After eight years of development, Media.Vision’s Digimon Story: Time Stranger has released to strong sales and great critical reception. While fans of the monster collecting RPG series may be used to waiting, it seems that the studio’s next Digimon game will, thankfully, take far less time to create.
In an interview with 4Gamer, producer Ryosuke Hara and director Yusuke Tomono discussed the eight-year development time of Digimon Story: Time Stranger, and how the team hopes to not repeat that in the future.
Tomono and Hara explained that the long development period caused a lot of anxiety for the team as the former explained the “original goal was to release it on PS4 in a shorter time frame, but as development dragged on, we shifting to PS5 hardware”.
“To be honest, I felt a great deal of fear before the release,” Tomono said. “It had been eight years in development, after all, so if people were to say it wasn’t fun, it would be incredibly damaging.”
The two explained that the game’s long development time was not the smoothest with fears around the game’s use of middleware tools like Unreal Engine, but it also allowed the team time to improve animations with motion capture and deliver the game they had envisioned for fans.
However, going forward, the team will continue to create Digimon titles with a larger team over a shorter period of time. After all, with Time Stranger already the best-selling video game adaptation of the franchise, it does seem like the right time to capitalise on the IP.
“We are currently focusing on collaboration with Toei Animation and other group companies regarding Digimon content,” Hara said. “Going forward, we will continue to focus on games while growing the Digimon IP as a whole through these efforts.
“This time, it took eight years, but the Digimon game team is gradually expanding in size and working to create a system that will allow for continuous growth. We have a lot of things in mind, so I hope you will look forward to future Digimon games.”
Of course, while Digimon Story: Time Stranger is out in fans’ hands, the game is not completely finished. The game is still set to receive a hefty amount of DLC including additional Digimon to unlock and new story content to play through.
