Kingdom Hearts III director talks about extended delays

Kingdom Hearts III has been in development for quite some time. Fans have been growing impatient with the lack of information, and many feared another Final Fantasy XV situation would be on their hands. Thank goodness the game finally got a release window of 2018 this weekend at D23.

Director Tetsuya Nomura came out against beliefs that the delays had anything to do with Final Fantasy XV in an interview with GameStop, pointing towards a graphic engine change and other changes that have made it impossible to proceed any faster.

However, not before addressing an issue that obviously bugs him.

A  lot of people have been mentioning and making it sound like ‘Oh, Nomura’s taking too much time,’ and it hurts.

After airing that out, Nomura then proceeded to talk about the reasons behind the game’s delay.

There was a decision made to change to an external [engine]…Unreal Engine 4. So we switched over to that. Unfortunately there was a bit of time that needed to be rewinded and started over. So there was a bit of a setback there, but it was a decision that the company had to make, so it was inevitable.

We had a plan of the period that it’s going to take for us to create the content at the start of the project, and we laid out, after such and such years, we would need to add more personnel resources. We had submitted it to our headquarters and had it approved, but internal personnel is very limited, and there are various different projects that happen within our company, so unfortunately timing did not work out. So we had to make due with the timing that was appropriate for the company…the company makes the decisions, so unfortunately sometimes it is out of my control.

I wanted to emphasize that it wasn’t a problem on our development teams. It just happened that way, and there were some decisions that the company had to make, and it just didn’t work out for certain timings that we were hoping to hit.

It’s kind of out of my hands. I mean, yes, time has passed. But it’s out of my hands.

As for DLC and content, he says nothing is set in stone in regards to DLC, and Square Enix won’t leave too much off the table in regards to spoilers. Most of the content will find its way onto the net before it launches.

Kingdom Hearts III will be released for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.