Despite Nintendo not having shown much so far of the game, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is still set for a release this holiday in North America and Europe. During this year's edition of Gamescom, the Japanese company took advantage of the event to show that development is proceeding smoothly.

　　During Nintendo's Gamescom 2017 livestream some brand new Xenoblade Chronicles 2 gameplay footage has been shown, showcasing a brand new area, battles, characters and more.

　　A couple of months back, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 director Tetsuya Takahashi talked about the quick development of the game.

　　The ease or speed of developing Xenoblade Chronicles 2 stems a lot from our having already created this architecture with Xenoblade Chronicles X. The game portion of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is kind of overlaid on top of that fundamental architecture. I think that made the biggest contribution to why development went so fast. And in terms of Switch versus Wii U, another point is that we’ve only had to deal with one screen, so that also has made development a little bit easier.

　　And so to add to that, both at Nintendo and at Monolith, we wanted to have a major large-scale roleplaying game early in the Switch’s lifecycle. We thought about how we might accomplish that, and we wanted to do the same thing with the Wii U. But the development for Xenoblade Chronicles X was a little bit difficult, and that’s why it ended up being released a little bit later in the Wii U’s cycle. So we had a postmortem and tried to think ‘How can we deliver this at an earlier stage in the console’s lifecycle?’

　　Xenoblade Chronicles 2 launches on Nintendo Switch this holiday.