As previously stated, the game will be a completely new IP, not a spin off from any of the existing Square franchises (not another Final Fantasy spin off!).
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Or so Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda believes.
Project Setsuna was announced during Square’s E3 press conference last month. Obviously Square Enix has high hopes for Project Setsuna, and it sounds like RPG fans can look forward to multiple installments of the new IP if all goes well.
During the interview, Yosuka Matsuda said that the development team of Tokyo RPG Factory that was revealed alongside the project centers around a team of external developers, including a number of freelance staff.
When asked about new IP, Matsuda said, “While it’s important to foster new IP, it’s hard to turn them into big IP”, adding, “looking at the game industry right now, many games take the form of a trilogy”. Although Matsuda also admitted that there are also cases wherein the opposite is true.
Granted, at the moment, there’s very little information on the game itself, but it’s nice to know that Matsuda is willing to invest in a project and give it a chance to grow and evolve, even if it might have a rocky start. “Once that third title becomes a success, that’s when I have nothing to worry about”.
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“For the first and second games, you experiment to a degree where you can still be flexible, and if the series has grown enough to be able to expect a big hit for the third game, you expand the scale”. Still, he insists that at least three games are needed before one can tell whether an IP is successful or not. After a fairly successful first two entries, The Witcher 3 exploded onto the scene in May, and is an early contender for 2015 Game of the Year.
