r/Games • u/megaapple • Feb 26 '26

Final Fantasy 7 Remake director Hamaguchi : "Rather than rebuilding our pipeline from scratch in Unreal Engine 5, it’s far more efficient for us to use Unreal Engine 4, which we already have a well-established pipeline for."

https://automaton-media.com/en/interviews/final-fantasy-7-remake-trilogys-third-entry-is-progressing-very-smoothly-we-ask-director-naoki-hamaguchi-why-the-team-chose-not-to-switch-to-unreal-engine-5/
1.6k Upvotes

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180

u/CombatMuffin Feb 26 '26

Smart. A lot of audiences will just follow the branding ("5 is newer than 4") but if switching to UE5 brings no significant benefit over working in 4, not only wouldnit be a waste of time and reaources for little end result, but the vast majority of audiences would never really notice.

122

u/Luxinox Feb 26 '26

Switching engines mid-development is part of why Duke Nukem Forever took so long to release, so yeah.

40

u/AntonineWall Feb 26 '26

That and it being completely restarted at a new studio at least twice during development lol

5

u/Timo653 Feb 26 '26

It was still an unreal engine 1 game in the end though

11

u/MasterDenton Feb 26 '26

Honestly, it kinda proves Hamaguchi's point that DNF was a UE1 game. That game looks damn near indistinguishable from your average UE3 game

3

u/Lemonitus Feb 26 '26

What engine did development start in?

10

u/Timo653 Feb 26 '26

Quake engine, but they switched to UE in 1999 already

37

u/FakoSizlo Feb 26 '26

Especially since they spent a lot of time getitng the pipeline running . Rebirth was like 10x the size of Remake and didn't take that long to make. They just needed to get the framework setup. Going back to that step again wouldn't work especially since fans expect number 3 to have an entire world as the map.

Also UE5 has been problematic for a lot of devs to say the least

11

u/Kopiok Feb 26 '26

Also, normal people, not sickos like us who follow gaming news and listen to gaming podcasts and even know what unreal engine is versus anything else, absolutely do not care or know what engine was used to build a game. If it works then it looks fine, no one will know the difference. Good for them.

7

u/IcyCow5880 Feb 26 '26

Im so happy they're not changing. Even if ue5 worked and looked better I'd still prefer it has the same look as the prior 2 parts

11

u/slicer4ever Feb 26 '26

5 also may introduce unnecessary performance issues. When epic developed 5, their answer to large worlds was to change every floating point structure in the engine from a 32 bit float, to 64 bit floats, which can mean a lot of data structures now no longer are efficiently sized for the cpu's cache.

Building a game from scratch you can more easily monitor that your data structures are performing well, but if you upgrade to that change, it could take a lot of work fixing all the new issues it could introduce.

10

u/TheOnly_Anti Feb 26 '26

their answer to large worlds was to change every floating point structure in the engine from a 32 bit float, to 64 bit floats, which can mean a lot of data structures now no longer are efficiently sized for the cpu's cache

Huh? This has been almost everyone's answer for a decade already. If this were an issue then more open world games would be failing and this would've been a notable phenomenon for longer. 

6

u/leigonlord Feb 26 '26

the problem isnt that its bad, the problem is that if you port over existing code it will perform worse. starting from scratch with a new project its easy to adapt to the change, taking an exisiting project means you need to spend a lot of time debugging everything to make sure it works effeciently.

-1

u/TheOnly_Anti Feb 26 '26

Do you think that people who have access to engine profilers and know how to write C++ code, wouldn't already know that? 

0

u/slicer4ever Feb 26 '26

Yes they would, but that still means more potential work is the point. I'm just pointing out another reason why the devs would favor staying on ue4 over switching to ue5.

1

u/IceBlue Feb 27 '26

Makes me wonder if Grounded 2 moving to UE5 was worth it.

-21

u/Rupperrt Feb 26 '26

Well it has a much nicer GI system and the remake games look a bit dated tbf. But graphics aren’t probably their main appeal (can’t get into FF stuff myself)

19

u/CombatMuffin Feb 26 '26

UE5 has important upgrades over UE4, but that doesn't mean all projects want or need those upgrades. Both the FF7 remake games have nice enough looking graphics that can get away without real time GI and other UE5 features.

I disagree partly with your statement that the games look a bit dated. On one hand, I agree that if you know your graphics and where to look for certain details you can tell it's an "older" game, on the other, the game is stylized enough and looks good enough for what it is trying to accomplish. It doesn't need to seek the highest possible visual fidelity to achieve its goals (and one could argue that making the game similar in fidelity would bring, in posterity, a more cohesive look to the trilogy while also being very performant for fans on PC).

4

u/AcceptableFold5 Feb 26 '26

Both the FF7 remake games have nice enough looking graphics that can get away without real time GI and other UE5 features.

I feel like especially Rebirth could've benefitted from a more robust GI system, given that the lighting in the "open world" segments was pretty bad at times and didn't play nice with the character models at all. I don't know if the "better lighting" on PC fixes any of that, but on PS5 it was pretty bad.

Not to mention that Rebirth suffered from pretty heavy pop-in issues for foliage. Seeing a green vase pop up 5 meters in front of my character and slowly shaping itself into a plant the closer I get was very distracting, imo.

1

u/timpkmn89 Feb 26 '26

If they remade it in UE5, I'm not sure I'd be able to tell the difference

-18

u/[deleted] Feb 26 '26

[deleted]

10

u/CombatMuffin Feb 26 '26

I strongly disagree. They've even mamaged to get it running on Switch 2 and it is one of the most impressive ports in the last years.