Square Enix reveals its team made an unexpected engine choice early in the development of Final Fantasy 16 ahead of the game's worldwide release.
Square Enix recently shared some exciting updates about their highly anticipated AAA RPG, Final Fantasy 16. One of the most intriguing pieces of information revealed is that the game will be the first from the company to incorporate advanced technology, due to an unexpected engine choice made during the early stages of development. In addition, the marketing campaign also highlighted that the cutscenes in Final Fantasy 16 will be longer than those featured in the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, hinting at an epic and immersive narrative that fans of the series are sure to love.
Square Enix hasn't recently demonstrated a strong commitment to any one engine for the Final Fantasy series. The company released Final Fantasy 14, which used the Crystal Tools engine, Final Fantasy 15, which made use of the internal Luminous Engine that was later used in Forspoken, and two Unreal Engine 4 games, Final Fantasy 7 Remake and a remaster of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7, over the past ten years.
This trend is now confirmed to continue with Final Fantasy 16, as Square Enix revealed in a recent interview with YouTuber Skill Up that the upcoming RPG does not use the Luminous Engine or Unreal Engine. The company declined to comment further, presumably because it intends to talk more about the game's technological aspects when it is closer to being released. This information was obtained from the same interview where the producer of Final Fantasy 16 criticized the use of the term "JRPG," which is frequently associated with Square Enix's games.
If there are no further delays, the sequel to Final Fantasy 15 will be released almost seven years after the first game. And even though game development cycles have inevitably gotten longer as they've become more difficult to make, the now-possible fact that Final Fantasy 16 uses a new internal engine would still go a long way toward explaining why there has never been such a long time between two mainline entries in the venerable series.
Final Fantasy 16 porting times may be significantly impacted by Square Enix's choice of engine, but it is unlikely that the AAA RPG will soon leave the PS5. Although the game's producer Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida has previously stated that he would like to eventually port the title to more platforms, he has also recently stated that fans will have to wait a very long time for a Final Fantasy 16 PC port. Not the least because Sony and Square Enix have a timed exclusivity agreement, though the need to focus on the PS5 during development might not necessarily make porting more difficult given the structural similarities between Sony's most recent console and contemporary PCs.
Final Fantasy 16 launches June 22 for PlayStation 5.
Source: Dominik Bošnjak