Building for the Future – Unreal Engine 5 + PS5 & FFVII Remake

[X-SOLDIER]

Got a follow-up article to the last one I wrote: WHICH CAN BE READ RIGHT HERE (and this one's only about 2,000 words ; )

It's meant to stand on its own as an analysis piece for how the new Unreal Engine 5 technology specifically connects to things we've seen in Remake & would expect for its sequels. It's also intended to be contextually supplemental to my previous "Building for the Future" write-up, because the new Unreal Engine on PlayStation 5 demo helped to provide some clear examples that give a lot of really helpful contextual clarification on things. It distinguishes which bugs are likely technological and a part of future-proofing their development and how they are likely move forward with development on PS5 and then on Unreal Engine 5. Knowing this better helps to clarify when I covered the other bugs & issues that were the result of having a narrowed window where they had to release the game in the previous, much longer article.

Hopefully this is an interesting look at technology in the Remake for everybody. If you've read the other one, I hope that this works well to supplement that analysis a bit more. If you haven't given that other one a go, maybe this will give you an overview that sparks your interest in knowing more enough to dive in.

Thanks again as always to everyone for the discussion & such on the forums ta help me focus in points and write these things.



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[msia2k75]

I still wonder what kind of technical improvements we will see with the PS5 version. I'm not too optimistic S-E will make much effort on upgrading the game outside of the usual resolution bump and maybe the framerate. Of course, i expect the texture streaming issue to be fixed... however will they increase their resolution. Apparently, their standard rez is 512x512... When displayed properly. Compare that to the UE5 demo which sports like 8K (!) textures resolution. I hope they will increase them.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

PS5 is most likely gonna improve load times, broken textures, and 3D audio. That's basically just a guarantee from the forward compatibility and hardware architecture.

UE5 is mostly just textures, but might have some other improvements to things like lighting and audio. The only reason they might do a retroactive UE5 texture update to Remake is because they'll be coming back to Midgar in the future, and need to do that work anyway — and they'll likely be using UE5 by the time the very next game releases. That means it'd be assets that they have to do anyway, and it'd ensure this game has the same visual fidelity of all of the future games — especially when the story gets far enough to come back to Midgar.

The likelihood of that is also variable depending on if they do future games that plug directly into this one (which I covered in the other article).



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[Kain424]

So you think they'll release the next part as a full game, rather than use this current install as a sort of hub?

 

[X-SOLDIER]

So you think they'll release the next part as a full game, rather than use this current install as a sort of hub?

Right now, I think that they're really wanting to use this current install as a hub for everything, and not release other standalone games. I don't think that anything's written in stone for that yet though. Their comments make it seem like they don't know how many releases it is to complete the full story, and I totally believe that.

I think that their loose plan is that they'd do modular releases, and just repackage the updates as a disc-type release when they have enough chapters to justify a physical version – essentially the Disc 1, Disc 2, Disc 3 breakpoints in the original game. That being said – they have to show that it's financially viable to do that in the long run.

That's why the other tl;dr article is looking at the mid-Chapter-16-to-end bugs that aren't part of the UE5/PS5 upgrade path as an indication of where they're going to be completing work for the purpose of testing what that development & release cycle looks. If they release the Red XIII & Party-swapping triple chapter update, that'll let them see what a modular "living game" update cycle looks like from a dev standpoint, and also how see how successful it is from an install base (who actually installs it vs. who got the game). That'll let them know if they can make the FFXV model work and keep momentum with it, or if they're gonna be better off to go to just bigger full-game-sized releases of the next parts to keep the audience size.



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