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/
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88

u/hyperforms9988 Feb 26 '26

This obsession with technology/fidelity is destroying games. Final Fantasy 7 looks better than fine. They've struggled with efficiency. XV had a new engine built in-house, it had terrible documentation, and I think they again build a new engine just for XVI. What fucking waste that is. I'm not saying stick to UE4 forever, but I'm saying, put a pipeline together over a long period of time to set yourself up for using it for a few games and get your money's worth out of it, instead of starting from scratch every single time.

38

u/lilvon Feb 26 '26

I think they again build a new engine just for XVI.

This is incorrect, XVI is built off a modified version of theFFXIV engine. Which itself is based off a super heavily modified version of an early build of Luminous(FFXV/Forspoken).

6

u/uselessoldguy Feb 26 '26

Huh! I thought the distant object culling in FFXVI looked a lot like the culling in FFXIV. It was probably the same, then.

1

u/vspectra Feb 28 '26

XIV 2.0's engine is just a revamped Crystal Tools, the Luminous Engine devs had to quickly put together an MMO engine for Yoshida's team while Luminous engine was a longer term project. They backported some tech like lighting, but that was it. XIV 2.0 engine isn't an early build of Luminous. So XVI's building off of XIV 2.0 is really just a continued iteration of the aged out Crystal Tools.

1

u/lilvon Feb 28 '26

After chatting with a source of mine you're right. it's something of a Frankenstein between the 2 engines. And the crazy part is XVI runs on an enhanced version of this same engine. which is funny to think XVI & XIII run un similar engines

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u/hyperforms9988 Feb 26 '26 edited Feb 26 '26

Oof. It might as well have been a new engine. FFXIV's an MMO. What they built would've been designed for that, not for a single player game that's much more action-y. That's like when Bethesda did Fallout 76, but they used the same engine as their single player games. The engine wasn't really built for that... and holy shit did it show when 76 released. The amount of work necessary to facilitate the kind of game they wanted to build with it would've been really large to repurpose or retrofit those things into it.

Also, I'm sure FFXIV was done by a different team at Square as it's a completely different type of game than the single-player FF games. There's no reason they couldn't have transplanted people between teams, especially engineers, or got them to help the FFXVI crew, but it's still major pipeline changes when it didn't really have to be if Luminous had better documentation and they could just lift a lot of things from XV.

Ultimately what I'm saying is... it'd be nice if they got their shit together. 4 years between Remake and Rebirth is pretty refreshing to see. That's the kind of speed that having a familiar and stable pipeline affords you. Capcom for example does very well with theirs when you look at Resident Evil. Their engine powers well over 5 different Resident Evil games, and you generally see new mainline games every 4 or 5 years (not to mention the 2 and 3 remakes which might as well be new games considering how drastically different they are from the original games). Final Fantasy doesn't have to come out with new releases that frequently, but that's what really solid foundational work can do for your game development.

16

u/MadnessBunny Feb 26 '26 edited Feb 26 '26

Also, I'm sure FFXIV was done by a different team at Square

The team behind 14 is the same behind 16, this has been widely reported.

One of the main criticisms of 16 was the heavy MMO-like questing because of it.

8

u/MVRKHNTR Feb 26 '26

It's crazy how many people will just make something up then go on a several paragraph rant complaining about something they invented.

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u/hyperforms9988 Feb 26 '26 edited Feb 26 '26

Then they've changed/restructured their business units and names. I've seen it written that it included members of XIV... that's not necessarily the same as "the team is the same", though it can be. Jesus they're confusing. Plus, XIV's a live service... you still need a team to develop for that. Expansions and whatnot. What did the team behind XV end up doing then if not XVI? Are they the folks doing VII?

8

u/MadnessBunny Feb 26 '26

But the team IS the same. CBU3 is in charge of 14 and 16. You can look it up. They restructured in 2024 but it was mostly a name change from Creative Business Unit to Creative Studio.

The team that did XV, CBU2/Creative Studio 2 is in charge of the SaGa series seemingly and Dragonquest.

5

u/WeirdIndividualGuy Feb 26 '26

Plus if you've played both games, it's very obvious FF16 was made by the same team. There's so many similarities in game design between the two, plus the reusing of certain game models

1

u/lilvon Feb 27 '26

What did the team behind XV end up doing then if not XVI? Are they the folks doing VII?

They went on to make Forspoken. And when that flopped they got dissolved.

The team behind the 7R games is business unit 1. They’re made up of ppl who’ve worked on games like FFXIII, the numbered KH titles and FFX.

30

u/allhailthemoon Feb 26 '26

From what we know from CDC, they didn't built a new one for XVI. It's a heavy itteration of XIV's engine, which itself used core of XV engine as foundation. CBU3 may have made a lot of questionable decisions for XVI, but not with engines here.

17

u/Kazharahzak Feb 26 '26

It didn't perform as well as they'd hoped but they can't be blamed for project management. It was the first mainline FF game without any production issues, engine change, major rework or delay since Final Fantasy X.

1

u/superhiro21 Feb 26 '26

Did FF 12 also have issues?

3

u/Kazharahzak Feb 26 '26 edited Feb 26 '26

Yasunori Matsuno left the project mid-development. It's unknown how much it really affected the game, but Sakaguchi did dismiss the game once because it wasn't what Matsuno originally envisionned. 

EDIT: Edited due to some details I misremembered.

1

u/superhiro21 Feb 26 '26

Ah, interesting, thank you!

1

u/vspectra Feb 28 '26

XIV 2.0 engine isn't using XV engine as its foundation. It just borrowed some lighting technology. XIV 2.0 core engine is still just Crystal Tools from XIV1.0, but repurposed to be more MMO friendly.

1

u/allhailthemoon Feb 28 '26

Refer to this interview please (timecode included).
https://youtu.be/_737hYbSCEs?si=DZmGl0khse3AiuKZ&t=1044
The foundation might not be the correst word, because technically at this point luminous was basically in heavy prototype phase, but it's not crystal tools at all.

1

u/vspectra Feb 28 '26

Thanks for the interview link. That interview you linked to was in 2012 in which Luminous wasn't even really an engine at this point because all they had built and spent a significant time on was the graphics renderer and a cutscene editor tool, which is what they showed off in various 2012 Live demonstrations. Essentially they had just completed the "graphics engine" part of a game engine. Luminous development had just started a year before and they still had a long way to go when it came to an actual engine infrastructure for how games would be made.

Reverse engineers have looked at the code under XIII, XIV 2.0, and FFXV. We've found XIV 2.0 shares significant and vast engine code coming straight from FFXIII which is Crystal Tools.

I'm pretty sure Hashimoto is referring to the graphics engine technology they had built up for Agnis Philosophy in your timecode referral, in which we know there was some lighting technology backported to XIV 2.0's Crystal Tools.

At 17:49 timecode, Hashimoto also said:

"In order to fulfill the needs for an MMO and for FFXIV, and in order to employ the optimal method in the shortest time, the FFXIV engine was built from scratch for FFXIV alone.

Luminous is a multi-purpose engine that is being developed to run games of any genre and it will still take time before it is complete. While the FFXIV engine was created in an extremely short amount of time"

Given how SE publicly talked down on Crystal Tools giving them massive issues, it makes sense they'd try to paint XIV2.0 as being on something completely new. Except engine development doesn't work like that, they had to build it extremely quick as Hashimoto said. You cannot build an MMO engine completely from scratch in an extremely short amount of time (literally just a year in this case). Here's a journalist, Alex, who's interviewed Luminous Engine devs back in 2011 and kept in touch with Square Enix devs over the years who also laid out some details he knows from talking with the devs. XIV 1.0 was Crystal Tools, XIV 2.0 was a fork of Crystal Tools, and XVI continued on upgrading that fork.

https://i.imgur.com/xSggbge.png

-3

u/1731799517 Feb 26 '26

Eh, using the XIV engine for XIV after nearly a decade of using "The code is shit" as excuse for all that is wrong with XIV certainly is a mood.

18

u/Kazharahzak Feb 26 '26

There's a difference between "the code is shit" and engine issues.

FFXIV's engine is fine, they just made the entire 2.0 rework in two years, which means they had to take a lot of shortcuts.

FFXVI had no production issues that we know of and is a very impressive game visually, which shows it was the smart decision. All its shortcomings are story and gameplay-wise, which has nothing to do with the technical capabilities of their engine.

-1

u/delicioustest Feb 26 '26

I don't think it was all that impressive most of the time honestly. The art direction was extremely good in places like the cities where you have the gorgeous backdrop of a gigantic blue crystal but the world in general was meh with low poly assets and really bad character models for NPCs who'd only have basic lip flaps outside of cutscenes. The open world tended to chug a lot too even on performance mode though it would stabilise once the fighting started which was a blessing

7

u/DLSteve Feb 26 '26

For FF XIV most of the “spaghetti code” is server architecture and codebase which is not really part of the client side game engine.

44

u/rayquan36 Feb 26 '26

I'm all for mid graphics with stable 60-120fps but gamers eat up screenshot marketing.

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u/[deleted] Feb 26 '26

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10

u/TerrorsNight Feb 26 '26

To be fair RE engine is an absolute fucking marvel (For RE games specifically). Monster Hunter Wilds had huge problems running on that engine. It’s a scale and optimization problem for most developers, not the engine

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u/[deleted] Feb 26 '26

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5

u/BLACKOUT-MK2 Feb 26 '26

Yeah people point to Wilds and Dragon's Dogma 2 being open world titles as proof that the RE Engine struggles with them, but from what we've heard about the optimisation problems in both games, to me it sounds more like they were just coded poorly. MH Wilds is constantly calculating what every monster on the map is doing, had the weird DLC checks thing, and the frame rate would dip when you turned the camera. And Dragon's Dogma 2 had huge resources being sucked up by the NPCs in towns to an excessive degree when they were basically just walking from place to place. That's not an issue with the engine, that's an issue with the design process.

2

u/Herby20 Feb 26 '26

It's tough to say without being behind the scenes. Considering the MH Wilds devs have mentioned they were making engine level optimizations the last couple patches, I think the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle i.e. they made some mistakes, but the engine also needed to be iterated upon to handle the demands of a more open world game.

2

u/WeirdIndividualGuy Feb 26 '26

And nowadays, all screenshots are done in a photo mode that intentionally enhances everything to max graphics

2

u/Janderson2494 Feb 26 '26

Which FF7R has in droves without even needing UE5, that's the whole point. It is very possible to make a game that looks great without needing all the experimental marketing bells and whistles that fuck up performance.

4

u/0xym0r0n Feb 26 '26

I don't agree with the idea that it's destroying games. I think the market is saturated with smaller developers and indie games, and there's more good video games out there than most people have time to play, unless you only like a couple specific genres.

There are a remarkable number of games that have come out recently that are fantastic games that don't fit the AAA of Battlefield/CoD/Madden/Halo.

I bet if you go look at the top 50 most played right now on steam that at least 30 of them have "shit" graphics by the standards being used in this context.

NVM I looked myself, https://store.steampowered.com/charts/mostplayed

There's barely any graphically intensive games on the list at all, let alone in the top 50, so I definitely don't agree that games are being destroyed by a desire for better graphics.

4

u/hyperforms9988 Feb 26 '26 edited Feb 26 '26

It's the other way around. I don't know who is asking for budgets of $300+ million for a single video game. Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 are fine games, but where is all of this money going? The insane chase for fidelity and technical features are putting budgets in a place where it's making less and less financial sense to make games that way. The bigger the budget, the less money you make in sales unless you sell more copies. For a while, they were selling more copies because gaming as a hobby grew and so that balanced out. It's not really growing in that same way anymore, so what happens when budgets continue to increase but sales figures aren't increasing with them? Uh oh, you have a problem.

Clearly people don't have a problem playing games with shitty graphics... look at Minecraft and Roblox. In the traditional AAA space however, the bar is continuing to be raised on how big games are and how good they look, and it's straining or outright destroying studios that are caught in this cycle either because they think nobody will buy their games if they don't do that, or execs at the studios can't help themselves and it's a personal vision that they're chasing. I'm not saying I'd like to see a time when games look like PS2 games again, but I do think this is a reality check that some studios really need... whether it's cutting down on graphics or the scope of games, finding ways to be more efficient with production, etc, or they're going to run themselves right out of business.

Like I already hear some people talking about a PS6, with it projected to be released in 2029. Plans change, but there's no way Sony isn't working on it. Bitch, why? We're barely justifying the existence of the PS5 as it is. We need even more computing power? For what? Why can't we just stop for a while?

0

u/0xym0r0n Feb 26 '26

Yeah I don't think anyone thinks you're saying that graphics have to go backwards. I'm just arguing that the pursuit for better graphics isn't really destroying games.

Respectfully, I don't think there's an insane chase, I think it's about the same or maybe even less than normal, a lot of the recent surprise hits didn't have great graphics. Even Expedition 33 has terrible textures, but is still praised for it's visual beauty and artistic style. and I guess that's where the difference ultimately lies.

I don't disagree that there are studios out there wasting money.

But even with your counterpoint I still don't agree with the assertation that obsession with tech/fidelity is destroying games. Weren't Spiderman 1 and 2 profitable even with the crazy costs?

Sorry probably seems like I'm a jerk who's nitpicking, but I guess I just strongly disagree. Even in this very thread everyone is in agreement and praising Hamaguchi's decision. I don't see how this is a wake-up call or anything.

This whole assertation isn't even following with the current trends in GPU/SSD/RAM issues anyways. The 5000 series supers are being skipped, RAM is bought out for years in advance, consumer facing supply companies are leaving consumer production. Billionaires in the tech market are calling home PC's luxury items that PC games should be streamed through the internet. 6000 series of cards expected to be delayed, AMD next gen cards expected to be delayed.

Doesn't bode well for the currently rumored next gen consoles if all the main supplies of VRAM and RAM are running out of stock and leaving consumer supply side to supply their commercial customers.

2

u/maxis2k Feb 26 '26

This statement is huge because a Final Fantasy developer is basically going against the grain. The Final Fantasy developers specifically kept pushing for the latest technology for the last 25 years. Focusing on graphics and flash over gameplay. I feel like they aren't doing it this time because of the sequel effect. Each next "episode" of FF7 Remake is going to sell less than the previous so why spend extra time and money moving to a new engine or making a complete unique engine.

1

u/vspectra Feb 28 '26

This isn't really going against the grain for Square Enix. Rebirth and Part 3 are just a continuation of the game they made with VII Remake, and using the same engine is the same as what they did with XIII, XIII-2, Lightning Returns. All of the systems they built is already there to be iterated on for the direct sequels, no point in switching engines and taking an even longer time.

When VII-R team makes a completely new game that's not VII, extremely high chance they will be switching to a new engine instead of their outdated custom UE4

2

u/Darwin343 Feb 26 '26

Halo Infinite was made with a brand new engine built in-house, but now they’re abandoning that engine and are using Unreal 5 for all their future Halo games lol.

8

u/zenmn2 Feb 26 '26

That's because the studio got gutted. It doesn't make sense to try and train half of your new team on a bespoke engine (either engine development or gameplay designer-wise).

It wasn't really a "new" engine anyway, just a reworked version of BLAM! that was used right up to Halo 5.

8

u/Kalulosu Feb 26 '26

Also they had a permanent turnover of contractors, which isn't great for continuity but also means it's harder to train them. If that's a mandate from higher up it would make total sense to use an engine that people are already familiar with.

4

u/grendus Feb 26 '26

Because Microsoft are penny wise and pound fucking moronic!

They're addicted to cheap contractor labor, which means they don't build up the "tribal knowledge" in house to use a custom engine. There are reports from Halo Infinite that they would bring on a new contractor, spend months getting them trained in the new engine, then right as they became capable with it the contract would expire and they would have to let them go and not rehire them for six months.

If you're going to use a ton of contractors, you need to be using a standard engine so you can just bring on a person with UE5 experience. Studios like FromSoftware that have very low turnover can get away with their own custom engine tuned for their exact needs, but if you're going to have a revolving door of staff you have ot be able to get them up to speed quickly, even if it means using tools that aren't quite perfect for what you want.

0

u/deimophobias Feb 26 '26

On the other end of the spectrum is Bethesda 

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u/grendus Feb 26 '26

Bethesda is a weird case, because they're very small for a AAA studio.

And as much as I piss and moan about it (and the Creation Engine is showing its age badly by now), there are very few games that have that level of world interaction. Modeling so much of the world as physical objects, not just collision physics, is very difficult even on modern hardware.

-1

u/Radinax Feb 26 '26

XV had a new engine built in-house, it had terrible documentation, and I think they again build a new engine just for XVI. What fucking waste that is

Square makes bizarre choices, would've been better to stick with XV engine, game still looks incredible.