Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Remake Director Naoki Hamaguchi and his team are weighing their options for the technology to utilize to create the third (and last) game of the trilogy.
The first two games were both developed in Unreal Engine 4, as Hamaguchi-san explains in an interview on the Japanese website CGWorld, but in response to a direct question from the interviewer, he explained that a switch to Unreal Engine 5 could be considered for the sequel, but it’ll require weighing the pros and cons of each version of the engine.
Hamaguchi-san explains that this is similar to the reasoning that applied to the decision not to switch to Perforce from SVN.
That being said, he believes that players mostly want Square Enix to release the third game of the series with good quality and as soon as possible. The decision will be taken depending on whether changing the engine would accelerate the development process, or whether it’s best to just create the entire series with the current tools.
If you’re wondering about the mention of SVN (also known as Apache Subversion) and Perforce, they’re version control software suites used to coordinate development within a team. Earlier in the interview Hamaguchi-san explained that the team used SVN for both Remake and Rebirth.
While some of the developers advocated a switch to Perforce for Rebirth, the team counts over 100 people, and at the beginning of development, there was a move to remote working due to the COVID pandemic.
If such a fundamental tool was changed at that time, Hamaguchi-san explains, it would have created issues, so they decided to stick with SVN.
For similar reasons, the development team also continued to use Unreal Engine 4 across the creation of Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth even if UE5 was already available. Using the existing development environment enabled working on the games as quickly as possible and bypassed the risks that would have been involved in working with new technology.
Due to this, Square Enix decided to stick with Unreal Engine 4 with Rebirth after finishing Remake, while developing the necessary extra tools they needed on their own.
A big difference between the two games is that the effects of Rebirth were created using Niagara VFX (a tool to create visual effects in Unreal Engine 5). At first, developers used it freely, but then they noticed that it had a noticeable effect on performance, and some restrictions were applied.
The control rig has been rewritten and since the increased number of animations for characters and monsters was putting pressure on memory, a plugin from Unreal Engine 5.3 called Animation Compression Library was merged into the UE4-based development environment to solve the problem.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is currently available exclusively for PS5, albeit it’ll probably come to PC at some point. Final Fantasy VII Remake was initially released for PS4, the its upgraded version “Intergrade” landed on PS5 and PC.
The third game of the trilogy has not been officially released just yet, and it doesn’t have an official title.
If you’d like to read more about Square Enix, you can check out its latest financial results and our article about Final Fantasy XIV’s expansion, Dawntrail.
