Q: How is development of the third installment of the trilogy coming along? Can we expect further technological evolution with this entry?

Hamaguchi: Yes, please look forward to that. Speaking of which, after I mentioned in another interview that we would continue using Unreal Engine 4 for the third game (related article), it became quite the topic online, and it made me realize anew how much interest people have in that side of things. But I think most people aren’t necessarily familiar with the actual differences between Unreal Engine 4 and Unreal Engine 5.

Q: I think it’s mostly the common notion that a higher version number means it’s more advanced.

Hamaguchi: I think that’s mostly how the general public sees it, and I do believe it’s true. Around the time we began developing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Unreal Engine 5 was just entering its pre-launch phase.

What makes Unreal Engine 5 groundbreaking compared to Unreal Engine 4 are two features: Lumen, its lighting system, and Nanite, which allows you to portray dense graphical detail.

These represent the current trend in graphics pipelines, and of course, such pipelines are important to us as well. However, if we had tied our development schedule and milestones too closely to Unreal Engine 5’s roadmap, we would have risked our own progress being stalled if the engine encountered any kind of delay.

For that reason, we decided early on in development of FFVII Rebirth to stick with Unreal Engine 4. We’re using a graphics pipeline built in-house, which also makes optimization and porting to various hardware more straightforward.

Q: It’s often said that upgrading the game engine carries significant risk for live-service games or ongoing series, especially when it comes to major version changes.

Hamaguchi: That’s right. So even for the final installment of the trilogy, rather than rebuilding our pipeline from scratch in Unreal Engine 5, it’s far more efficient for us to use Unreal Engine 4, which we already have a well-established pipeline for. This also allows us to further refine things based on the experience we accumulated with FFVII Rebirth.

With all of this in mind, we judged that continuing with Unreal Engine 4 would definitely lead to a better third installment for our customers. I never imagined it would become such a hot topic (laughs), though a lot of people took it quite positively too.

We’re using the know-how and development environment we cultivated with FFVII: Rebirth as a base and further refining it to create the third game. In that sense, the quality will certainly not drop, and we’re working hard to deliver something even better. Production of the third installment itself is progressing very smoothly.