Um...you went through all that trouble to dig up posts from years ago of me talking bad about FF15's luminous engine troubles after an entire decade of a shitshow of SE going through crystal tools's as their proprietary engine and all the disasters that entailed developmentwise for SE as a whole...? Did you just start following SE's game development this decade?
And your trying to act like that's at odds with what i'm saying now? If unreal engine 4 is new to business division 1 (which you ignored CC2 working on this game until SE brought it in house), of course i'm going to give them a pass on a game i like and think is good right now ( despite some engine growing pains) as a complete product.
Your posts were pretty recent in 2019. Just funny you posted to gloat UE4 over Luminous comparisons only to then make excuses for the shortcomings in VII-R. Just proves your engine talk is based on a lot of assumptions. SE making Crystal Tools vs. Luminous comparison never made sense, they were mostly by entirely different developers, and the major mistakes learned from Crystal Tools (trying to make it alongside multiple games) was being avoided, yet you keep harking back to only one dev team using it when these SE games releasing now had already started development back in 2013-2014. During UE4's initial release it wasn't even in that great a state and had even worse optimization issues, highly linear games like Daylight would hit 0fps due to background level streaming. It made sense SE didn't want to suddenly use it right off the bat for everything, especially after their experiences with Last Remnant where Epic didn't have good technical support for Japan.
CC2 work wasn't scrapped, and you claim BD1 being new to UE4 as a reason to give the game a pass, except you were previously saying how easy it is to develop on UE4. So what happened there? And that's not even considering that Luminous was also new to the XV devs and its outsource developers (HexaDrive and XPEC) when they transitioned over to it in 2013, so that's not really an excuse when XV is still more consistent with larger worlds on a shorter dev time. The VII-R devs, like the KH3 dev or anyone else using UE4, also have help from Epic support engineers.
In addition, even the KH3 team were giving UE4 technological assistance to VII-R as far back as 2015. This makes it even more baffling the game released with entire chapters having the lowest LOD and texture asset issues.
This is in comparison to a game in 15 i thought had clear troubles in multiple areas for years during development and actually launched in that state proving me right.
They spent so long on the engine and now only one team ends up using it, after years of trying to force a company wide engine standard like EA and their frostbite nonsense(which ended up falling out of favor as well).
I didnt shit on FF15 because i didnt think luminous was a good engine. I criticized it because i thought the development of that game was a mess, and the development of the engine was a big part of that.
UE4 also had a very long development time, started development in 2003, ramped up development in 2008, and it didn't have any games released on it until 2014. Luminous started in 2011 with XV releasing in 2016. Modern engines have long developments, not sure why you're pointing to it as a negative when it's a positive investment for going into the future, and they can work faster on their own engines to quickly implement and optimize for what they need. The difference here is UE4 had started development earlier, but it didn't even have tools and framework for creating open worlds until 2015, and FFXV needed to release a year later. This would have massively delayed XV if they didn't have their own engine.
They had only 3 years to work on the game in Luminous, it's state of release wasn't even bad (still much more polished than current VIIR), and did not point to issues because of engine development, so you weren't proven right. Consider that XV's story was still being re-written even after 2013, Nomura was kicked off the project late that year after initially wanting to also make it multi-part games. They ended up trying to tell the entire mutli-part story in one game vs. VIIR which only includes 10% of the complete VII story. Add that to having a 2016 deadline with the story still not set in stone is obviously going to make development difficult, because you don't know what assets you need to create while figuring out where to include them in the final product. The fact that they were able to create it in only 3 years despite that and still having a good Metacritic score proves the benefits of having their own engine.
And SE was not trying to force Luminous on a company wide use.
In 2012 the lead engineer even said each SE team could pick and choose what engine they want to use, that they didn't have to pick Luminous. Going forward I wouldn't be surprised if more SE teams like FFXIV team's next game made their own engines custom tailored for their specific type of game, similar to Sony teams having diverse engines.
In addition to that, the whole point of why i criticized FF15's sidequests was because of the expectation of an open world having something more to do in it than something as rudimentary as fetch quests in a world with witcher 3 existing.
FF7's questing structure isnt novel and i would never say that it is, but its also clearly there merely give some space for the main story content, not just to exist because they have to justify the time spent on the huge area they created like in 15(which in my opinion they absolutely still didnt manage to do)
Witcher 3's sidequests are still mostly that, fetch/deliver and hunt quests. The difference is in the story telling behind each quests, they just have much better writers than SE that makes it more engaging. VIIR side-quests are literally there also just to pad out the game so they can claim it's just as big as a mainline title due to them taking 6 years to release one part of 10% of the full VII story. The main story beats are great like in the original, but most of the side and new stuff are a drag.
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