two month delay to November this week may have been a disappointment to some fans, but Square Enix is confident it will make for a better experience once the game is available worldwide.

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“ The level of quality that the fans are all expecting...wasn’t quite there yet.

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Speaking to IGN at Gamescom, Final Fantasy XV director Hajime Tabata explained that a hefty day one patch was originally in store for the game, but ultimately he didn’t want fans who play offline to be unable to experience the game at its best. Instead, he wanted the game to be in its most polished state as soon as players put in the disc.“Originally I was thinking it would be okay and we could put all of the extra updates into a day-one patch,” Tabata told IGN. “But at that point I learned there are maybe a lot of people out there who play in an offline environment and don’t have internet. When I found that out, thinking about it again, I’m glad I didn’t make that decision.”Once he knew he wanted to avoid that patch, Tabata says he estimated that two months would be enough to put that content on the disc and allow for extra time to make the visuals as complete as possible.“It would take about one month exactly to fit everything we wanted in the day one patch into the disc version. And with that, pretty much all of the technical issues would be sorted out,” he said. “And then we thought that after we got that technical base down and there were no problems there, it’s one more month to polish everything up and get it really great. And that’s why it was two months.”“The main thing there is working on fixing the bugs which affect the visuals of the game, polishing that up and doing the final optimization push. The other thing, I think we can get much closer to that perfect game balance in that final balancing period as well, to make it a game that’s really fun and easy and comfortable to play for any kind of player.”“If you keep putting more volume and more content into the game, with that comes a load of extra debugging and polishing and optimization periods, so we really are concentrating on getting the volume and content we have at the moment, getting that really solid and really perfect for the final game,” he added.Tabata said the recently-released hour of footage is a good indication of the current state of the game.“If you look at that, you can certainly see that the quality of the game is pretty much up there at the moment,” he said, “but we felt that that final push to the level of quality that the fans are all expecting, and where it was, wasn’t quite there yet. So that’s what we really want to use this extra two months to do.”Final Fantasy XV will launch worldwide on November 29. For more, visit our Final Fantasy XV Features Hub and read our impressions of the first four hours of the game , plus what Tabata told us fans can expect from Final Fantasy XV’s DLC

Andrew is IGN’s executive editor of news and could also use a few extra months of polish. You can find him rambling about Spelunky and cute animals on Twitter