If you’ve seen the jaw-dropping E3 tech demo from Square’s Luminous Studio, then it should come as no surprise to you that the studio plans to share assets between CG and gameplay next generation.
Speaking to RPGSite, Square Enix CTO Yoshihisa Hashimoto discussed the future of game development, noting that the lines between pre-rendered and real-time content will be blurred like never before.
For the backgrounds used in this – the mountains, the houses – we are using exactly the same assets as are used in the Visual Works CG version.
Of course, it’s too massive of a data to use in a game as-is, but I think the look and feel will probably remain. If we had time, we could’ve compressed the data even smaller. We didn’t have time to do that, so we just used the same master data – but it can definitely be reduced.
To achieve such astounding visuals, Hashimoto points out that it is going to be a “challenge” to squeeze all of the content on a single Blu-ray. “We have to really consider the mechanism of compressing the data carefully,” he said.
If this is what the next Final Fantasy will look like on the PlayStation 4, then sign me up. Heck, I’ll buy it on three Blu-rays if that’s what it takes.
