Not impressed by anything I have seen for now. FF15 was more impressive.
Using FF14 engine was probably easier for a development point of view I guess. But we can see the difference IMO. This looks like DMC6 (graphics, lack of ambitious environments and type of game), not a fully fledged Final Fantasy game.
A lot of confusion about what they use as an engine. I did some research about it and their engine is an iteration of FF14 engine. They had used UE4 for target renders or something similar years ago but they are actually using (an improved obviously) FF14 engine.
Using FF14 engine was probably easier for a development point of view I guess. But we can see the difference IMO. This looks like DMC6 (graphics, lack of ambitious environments and type of game), not a fully fledged Final Fantasy game.
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Naoki Yoshida never said this. This is an error.
Final Fantasy 16's game engine might have been revealed four years ago and no one noticed
And it's using Final Fantasy 14's engine, sort of
From a CEDEC presentation, preproduction of FF16 were using UE 4 but they changed to FF14 engine.
Inuhanyou
Veteran
So what is your point? Both forspoken and ff15 in your words aren't technically benchmarks. They are run on luminous a custom game tool of square. So there should be no difference between them and ff16.I don't consider FF15 as a benchmark. FF7 remake looks good but this is UE 4.Here FF16 looks good and this is a custom engine of Square Enix and evolution of the FF14 engine.
Unreal engine 4 hurt ff7r because of the sheer amount of assets and PS4 holding their application of the technology back(the texture issue was a big problem due to ram limit that took until PS5 version to fix), and this is with it being that teams first handling of the engine.
FF7R 2 either using ue4 again or hopefully ue5 will be way better as impressive as ff7r was.
So it seems to me whether it's custom ff14 engine ff16 is using or commercial engine ff7r is using, they are both pushing the bar. And it depends on the team we are talking about when we talk about technical competency. Osaka team also did good work with kh3 on unreal and they are transitioning to unreal 5 as well
Inuhanyou
Veteran
The devs working on ff16 primarily have much more experience with the ff16 engine since they are coming from that team. So it makes much more sense for them to utilize that engine rather than wasting time trying to learn ue4. Osaka team and the ff7r guys already have the experience so they will keep on using it.
But Osaka team famously took more than a year transitioning from luminous early on to unreal engine 4, because luminous was not in a state that could deliver a working product despite the higher ups at square pushing them to use the engine before knowing that.
You can see where all the incompetence and bad governing structure comes from. Final fantasy 14 1.0 and FF13 went through all the same issues.
But Osaka team famously took more than a year transitioning from luminous early on to unreal engine 4, because luminous was not in a state that could deliver a working product despite the higher ups at square pushing them to use the engine before knowing that.
You can see where all the incompetence and bad governing structure comes from. Final fantasy 14 1.0 and FF13 went through all the same issues.
Alex Donaldson, who runs RPGSite and did all of those old interviews with FF people and the people who worked on Luminous and XIV engine, pretty much confirmed XVI is using XIV's engine if that cgworld article wasn't enough proof already. Interesting thing is that XIV 2.0 / XVI's engine is also forked from Crystal Tools and basically a heavily modified and upgraded version of it, which makes sense given how the Luminous guys who were already busy with Luminous at the time, were able to help the XIV team quickly build another custom engine specifically for XIV 2.0. Would have taken a lot longer if they had tried to do everything from scratch. I imagine the Radec engine trademark is whatever this upgraded CT engine Yoshida's team is using is called now.
"Extremely late reply as not been on Era in days, but my understanding of it from talking to people both in official interviews & beyond was that FF14 1.0 was built out of Crystal Tools just as FF13 was, and then Yoshida's team continued with that and built on it a lot over the years.
In addition, some tech Luminous developed did find its way back into the 14 pipeline. There was a lot of this around the 1.0 time, like I remember playing a 3D version of FF14 at Square's office once - that never became a viable product, but that was Luminous people doing that. It was the same core tech, but they were building on top of it. I know some Luminous lighting/shadow stuff got backported and made its way into 14, too.
Anyway, the 14 fork of that continues on now, really, 'cos they whipped it into shape over many years and then used that tech for 16, which is why 16 isn't UE like FF7R, or Luminous like 15/Forspoken. They wanted to continue on tools they knew inside out, so they did.
The important thing to remember about Crystal Tools in particular is that people call it an engine, but is isn't - as the name suggests, it's just a series of tools. Which in fairness - so is any engine, right - but in those 2010s FF13/14 days, it wasn't formalized into any structure. That is also part of why so much of those developments got so fucked up and complicated. It was just a set of in-house tools that were being used in wildly different ways by wildly different teams. It was hard to share stuff. Whereas Luminous is built in a way where theoretically a bit of training and you could get any team making games in that engine relatively quickly, especially if said games are RPGs or action games with large-scale worlds.
It's actually similar to a lot of the troubles faced when EA tried to get everybody on Frostbite, and BioWare discovered that all the shit that DICE had built was useless for making RPGs, causing all manner of struggles for ME/DA. It's not like a UE or Unity situation - which is what Luminous is like. It's a more old-school/traditional style of game development in that sense. So the lineage from FF13>14>ARR>16 is really weird and convoluted, whereas the lineage from Agni>15>Forspoken is pretty clear-cut, and you can even see how they just render and have the same 'feel' about them."
"One thing I'll say is that most of the core people behind the first iteration of Luminous/Agni's Philosophy are no longer at Square. Most of that core team's leadership was ex-Sega, having done the Hedgehog Engine over there. Everybody I interviewed for Agni's Philosophy all those years ago is no longer at SE. So it's the same tech, but leadership wise, it's all moved on.
As for Crystal Tools - I'm sure SE would argue it no longer really exists. But whatever FF16 is built on, if it even has a formal name, is built atop its foundations, basically."
I dont think the texture issue in FF7R was a ram limit, but a known bug that occurs under certain conditions in UE4.
Inuhanyou
Veteran
It wasn't a bug, otherwise they could have fixed it on ps4. It took until PS5 and PC version for it to be solved.
We can tell it was atleast partly a ram limitation because replacing the HDD
inside of the ps4 with an SSD partially solved it(as one the issues was textures taking a very long time to load in and/or not loading into the high resolution asset at all)
So bets are open… what are the chances that somehow Square Enid will fuck this one up too? So far this looks way too good to be true, considering their recent track record.
How is it a RAM problem if an SSD partially fixes it? It is a sign that shows that it has to do with how the engine works with the streaming of the assets
Also this guy explained that this is a bug from the engine.
Digital Foundry: Final Fantasy 7 Remake - Tech Review - Beautiful, But Not Flawless
I think the worse texture are in chapter 12 lol, certain boxes and metallic environment obstacles so bad ahah. It's a casa study btw this game...
www.resetera.com
This is a funny take though. What does "Streamline approaches" even mean when Crystal Tools,XIV,XVI engine in this case is just something only the XIV team can use, is more outdated and less modern as a game creation tool, and will also die if that studio breaks up. They already had to "worry about engine creation and constant management" with this XVI upgrade and will have to worry about it with any future iterations. XVI has effectively been in full production since patch 3.4 of Heavensward. It has had an extremely long development time.
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Silent_Buddha
Legend
Yoshi P has a good track record for ensuring that his projects remain on track and release in a good state. That's expected as MMORPGs can't afford to release in a bad state since they absolutely rely on user retention in order to recoup development costs and make a profit.
This is the guy that saved FFXIV (FFXIV 1.0 was absolute crap and is VERY different from FFXIV 2.0) and by doing so basically saved Square Enix. I still remember being in the BETA for FFXIV before the 1.0 launch and being incredibly disappointed in so many things about it which lead me to think it was going to fail. And the 1.0 launch came out and it was failing. A PS3 release of the 1.x versions never came out because the Engine was in a sad state and the game itself was in an even sadder state.
FFXIV was the first game (and only game up until he was put in charge of FFXVI) where he was both the Producer and Director for game. He was put in charge after the failed release of 1.0 (2010). It should be noted that the 2.0 release is considered by Square Enix and most of the player base as a different game (2.x - 6.x are vastly different from 1.0). So he basically got the short end of the stick by being assigned a failed retail release project as his first game that he got to be producer and director on and instead of it sinking his career as it often does for people put in that position, he not only turned it around and saved FFXIV but Square Enix as well.
With 2.0 and on (6.x version as of now) they've been pretty rock solid WRT to development and engine stability. Each major version 2.0, 3.0, etc. sees the engine get sometimes relatively massive generational improvements. Keep in mind that these engine improvements have to be rolled out cross platform as well ... PS3/PC, then PS3/PS4/PC and now PS4/PS5/PC. Keep in mind for FFXIV each major version (expansion) basically represents a new "game" release. The FFXIV expansions receive the largest AAA budget within Square Enix as far as I'm aware and have the largest team working on it. That of course, doesn't apply to FFXVI, but it does mean that Yoshi P has a lot of experience managing a large team, a large budget, and incredibly high expectations. And not only has he made sure that the FFXIV team has executed well for over 2 decades now, but each expansion has been better than the previous expansion and the fan base has grown with each release. 2 decades of consistently good and technically solid releases.
He's rightly well regarded within Square-Enix as well as by everyone that lived through the FFXIV 1.0 launch and saw what he managed to pull off with the FFXIV 2.0 launch. So that immediately made me have high hopes for FFXVI where I had pretty low hopes for FFXV prior to it being released.
Regards,
SB
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I don't think they'd stop at only all the other games. I could see it impacting everything. I don't see SE having any positive forward movement, especially given them saying "...look forward to the blockchain games we plan to launch in FY2024/3 and thereafter."
