Director Hajime Tabata has revealed that 10 years pass during Final Fantasy XV’s

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Speaking to IGN at PAX West, Tabata revealed that the late-game, bearded Noctis seen in footage released at Gamescom is ten years older than when we see him at the beginning of the game saying goodbye to King Regis.“In the opening sequence, you see Regis and Noctis talking to one another and Regis tells him to stand tall,” Tabata told IGN. “His appearance later on in the game communicates that he has [taken] that to heart and lived with those final words.”“The whole change in Noctis’ appearance from when the game starts compared to when years have passed [is so] that people would feel the passing of time, and that they were actual living, breathing characters rather than just symbolic characters,” he said.As for the beard Noctis grows, Tabata added that “the one important part for us was to see a little bit of Regis in his appearance 10 years later.”“It’s not typical to see a lot of Japanese RPGs with a mid-aged man as the main character,” he continued. “A lot of people who like Japanese RPGs would be surprised by the fact that they’ll see this character age in the way that he does, so it took a lot of courage for us as developers to do that. But we felt that it was important in communicating [the party’s] development and wanting to express it in a way that we only can with the current generation of consoles.”“There’s not a deep reason as to why we made it ten years,” Tabata confessed. “It’s just that we needed a significant amount of time to have passed within the game for certain reasons.”Final Fantasy XV will come to Xbox One and PlayStation 4 worldwide on November 29. Be sure to read our impressions of the opening hours , and stay tuned for more from our interview with Tabata.

Andrew is IGN’s executive editor of news and watching a decade of his life would probably be pretty boring. You can find him rambling about Spelunky and cute animals on Twitter