I question why they allowed them to play an old build of the game an at the same time record footage if they wouldn´t allow to show them? Couldn´t S.E just simply make them do a press writen preview.
I imagine they are allowed to view some things and only show certain things as well, that's all.
People are actually arguing that issuing command to your characters is better than having full and total control over their actions and movement. We've come full circle.
I honestly think that it is better in the grand scheme of things. Having to switch between multiple party members to issue commands is cumbersome. In Type-0 you can switch between party members more freely, but your party members are in confined places where it's easy to have context to their location and what they're doing, not only that, they don't have much freedom in terms of how they traverse the area, so it's easy to acclimate from one PC to the other.
When you look at XV however, there's a stark difference. The main cast is vastly inferior to Noctis in many ways, and the world is vast and your party members can be farther away from you behind a wall or out of sight. Honestly though, the biggest reason why I don't think controlling them manually is useful is because of the lack of any strategic use. In Type-0 switching between characters was useful because they offered unique play styles based on their arsoneal and move set and were balanced across each other. In XV, Noctis is the strongest character, and the rest of the party members are no where near as powerful as him. This makes switching to the other members less desirable overall, as they offer NOTHING that can't be done with Noctis.
If they could somehow find a way to make it work and be
useful I would be completely down for having it in the game, the more options the better, but from what I can tell, there's simply no way to balance these characters in a way that makes switching to any of them useful. It's just like in Kingdom Hearts, you would never want to switch to Donald or Goofy because they simply lack the abilities that Sora has.