The thing is they never said you could drive anywhere, in fact even back when the demo was still planned to have the car in it during the walkthrough video in 2014 Naora said so himself that you can't reach forests with the car, which isn't anything different to what Tabata is saying now with offroad places like forests and mountains not being drivable areas, which should have been obvious in the first place.
And clearly there are dirt tracks like this and the area around the Adamantoise which we can drive on.
Nothing he's saying now is any different to how it already was implemented as.
I understand this absolutely, but I suppose my issue is if there's invisible tracks keeping the car on the road, so to speak, and the roads are all dead set straight (as all the ones have been shown so far appear to be), what's the point in giving the player control of the car at all? In a sense it becomes like a train; you can control how fast you go, and move a minor amount to the left and right, and reverse, but that's all?
Driving in a straight line with no real turns or side streets isn't very fun, and that was always my worry with it, really. I get it's supposed to be an American style road trip, and the big wide open roads in America are often dead set straight too, but that doesn't necessarily make for good player agency. Being able to hook off-road at least onto flat-ish terrain would've been nice. Of course you can't take the car up into the mountains; this would be as true in GTA, to be fair, you could try but you'd just find it impossible. There's areas you can't take a horse in Skyrim, but that's defined by the terrain, not by an invisible wall. I do think these games are fair comparisons, as these are the games FF15 has been openly inspired by. It's justified in game because if you look at the roads almost all of them have short barriers around them that'd stop the car - but I have to admit I'm mildly disappointed by it. I thought you'd at least be able to push the boundaries beyond the long stretching route 66 style road. That's my personal issue with it.
I hope areas we haven't seen have more diverse roads to make driving a more fun experience. I just want to see more to justify the driving as a concept, basically. If there's a ton of enemies in the road, as has been pictured in certain screens, can I ram into them? The wildlife - will that sometimes wander towards the road, and likewise, can I roadkill something? These are the things I'm curious about. If the car is just holding right trigger to accelerate and adjusting minor steering to follow the curve of the road while listening to NPC dialogue, I question its value at all. (But you can hand control to an NPC, I guess, so there is that.)
And -- this isn't me taking a dump on the game, I'm hugely excited for it; the car has just always been a concern for me, that's all. It's like, if you're only going to travel in straight lines, it might as well be a train, FF8 style, heh.
