Xenoblade Chronicles X has 30 times the quest content of last game

Xenoblade Chronicles X is going to be huge.

Xenoblade Chronicles X is a spiritual successor to Wii exclusive Xenoblade Chronicles, and builds on that game's foundations with a true open world and modern RPG quest structure.

In the latest Iwata Asks, Monolith Soft and Nintendo staffers discussed the epic scale of the RPG.

"It's quite huge. When we started this project, we discussed creating a whole planet for this game," co-director Tetsuya Takahashi said.

"In the end, we created a field that can be developed on a realistic scale by creating five continents around 400km2."

Co-director Koh Kojima said that every location you can see in-game, you can get to - there are no backdrops or window dressings.

"We didn't want to disappoint players with something simple when they put in the effort to go to hard-to-reach locations, so there is a lot of content hidden in various locations," he added.

Xenoblade Chronicles X includes a "pioneering" feature encouraging players to explore the game world outside of the main story, and the map is divided into hexagonal segments populated with various forms of content, so it can be explored in manageable chunks.

It took MonolithSoft "at least a year and a half" to write the main story and extra quests.

"The main story might be shorter than Xenoblade Chronicles. However, the quest stories are matched up with the open-world game design, so there's more depth to the quests," Takahashi said, estimating that there's about 30 times as much side quest content as in Xenoblade Chronicles - even though the number of actual quests is pretty similar.

"It's very different from Xenoblade Chronicles. If based on the play time, I believe that players can enjoy the game five times longer if they try to complete everything," Nintendo's Genki Yokota said.

Xenoblade Chronicles X is headed to Wii U. It launched in Japan today, and should come west later this year.