Quote Originally Posted by tyckspoon View Post
They took the 5-8 hours of Midgar in the original and blew it out to a 40+ hour story in its own right, although it'd be a fair bit shorter if you for some reason ignored all the sidequest requests. If all the rest of the original story gets a similar amount of expansion we could be looking at like 300 hours of game split up across who knows how many episodes. Or they can compress and speed through things a lot more than they did on this first episode; will that feel like giving up or a drop in quality to everybody who enjoyed the launch episode, if they don't get to spend five hours running around helping out the citizens of Kalm with their cow-herding problems, 10 hours exploring the various sections of Junon, etc?
Oh, I don't imagine they'd possibly expand every part of the original game to the degree that they did Midgar - even not knowing exactly how long it was, I could confidently guess they'd be working on it for the next few decades if they tried something like that. Midgar getting this much expansion probably just fit conveniently for them narratively (establishes the characters, world, and main plot quite thoroughly, while still having its own satisfying narrative arc and conclusion to it), and allows them to wait to do the larger game world for the next console generation, while having the assets (and engine?) they made for this title as a starting point to work with going forward. I'd guess we'll see maybe two more parts, assuming they will still be doing a fair amount of expansion on the original material.