Square-Enix shares more player feedback from the Project Octopath Traveler demo, game set for release this year

Project Octopath Traveler seems to be moving along quite nicely, with Square-Enix recently sharing a video featuring the progress they've made since the demo. To get more insight into the project, Famitsu sat down with Producer Masashi Takahashi from Square Enix and director Keisuke Miyauchi from Acquire. We've already shared some tidbits from this interview, but you can get some new details below.

- the eight protagonists won’t have similar stories to each other because the team wants players to enjoy different experiences
- the other six protagonists will have jobs different from Orberic (Swordsman) and Primrose (Dancer)
- Orberic and Primrose were chosen for the demo because their starting points are closer to other party members
- each protagonist will have different starting points, so there may be a gap in the progress difficulty
- the team is trying to even things out, but they don't want every character to have the same difficulty, as that would be boring
- the demo has surpassed 1 million downloads worldwide
- a demo was released because they thought simply publishing screenshots and trailers wouldn’t convey this game’s fun factor
- more than 80% of the overseas player base found the game interesting
- there was one player who won against a high-leveled NPC in a Duel, and another who defeated all bar customers
- the team had expected the former, they didn’t expect the latter
- the music was received very well, which comes from composer Yasunori Nishiki
- overseas players complained of hard-to-read text, because the UI was based on the Japanese version, which will be adjusted
- the biggest complaints were about slow map movement, and the lack of fast-travel
- both of these features have been implemented, with faster movement and fast-travel between cities
- players also found the screen too dark, so devs are adding waypoints for paths and also bigger roads
- there will be an Event Skip feature, as well as the ability to freely watch events that have been already seen.
- some found the battle system monotonous with a slow tempo, so devs are shortening the character turn change time
- the plan is to release the game sometime in 2018