FFXV Director: Development time and costs would have doubled if the game was entirely open-world

Hajime Tabata was put in one of the toughest spots in the industry when he took the helm on Final Fantasy XV away from the legendary Square developer Tetsuya Nomura. Nomura is something of a God to the Final Fantasy faithful, and to be fair he's earned it through years of quality work. Unfortunately, the same did not happen with Final Fantasy XV, although few fans will admit it. Tabata took over what was essentially a whole lot of nothing from Nomura and, with the hard working devs at Square Enix, managed to cobble together a mostly open-world JRPG that's actually pretty good.