Final Fantasy VII Remake series director Naoki Hamaguchi has shared the news that we all want to hear and that is that the third instalment of the Final Fantasy VII Remake series is now progressing “very smoothly.” This is great news especially since the third entry will be arriving on multiple platforms this time, including the Nintendo Switch 2. Mr. Hamaguchi says that sticking to the tried and tested Unreal Engine 4, rather than the newer Unreal Engine 5 for the entire trilogy has kept things on track for the developers.
How is development of the third instalment of the trilogy coming along? Can we expect further technological evolution with this entry?
Yes, please look forward to that. Speaking of which, after I mentioned in another interview that we would continue using Unreal Engine 4 for the third game (related article), it became quite the topic online, and it made me realize anew how much interest people have in that side of things. But I think most people aren’t necessarily familiar with the actual differences between Unreal Engine 4 and Unreal Engine 5.
I think it’s mostly the common notion that a higher version number means it’s more advanced.
I think that’s mostly how the general public sees it, and I do believe it’s true. Around the time we began developing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Unreal Engine 5 was just entering its pre-launch phase.
What makes Unreal Engine 5 groundbreaking compared to Unreal Engine 4 are two features: Lumen, its lighting system and Nanite, which allows you to portray dense graphical detail.
These represent the current trend in graphics pipelines, and of course, such pipelines are important to us as well. However, if we had tied our development schedule and milestones too closely to Unreal Engine 5’s roadmap, we would have risked our own progress being stalled if the engine encountered any kind of delay.
For that reason, we decided early on in development of FFVII Rebirth to stick with Unreal Engine 4. We’re using a graphics pipeline built in-house, which also makes optimization and porting to various hardware more straightforward.
Guys I want a Nintendo direct
If it’s true that game development takes longer for Switch 2 games, then I’d expect the rate at which we get Nintendo Directs will drastically decline. We likely shouldn’t expect to have Directs at the “normal” times of the year that we’ve been used to.
Will we get the complete FF7 remake trilogy before KH4.
It’s going to sell tons. Can’t wait.
JUST GIVE US THE GAME ALREADY WE DONT CARE HOW THINGS ARE GOING LOL
Crazy excited for this. Replaying Remake on Switch 2 now and am stoked to replay Rebirth in June!