Naoki Hamaguchi explains why they stuck with Unreal 4 for Final Fantasy VII: Revelation

One of the big new releases linedup for next year is the final part of the Final Fantasy VII remake series which is titled, Final Fantasy Revelation. Naoki Hamaguchi, the director behind Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, has explained to 4Gamer why they decided to continue using Unreal Engine 4 for the last part of the trilogy rather than using the more powerful, Unreal Engine 5. Mr. Hamaguchi said that the team were well versed in Unreal Engine 4 and that they wanted to get the game out to players as quickly as they could rather than relearning tools. Here’s what was said:

For your average person, there’s an impression that bigger numbers are better, so people may think ‘is it okay to not use Unreal Engine 5?’

Yeah, I get that (laughs). But simply, for this series, considering a business perspective and a player perspective, I believe that getting the game out as quickly as possible is the best thing to do.

We had already worked with and customized UE4 for the remake series, so we decided delivering the game quickly to players with a workflow that we were used to was best, rather than resetting everything to restart with UE5, build everything again and extend the development time.

Quite early on I told the team, “This time we will continue with UE4, and we won’t debate that.”

Was there anyone against that? It seems like creators may like to try the challenge of using something new.

I anticipated people saying things like “They added this new feature, are we not able to use it?”. So because of that, from very early on we decided to stay with UE4 and not get confused along the way.

I think now that was the correct decision. Of course, we have made and extended engines as a team, so with UE4 if we faced problems, we could alter it ourselves.

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