Alleged FFVII Remake leak

[Vyzzuvazzadth]

2 Threads in a day. Wow. I hope this doesn't become a trend.

Anyway, there's a post on reddit about an alleged leak from 4chan which covers some sort of interview with a Square Enix employee (presumably from Business Division 1) about the FFVII Remake. It's already all over the internet and since I'm already here this evening, I decided to share it here with you guys.

Please, take it with a huge grain of salt. I personally am 50-50 on this. It sounds quite genuine on most parts, but it wouldn't be too hard to fabricate such an interview. Most of the information is already out there and some specifics aren't really hard to come up with. However, I hear that FFVII Remake rumors and leaks are scarce and those that are out there were mostly spot on.

But enough babbling, here you go:
https://www.reddit.com/r/FinalFantasy/comments/7cisea/ff_vii_remake_possible_leak/

EDIT:
The above link seems to be a summary by someone. Here's the actual (archived) 4Chan thread:
https://boards.fireden.net/v/thread/396523194/#396537789

 

[Lex]

Be incredibly skeptical of that, especially considering every bit of information in there could be inferred from information already available to us. I don't believe for one solitary second that all of Midgar is seamless, lmfao. Thanks for sharing though. I was immediately going to suggest a front page news post but after reading it... lending it credence isn't worth it at this stage unless confirmed by other sources.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

Seems interesting, and it'll be interesting to see where things end up, and if we're ever able to confirm any of these claims (like loading times, etc).




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[Claymore]

Like Lex has mentioned, a lot of that is just extrapolated from what has already been stated in various pieces. The CC2 stuff is also rather suspect. It just seems to play into what a portion of fans believe in that all their assets were scrapped and SE pretty much restarted from scratch or cherry picked what can be saved ... but there's something about that which just doesn't ring true.

I also have to echo BS on Midgar being seamless. It just ain't going to happen.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

BI don't believe for one solitary second that all of Midgar is seamless, lmfao.

I also have to echo BS on Midgar being seamless. It just ain't going to happen.

While the individual load times for start up, etc. in FFXV can be exceptionally long, the whole explorable areas in the main world all do so without loading and you only occasionally notice a quick loading screen if you drive quickly across the entire map on certain routes.

Depending on how quickly you can get from one point to another within the city, what routes you can take to do so, and how much of whatever things have to actually be rendered (e.g. not every building is actually fully explorable and populated), making a fully explorable and not chunk-by-chunk instanced Midgar isn't at all inconceivable. Hell, since most of the time you'd be walking from one point to another, or taking a train, I don't see why this is at all unbelievable.

Not saying that makes the rumour any more or less believable, but just saying that that's hardly an unbelievable claim given what most open world games are capable of accomplishing.




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[Vyzzuvazzadth]

True, seamless Midgar seems unrealistic, especially since there's only a train connecting the slums to the upper plate. And seamless isn't always better. Running through a huge seamless city can result in an unnecessary time-sink. This ain't GTA.

Update: The link in my opening post seems to be a summary by someone. Here's the actual (archived) 4Chan thread:
https://boards.fireden.net/v/thread/396523194/#396537789

EDIT:

Depending on how quickly you can get from one point to another within the city, what routes you can take to do so, and how much of whatever things have to actually be rendered (e.g. not every building is actually fully explorable and populated), making a fully explorable and not chunk-by-chunk instanced Midgar isn't at all inconceivable.

On a technical level, sure. Not at all impossible. However, it's a question of how it would benefit the game. I like seamless areas, don't get me wrong, but making the entirety of Midgar seamless doesn't sound like the best idea to me. Especially because of this one reason: the bigger and more seamless an area, the smaller it feels compared to a huge area divided into zones which only cover a small part of the whole area. Think FFXV compared to FFXII.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

On a technical level, sure. Not at all impossible. However, it's a question of how it would benefit the game. I like seamless areas, don't get me wrong, but making the entirety of Midgar seamless doesn't sound like the best idea to me. Especially because of this one reason: the bigger and more seamless an area, the smaller it feels compared to a huge area divided into zones which only cover a small part of the whole area. Think FFXV compared to FFXII.

(Having not yet played XII, I'll have ta take your word for that)

Loading times aren't a necessity for that though. I think it really all comes down to how you're managing how much of which assets where are loaded at any given time, which is managed by how much a player can see or interact with at any given time, and while Midgar is very expansive, it's also very dense, which means that there're lots of ways programmatically to get around that.

Arkham Knight is what actually comes to mind first for me when it comes to this, since it's running on Unreal 4, and used a lot of tricks and things to change what's shown for illusions and other things – AND it does that while being able to traverse all of the available area exceptionally quickly by a number of different methods like the Batmobile and Flight, because it manages the area in chunks – just like we'd naturally expect to see with Midgar, and should even be conceivably be easier to do with only walking and trains.

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[Ryuman]

Well, if it is real, then by the time it's proven, will have forgotten this "leak" anyway. That's always convenient.

I could understand why they would want to hold info back until they're closer to release, but it it would be an unwinnable situation regardless. Either they show something now and have people complain it's too early, or show late and take a lot of heat for its absence.

No point in getting too hung up about this rumour. As always, it might not be true. And the fun thing with 4chan is that all those posts could be made by different people posing as each other to troll everyone.

 

[ChipNoir]

Could the trains be used as a sneaky way to hide load screens and make for the illusions of seamless travel?

We know that there are thresholds between the sectors, and trains are one, if not the main form of travel. I don't see Avalanche affording a car, nor do I see Cloud getting the ability to highjack any, so I imagine trains will be the main mode of transit between slums and city, and between sectors.

So you have a limited car that you can walk around in, but has mostly static elements beyond the NPC's hovering about, and some very cleverly 'green screened' visuals out of the windows. Meanwhile the game is actually completely re-writing the entire area around the player.

Could this be a possibility?

 

[Vyzzuvazzadth]

@X-Soldier & ChipNoir:
I can see the upper plate being handled like Batman Arkham Knight with some loading work being hidden through Sector doorways. The slums however are far more compartmentalized (if they keep the original base architecture somewhat intact).

But on second thought, they could divide the entirety of Midgar into several smaller and bigger zones, which are connected through either short hallway segments (sector 6 ruins, Sewers, ducts and vents in reactor areas...) or train rides, which hide much of the surrounding area (see ChipNoir's idea in the previous post). That way, they can realize seamless travel while not having to recreate ALL of Midgar and also make it "fully" explorable. If that makes any sense. It's late and I need to go to sleep. Not much brain power left :/

 

[X-SOLDIER]

Could the trains be used as a sneaky way to hide load screens and make for the illusions of seamless travel?

We know that there are thresholds between the sectors, and trains are one, if not the main form of travel. I don't see Avalanche affording a car, nor do I see Cloud getting the ability to highjack any, so I imagine trains will be the main mode of transit between slums and city, and between sectors.

So you have a limited car that you can walk around in, but has mostly static elements beyond the NPC's hovering about, and some very cleverly 'green screened' visuals out of the windows. Meanwhile the game is actually completely re-writing the entire area around the player.

Could this be a possibility?

...they could divide the entirety of Midgar into several smaller and bigger zones, which are connected through either short hallway segments (sector 6 ruins, Sewers, ducts and vents in reactor areas...) or train rides, which hide much of the surrounding area (see ChipNoir's idea in the previous post). That way, they can realize seamless travel while not having to recreate ALL of Midgar and also make it "fully" explorable.

Basically yeah, this has been my point the whole time. A no-loading-time-Midgar isn't at all a crazy concept if you look at how much of Midgar has to be presented at any given point of time, how quickly/slowly you can traverse through it, and how it's already naturally bottlenecked in a number of ways.

You don't have vehicles or flying (like Arkham Knight does), and Midgar is dense enough that from the ground of the plate or the slums, it's pretty straightforward how to block out small sections that quietly load and unload more detailed assets & entities based on what you can see, and what's blocked from your vision, and what direction you're actively moving.

Open world games without loading times don't ALWAYS have every tree, door, and entity loaded as a fully rendered asset all the time. They only really track them when they're approaching a distance at which the player could soon see or interact with them, which is its render distance – and it's optimizing that and testing it takes all the hard work.

While with Midgar you COULD put each thing in a chunk, and make you fully load everything between each chunk, and ditch the previous one, you don't HAVE to – especially because you already control the routes that you take to get there, and when you're approaching a bottleneck, it's easy to infer where the player is going, and if they can only move on foot, you can also plan and optimize what unloads, and what new assets render, because you know what the fastest possible travel times can be to those areas.

As Chip mentioned, the trains between the Plate & Slums and other things already assist with that, because they move at a non-player-controlled pace, and you know how long it takes to move them through the Plate before the Slums is visible, and when it arrives, which assets are within immediate reach of the player. They're just the same as how old games used Elevators to do the same thing, just with more processing power and capability to make those transitions less obvious.


tl;dr – There's no reason to scoff at the idea of having a fully playable Midgar with no noticeable loading times as you play.




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[Claymore]

On a technical level, sure. Not at all impossible. However, it's a question of how it would benefit the game..

This was the sentiment behind my words. I know technically it's not impossible, as I've played a lot of open world sandbox games, however, VII(R) isn't one of them. I feels like a complete waste of time and resources to make Midgar into this open-world sandbox playground rather than just attributing proper zoning to it. What benefit does it really bring it? Even more importantly, what really will you be able to do in Midgar? Will there be many buildings to enter? How far will you be able to run around? Will there be lots of slum areas to navigate? Fetch quests? Fights?

It is, fundamentally, an area that you will quickly leave behind and not see again, unlike other proper sandbox games. I just don't see what any real benefits doing this has when everything else will be structured and zoned.

 

[Geostigma]

Devs have made huge strides in large "seamless feeling" open world settings even since the PS1 days. Look no further than Legacy of Kain : Soul Reaver for proof that you could make a gigantic world with obscured loading zones on really bad hardware. You never actually feel like you have to load anything after the initial load up but it definitely sneaks them in there in pretty clever ways. Immense fogging also helped


Go to about 10 minutes in, idk how to embed with timestamps

The method used by Soul Reaver plus using usual tricks like Metroid Primes use of Elevators and "Blast Doors" to stream the data into memory should make a seamless Midgar doable.

 

[ChipNoir]

On a technical level, sure. Not at all impossible. However, it's a question of how it would benefit the game..

This was the sentiment behind my words. I know technically it's not impossible, as I've played a lot of open world sandbox games, however, VII(R) isn't one of them. I feels like a complete waste of time and resources to make Midgar into this open-world sandbox playground rather than just attributing proper zoning to it. What benefit does it really bring it? Even more importantly, what really will you be able to do in Midgar? Will there be many buildings to enter? How far will you be able to run around? Will there be lots of slum areas to navigate? Fetch quests? Fights?

It is, fundamentally, an area that you will quickly leave behind and not see again, unlike other proper sandbox games. I just don't see what any real benefits doing this has when everything else will be structured and zoned.

Its what I like the call "Magic Hat Syndrome." Gamers get ideas into their head, and assume because it sounds good, it is in fact good, and what's more, perfectly doable on a developer's part. They basically expect a developer to pull a rabbit out of the hat.

Because Midgar was so forbidden, a lot of people desperately want to see it , without realizing there was never an "It" to see in the first place. Anything they put in will be a purely new concept. I don't think a lot of people have wrapped their head around that.

It's a testament to what a strong impact Midgar has that people don't think about the fact that over half the city doesn't actually exist in any shape or form that we know of, but we can still envision it as a complete city.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

Woah, woah, woah. No one's talking about Midgar being a massive, fully explorable, open world thing.

The claim was that each city is seamless, without loading times — once you're in it.

All that's being talked about is that Midgar itself can be seamless without any loading times via any number of common things that modern open world games use for rendering, so there's no reason to assume that the regions of Midgar you get to go through in the game wouldn't be able to be fully traversed without loading screens.




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[ChipNoir]

We've been having a field day at Gamefaqs tearing this and another rival 'leak' apart.

 

[Theozilla]

We've been having a field day at Gamefaqs tearing this and another rival 'leak' apart.

Is the other “rival leak” the one that is supposedly an interview in a hotel room and the interviewee is smoking and unironically uses the phrase “sjw bullshit is not touching the original vision” to describe SE’s policy towards the Remake?

I couldn’t even finish that supposed “leak”. It did give me some chuckles for how ridiculous it was.

 

[Vyzzuvazzadth]

Is the other “rival leak” the one that is supposedly an interview in a hotel room and the interviewee is smoking and unironically uses the phrase “sjw bullshit is not touching the original vision” to describe SE’s policy towards the Remake?

Yes, that's exactly the one. It sounded too cool to be true and the guy contradicts himself at least once. There's also another "leak" in the comment section of Final Fantasy Peasant's video about the 4Chan leak, which got torn down by Chip and in the end deleted by the user.

It was about the real reason why CC2 was fired. Apparently, one developer "forgot" to switch from PSN to PartnerNet when playtesting FFVII Remake: Epsiode 1 which led to others being able to see what he was playing. Was only for a few minutes, though, but this was considered a grave security break which led to said firing.

That guy also babbled on about other details like VA's not returning and Jessie being killed off within the first hour or something. Pretty obvious bullcrap.

 

[AerithLives]

I want to believe...

...but its very fishy.

 

[AerithLives]

Also..."Maho" energy! LOL!

 

[lvladskillz]

So stoked for this, we need more info ASAP