I can see a July release date, but also a September (or even November...) one. I think that it'll be Summer, though (or I want to believe
). And 4 months of full-fledged marketing is not that crazy, I would totally prefer that than dragging shit down for a year.
March can't come soon enough.
Luminous Engine of course, pre-production they probably have a work towards it, but I imagine they are also planning on using LE if not already. The Engine exists as a separate project from the game and so they can easily just work with what they have so far and pull updates whenever the XV team has done work to it. Keep in mind, XV is already completely playable which means the engine can serve a full game at this point on consoles. We probably won't see XVI until 2017 unfortunately... as much as I'd like to see it in 2016, I don't think we will.
Yeah, could totally see this. I'm very interested in seeing a LE game not as a big and open as XV: it already looks great, so imagine a more compact game (not talking about XVI here, who knows how that'll be like).
And indeed, 2017 is the earliest they would announce XVI... During that time, XV would have been done for a while, maybe KH3 too (or at least soon-ish) and I assume the first episode of VII could have a late 2017 release date. So yeah, it's not that crazy that they could talk about it in 2017.
I REALLY need a totally new mainline offline FF, we haven't had that since 2006: as much as I love XV's potential and look, we've (very roughly) known about it for almost a decade. I want to get excited wondering about a brand new world, with a totally new story and, especially, a new set of characters (and I assume it won't be Nomura's designs this time around, so all the more excitement, as I've wanted a change in that regard, at least for a while).