Naoki Hamaguchi, the director of Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, has spoken about the decision to continue using Unreal Engine 4 for the game instead of Unreal Engine 5.
The upcoming RPG is based on the same tech used in both Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Rebirth. Unreal Engine 5 has been around for a bit now though, so some may have thought that Square Enix would move over to that one.
Speaking with 4Gamer, Hamaguchi mentioned that switching to Unreal Engine 5 would have meant a longer development cycle, which wouldn’t make sense for “a business perspective and a player perspective”. The team was even able to previously implement its own take on Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite feature.
For your average person, there’s an impression that bigger numbers are better, so people may think ‘is it okay to not use Unreal Engine 5?’
Yeah, I get that (laughs). But simply, for this series, considering a business perspective and a player perspective, I believe that getting the game out as quickly as possible is the best thing to do.
We had already worked with and customized UE4 for the remake series, so we decided delivering the game quickly to players with a workflow that we were used to was best, rather than resetting everything to restart with UE5, build everything again and extend the development time.
Quite early on I told the team, “This time we will continue with UE4, and we won’t debate that.”
Was there anyone against that? It seems like creators may like to try the challenge of using something new.
I anticipated people saying things like “They added this new feature, are we not able to use it?”. So because of that, from very early on we decided to stay with UE4 and not get confused along the way.
I think now that was the correct decision. Of course, we have made and extended engines as a team, so with UE4 if we faced problems, we could alter it ourselves.
Whatever game engine you use, you want us to look at the final output.
Exactly, exactly. You often hear of something called Nanite* when discussing UE5, but when we made Rebirth we made our own rendering system that was basically the same as Nanite, so we were able to have a comparable quality to UE5. As a development team we’ve made lots of AAA games up until now, so I hope players can place their trust in us.
* Nanite – included in UE5 – is a geometry system that can efficiently draw extremely high density geometry.
So it was a case of using an established system, one that you were already used to using.
The video we released at SGF had a very positive reaction to the graphics, which was relieving for us. We have confidence in what we will deliver to players, and I think that confidence is expressed well.
There was actually big news for Unreal Engine 5 this week as version 5.8 released. As part of that, we got confirmation that Lumen Light is available for Nintendo Switch 2. We have more information here.
Translation provided by Simon Griffin and SatsumaFS on behalf of Nintendo Everything.
