Naoki Hamaguchi, director on the Final Fantasy VII Remake project, has revealed during an interview with Automaton that switching to Unreal Engine 5 for the upcoming Final Fantasy VII Remake Part 3 would potentially risk the team’s progress being stalled, had the engine’s roadmap seen any delays.
Hamaguchi-san previously revealed that the development team for the third and final chapter in the FFVII Remake project had opted to stick with Unreal Engine 4, although note that some modifications had been made. And, while he acknowledged the advantages that UE5 brings, bringing FFVII Remake Part 3 over to the new engine may come with some setbacks.
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 Final Fantasy 7 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.
With all of this in mind, we judged that continuing with Unreal Engine 4 would definitely lead to a better third installment for our customers. I never imagined it would become such a hot topic (laughs), though a lot of people took it quite positively, too.
We’re using the know-how and development environment we cultivated with Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth as a base and further refining it to create the third game. In that sense, the quality will certainly not drop, and we’re working hard to deliver something even better. Production of the third installment itself is progressing very smoothly.
Speaking to the same publication, Hamaguchi previously stated that the FFVII Remake Part 3 is already in a playable state, and is hopeful that they can share an update on the project soon. He also assured fans that despite the focus on multiformat development this time, the visuals and technical performance of the concluding chapter in the trilogy won’t be compromised. Both FFVII Remake and FFVII Rebirth were made for PS5 hardware in mind, with the former only coming to other formats last month – Rebirth will follow this summer.
A release date for Final Fantasy VII Remake Part 3 has yet to be announced.
[Source – Automaton]