Lightning Returns' Director Talks Open World and Game Mechanics

[Andromeda]

It has been mentioned before in previous interviews, but Dengeki spoke with the director of the game to get more information on the game. He said that their goal was to make it possible to travel through the continents without hitting a single loading screen. He did say that there would be a few still during places where it made sense, like teleporting across the world, getting into a vehicle or cutscenes that move Lightning out of the area she is in to another location. But otherwise the player's experience should not see a loading screen once in game.

Another thing he talked about was the points Lightning can gather to affect the world or time. It was reported before they she would have points to spend to help in combat, but at the cost of losing time in the world. More clarification comes on the system governing this. It used to be one allocation of points that the player would have to chose how they spent on helping in battle or giving the world more time. But they did not want to the player feel they needed save them up and have hard choices to make. So they split up the points into two pools. There are Glory Points, which can be used during combat to help and then Radiant Power, which works with the Tree of Life to increase the time the world has, which starts at 7 days and can be extended to 13 days.

Despite all of the time constraints and the open world feel, he did assure people that it was possible to complete the game in a single playthrough, though he admitted that it would be very difficult to do so. Like you would need to know everything you needed to exactly to be able to achieve it.

Source: Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII Aiming For Open World Structure