Final Fantasy VII Rebirth co-director Naoki Hamaguchi has revealed during a chat with FF Dream that the game’s semi-open world setting was inspired by a number of major RPGs over the last few years, including The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
Hamaguchi-san revealed that Square Enix’s own Final Fantasy XV helped to lay the groundwork for the team, as the experience gained from working on that project proved valuable when crafting Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s game world. Beyond that, he name-dropped The Witcher 3 and Horizon (he didn’t specific which Horizon game he was talking bout, though) as inspiration for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, both of which obviously featured large-scale open-world settings.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth isn’t a traditional open-world game like those titles mentioned above, but it still features a much bigger setting than its predecessor and is far less linear as a result. Square Enix has previously said that gamers can expect to squeeze as much as 100 hours out of the sequel, with the story alone taking 40-50 hours to complete.
Square Enix will publish Final Fantasy VII Rebirth for PS5 on February 29, 2024.
[Source – FF Dream via Games Radar]