Final Fantasy VII Remake is Powered by Unreal Engine 4

Unreal Engine 4 will be powering Final Fantasy VII Remake

[DarkOcelet]

That was known along time ago.

[breakpad]

that s a bad thing ...unreal 4 is a mediocre engine..seems they try to put out the game with the less possible work (similar to Capcom and the majority of western developers) ...imo there is a war behind the scenes with the developers of new graphic engines..probably that s one reason why Kojima completely cut of from his game series ..his team developed one of( if not the) best graphic engine out there and the barons of the industry (Epic games, Nvidia etcetc) didnt want a developer (and his team) to have rights on their excellent work

[DarkOcelet]

I would have preferred Luminous Engine tbh but the footage yesterday looked INSANE!

So i am ok with it now. If they can nail the gameplay, then it will be awesome.

[ZaWarudo]

Yeah no, i don't want to wait 10 years for this. Unreal engine is fine and very user-friendly.

[Lightning Mr Bubbles]

Well, it looks great. It looks like it's powered by Unreal Engine 5 or 6.

[thekhurg]

Unreal engine 4 looks and performs spectacularly.

[DragoonsScaleLegends]

Well the two Unreal Engine 3 games I've played on PS4 ran and looked pretty shit (Injustice Gods Among Us, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5). But there were way more Unreal 3 games that ran good rather than bad. I would assume Unreal Engine 4 is way more optimized for PS4 and XB1. Regardless of the engine it mostly comes down to optimization, budget, and not rushing it to meet a deadline.

[lipton101]

The engine is nothing but a tool. It's up to the developers as to wether it's going to run and play well. As to their using of UE4, good for them and us. It's a proven, quality engine that saves them the time and money of developing one from scratch. Which means game comes out sooner.

[Fatdrinkofwater]

The game looks amazing on UE4 and somehow its a bad thing?

https://media.giphy.com/med...

[Damien1801]

Unreal Engine 3 might be a mediocre engine but from what I'm hearing about Unreal 4 it's a very developer friendly engine, they had no complaints about it and it's a huge step compared to the previous engine. Game engines cost a lot of money to make. If they want to release FFVII as quickly as they can, they have to go with pre-existing engine, and the game will never be finished at that rate if Square-Enix sticks with their house-hold engine like Luminous when it's not eve complete yet. They're developing Luminous along with FFXV. Tell me why they dropped Luminous in favor of Unreal 4 while developing KH3? Why it took them a long time with Versus XIII/FFXV while they were still developing it with Crystal Tools? FFVII needs to be cost-effective and that's the only way they can release it as quickly as they can. And from what I'm seeing the development is going smoothly. And about MGS5 as much as I appreciate Kojima's work and Konami is no doubt a waste of a company that needs to go bankrupt immediately I believe the reason he got canned is because of the cost management. MGS5 has a budget of 80 million dollars. Plus the marketing. Plus the cost of an engine. Plus the dedicated service for MGO. And it took him 5 years to make it. Little more than that the game would have costed even more.

[SIdepocket]

Unreal 4 is not mediocre by any measure. It's faster than many other engines, is physically plausible, and scales to a wide variety of platforms.

Fox engine is impressive as well, but can't hold a candle to the framerate of UE4.

[ThyMasterDebater]

Did you just say Unreal Engine 4 is a Mediocre engine? It's one of the highest technical and graphical engines on the market. Do you understand how many great games have been made in Unreal engine? This is by far one of the undermining comments I have read on this site.. Everyone on N4G is now dumber for having read it.. You will be rewarded no agreements and may god have mercy on your soul..

Seriously though.. Da fuq?

[Sevir]

Um... It's not bad, Kingdom Hearts 3 is also powered by UE4 and that looks fantastic. The footage seen yesterday was amazing... So I'm fine with UE4.

[HammadTheBeast]

Unreal Engine 4 is one of the top engines out there.

[specialguest]

I'm pretty sure you had no complaint about the graphics until recently when you invented a reason to think it's bad upon discovering Unreal 4 was used.

[Game4Next]

"Enlighten" Anyone? It is a Global Illumination technology that Square Enix have. But does FF7R use it?

Square Enix logo is on Enlighten official site http://www.geomerics.com/en...

[Crimzon]

Yeah, Unreal Engine 4 is actually a great engine. I could understand people groaning if they were using CryEngine or something, but UE4 is solid in my opinion. It should also mean that the PC version of the game will be well optimized and scale quite nicely to 60fps and 4K for the people who have fancy rigs.

[ULTp0ltergeist]

Just realized this FF7 is episodic LOL! xD

[Matpan]

MEdiocre engine? hahahaha my god.

[Ratty]

You obviously don't know squat about game engines. There's a reason why we're seeing less engines these days. Games are getting bigger and more complex and not every one has the ressources to make, maintain and expand on their own in-house engines. UE4 receives frequent updates and is well optimized. I haven't used it well myself but it's becoming more user-friendly in order to compete with Unity in the indie department. I've seen what some indie devs are making with UE4. I can't wait to see what a huge company like SE can do with it. Well it already looks amazing.

[calactyte]

I won't crucify you for not necessarily being aware of Unreal Engine's capabilities. But I'm a 3D artist and I was able to build CG quality architectural rendering in realtime with maybe 3 days worth of self teaching. It is incredible. It is super powerful and highly optimized. I can run it on a Macbook Pro with a low powered GPU and still get soft shadows, ambient occlusion, global illumination and decent antialiasing. It integrates with both Maya and 3dsMax seamlessly.

It uses PBR (Physical based rendering) material rendering which can make photorealistic, wood, bark, glass, tiles, grass, leaves and skies.

Also since they have open sourced it, the code is constantly improving with the benefit of over 250K developers improving it. Nothing a group of 10-20 in house developers could ever hope to compete with. The fact that is it free to use was a genius move since it means every school and university is teaching it to the next generation of game developers. I won't continue on or you'll think I work for Epic Games. Please take my word for it when I say this was the best possible choice for Final Fantasy VII. Just trust me here.

[KwietStorm_BLM]

News to me.

[awi5951]

Japanese developers have proven they suck at unreal they really should just make their own engine.

[UNKLE]

Yes, after E3 2015 is already said its gonna run by UE4. This way easily can made for PC, and XBOX.

[eyeDEVOUR]

Powered by bad decisions/greed seems to be accurate, no matter what the engine is.

[Godmars290]

More like the pride behind the PS3 demo they showed off years ago, then said they couldn't do.

[-Foxtrot]

Oh they could have...just now they thought

"Holy shit, suckers bought into three FF13 games, we could totally do this with FF7"

[REDDURT]

Do you guys really want them to build a engine ? LEts just wait

[rextraordinaire]

They built Luminous engine for FFXV, why wouldn't they use the same engine for VII remake?

[Timesplitter14]

In-house engines are often built in a way that's not super user-friendly and usually require a large team of engine devs to support the game devs. UE4 on the other hand is field-tested to have a very comprehensive workflow for designers and artists, and continues to evolve while you are focusing on your game.

So unless you're working on a very technically unconventional game like No Man's Sky, it's becoming less and less pertinent to make your own engine. There really doesn't seam to be any good reason to spend years and milions of dollars on your own engine when you can have a team of hundreds of experts (Epic, Unity) working on a thoroughly-tested professional engine for you while you focus on your game

[Eamon]

Because that engine is still in development itself. And still getting modified and debugged. It's part of the reason why FF15 has taken so long to finish. If part of the engine is unfinished or broken or full of bugs, it puts a bottleneck on the actual game design. Schedule gets pushed back further and further.
But Timesplitter14 was correct in saying that the User Interface is very likely much more complex than Unreal Engine 4 which was designed to be user friendly.

[_-EDMIX-_]

yes.....for FFXV huh? Annnnnnd how long did that take to make and how easy was it for them?

KH3 moved from that engine to UE4. I'm fine with it being this engine if they can work with it.

[eyeDEVOUR]

No. Most of us wanted updated graphics, updated cutscenes, high quality music(same tunes tho) and turnbased combat. Im still just in shock of this butchery.. :(

[averagejoe26]

Actually, "most of us" are very pleased...except for a vocal minority seen on the internet.

Please don't speak for all FF7 fans.

[eyeDEVOUR]

@averagejoe
you just did what you told me not to do..lol
now just wait for your average game.

[L0NGSHOT28]

Yet you'll still buy it when it comes out.

[_-EDMIX-_]

...nope. The day the game was announced it was stated it would NOT BE FFVII WITH JUST updated graphics.

I'm sorry but it was told to you day 1, it was NEVER going to be that.

I'm happy with what I saw, sorry die hard fanboys, they got a buy from me day 1.

Like many stated, you don't speak for all FFVII fans bud. I own 3 versions of the game and don't care lol

[rainslacker]

updated graphics...check
updated cutscenes...check
high quality music...kinda hard to tell from the trailer but sounded better than it does on a PS1.
same tunes tho...check
turn based combat...I'd wager most people don't actually care. But if it eases your mind, SE has said they will have an option for some kind of ATB battle system, but apaprently it is more action focused. So maybe wait a bit before judging on that one.

I see no butchery, I see them giving the fans a remake. It's not really proper to beg for a remake, then demand how that remake is handled because you could ask 100 die hard fans what they want, and you'd get 100 different answers.

[djplonker]

"most of us"

(3 agrees) (24 disagrees)

Lol

[eyeDEVOUR]

@djplonker

Yes i mean most of us who have been asking for the damn thing since the ps3 demo. When they announced it at e3 it was because of us who's begging has made this happen.

I dont care if you disagree, but you guys made me loose 5bubbles in one day because i have a different opinion? So i get silenced ?

Even tho im a disabled vet id love to meet one you pu55ies above in real life. Its ashamed that i fought for the rights of "the entitled generation " of b!tches.

[Adrian_v01]

@eyedevour

It's not the people's fault for your lost bubbles. It's your fault for posting annoying, immature, offensive comments and attacking people on a personal level.

If you wrote a comment explaining why what they are doing is wrong people would take you seriously. But I haven't seen you do this. As soon as someone replies with a different opinion than yours you start with trolling and offending people, instead of having a proper conversation. And then you wonder why people want to restrain you in the number of comments you can write.

[Eamon]

This was to be expected. It also explains why we've got this much content so far in only a year of development - compared to FF15, that is.

The Luminous Engine's development and debugging was a factor in why FF15 has taken ages.

[OtakuDJK1NG-Rory]

this much content? That like the first 30 minute of the game they showed in that trailer that not a lot.

[ninsigma]

This is a game they are building from the ground up that is going to be packed with content. The fact they have character models done, combat done, voice acting, CG scenes and playable areas is quite impressive.

[Eamon]

Uhh you're just looking at the environment. There is an actual combat system that looks to be functioning already.

I'm not saying this is typical speedy development. I'm comparing it to FF15.

[alstruck]

Well I heard some comment months ago that this remake was developed by a third party developer with SE only acting as supervisor. But it was never confirmed.. So who knows, I was very surprised they already put voice acting in the teaser

[rainslacker]

It shows they have a good chunk of the game design implemented. That's half the production time of any game right there. They had mocap done(unless you believe they do that in 30-60 minute segments), they had voices recorded. They had a solid lighting system in place. They had their textures and filters up to snuff. They had both battle and game play animations done. They had object interaction done. Only thing I saw in this trailer that needed improving was the battle UI, which looked to be a placeholder...possibly as well as the damage tickers, and there needs to be some more polish in the lighting and filters.

Once that stuff is done, it's mostly about just plugging in the assets and scripting the events.

To put it in perspective, what they showed, is about on par with what was shown in Horizon outside of not as much of the battle system, and that's releasing next year.

I'm sorry if you feel they aren't very far along, but from what I saw, it looks like they are a lot further along than most people would have believed. This game looks to have been in production long before the reveal teaser.

[Ace Killa 08]

how is this a bad thing

[BallsEye]

UE4 is great as long as it's done right. Watch the videoThe framerate...it drops to single digits during real gameplay. They better fix it.
https://youtu.be/A3sBZ5Nr4h...

[silkrevolver]

As long as it speeds up the process, I'm fine with it. SE always seems to put so much effort into their own engines, only to realize they should be using a 3rd party engine four years into development.

[rainslacker]

Can't really discredit square though on the power and functionality of their engine. It can produce a beautiful game. Granted, that doesn't mean much if the game isn't good, but that's not the engines fault.

UE4 is quite good though. It is much better than UE3, where with a lot of games, it was obvious it was made with UE3. With UE4, you could play ten games, and it'd be hard to discern if they were made with UE based on the look of the objects alone.

I think square is just coming to the conclusion that while it's nice to be a forerunner in the graphics engine space and have some of the best looking games, ultimately, it costs a lot of money and resources for not much gain. I have a feeling those guys over at Ready at Dawn, and possibly Quantic Dreams will come to the same conclusion one day, unless they manage to sell those engines to 3rd parties and make money on it.

In house engines only really make sense for the really big publishers, and square is more a medium size publisher, and some of these engine makers are simply indie devs.

[Yui_Suzumiya]

Seems like that Luminous engine was made only for FF XV. They're using U4 for this and KH3. Seems like a waste of a gorgeous engine that they put years of work into.

[ninsigma]

Having built their own engine for ff15 could have contributed to the delay of the game. So while they iron out the kinks while developing 15, they make their other games in other engines until it's ready. No point in slowing down any more games. That's all speculation of course.

[rainslacker]

It's possible they could use it in the future. It may just not be ready yet to adapt to more games and was built in such a way to only build one game at a time, thus requiring a lot of in house support to adapt it to new things.

Fox Engine at Konami was kind of like that in the beginning.

Of course, Square also had that Crystal Engine, which was also awesome for it's time and still kind of is, which they pretty much abandoned as well, or it morphed into Luminous. I'm not really sure what their end game is for creating these engines, because given the quality they can produce, it seems they'd be better off just making another game since engines are time and resource expensive to make.

[Adrian_v01]

Luminous engine isn't even finished. Making FFXV in that engine has them double benefits, they can refine the engine while creating a game in it and they can show off what the engine is capable of as a way of marketing it.

As far as I know it's not even released or available for other developers. But once it is it's said to reduce production cost and time of games by one third.

[sk8ofmnd]

Im fine with whatever the developers use for an engine for this game. I thought it looked extremely detailed and i loved the art direction. What im not fine with is them showing stuff on this game prematurely. I would have rather them not said a damn thing and waited till the game was closer to release and almost finished than this episodic bullshit.

[Mr_Luke]

mh... i thought it was powered by sadness, nostalgia and ectoplasmic substance (because for me, this game is dead).

And me thinking that Square could re-make a legend. Then i forgot about Enix. Or both togeter, whatever.

[Chaosdreams]

I'm fine with the gameplay and the graphics. But if the game is episodic.

I'm not giving it the time of day.

[Toon_Link]

Maybe wait for some details. For all we know the episodes could be 20 dollars each and each episode having 15-20 hours of content. I think people need t quit jumping the gun and enjoy the idea that FF7 is finally being remade. Remember SE always talked about how huge of a project FF7 would be to remake and that being the reason they won't do it. It seems they figured out how to make it happen in a timely manner while making sure they get their investment back.

[Chaosdreams]

Oh no worries, but what I mean is that I generally dislike episodic games. I stay away from them, something about the formula just doesn't appeal to me. It can even be FF7 and I'd shake my head.

*Thumbs up* I don't judge a game until it's out, I just make statements on how I am as a consumer.

[Sephiroushin]

20 dollars when they sell you the older games else where at 16, that aint gonna happen, If theyre planning to make it bigger than ff7 it is probably a trilogy 60 each with special editions etc... I just hope first part is not just Midgar

[DivineAssault]

Who cares? UR4 is a great engine & just look at the game!

[Dasteru]

It is looking good from what i have seen so far. Only 2 things i am worried about. Overall cost given the episodic nature, and whether there will be any way to control the other 2 characters in battle (hopefully it will have something similar to the gambit system so you atleast have some control over the AI of in-direct characters.

[frankdrebin72]

If I am not mistaken,..doesn't unreal 4 support DX12?
Go to wonder what it may bring to the Xbox version.

[rainslacker]

Yes, UE4 supports both DX12 and OpenGL, or it's own rendering API, which I think is a derivative of OpenGL. UE4 can actually build to a crap ton of devices and operating environments such as PS4, Vita, X1, 360, PC, iPhone 4 and above, Droid OS, arcade hardware, and even custom equipment when provided the proper compiler. It actually uses a wrapper to allow the somewhat seamless build between the API's with minimal translation to the developer, thus speeding up development time, and supports multi-res/textue builds along with feature specific builds to streamline the development process. In addition it supports specific tools interfacing with low level components for consoles and now PC through DX12 and Mantle.

It's quite a nice engine...and damn, I sound like I'm in their PR department.

[MicrosoftMackin]

Lol put millions into an in-house engine just to not use it. There tech demo looked awesome .Final Fantasy VII still looks great. But they literally want to take the longest most retarded ways to do things. It seems like a typical day for devs at square enix is talk about the game then think about working om the game while eventually planning to work on it. Then getting to it a few years later, switch game engines and start the process over again lol. I love Japanese games but I hate certain Japanese devs work ethic.

[spicelicka]

Isn't this supposed to be turn-based?

[Damien1801]

Square-Enix has made a good cool switching over to Unreal Engine 4. Imagine how much time will it take them to develop the game with their in-house engine Luminous that is still being developed further with FFXV. I expected they would go with Unreal 4 since it makes total sense come to think of it. They tried to develop KH3 with Luminous before they switched to UE4 since it was taking too much time to process through the early stage of development and Nomura is happy with the decision they made. If they went with Luminous on the bottom line the game might skip this generation and they would have to make another engine compatible with the hardware of future generation of consoles and would just be a waste of development time and resources if they delay this even further. They might even release the first ''episode'' just down the line of FF7's 20th anniversary, it might be a possibility. I'm happy with the choice of the engine, it's capable enough to run high demanding games without the drop of the performance and it's pretty much developer friendly not to mention we might even get the game quicker than we think.