SPOILERS Characterisation of Midgar in the Remake

[looneymoon]

I am curious if Square does their NPCs in house? I am sure the more important ones were. I am wondering because I could have used a few more background characters carrying swords and whatnot.

I kinda felt that Midgar in remake exists in this liminal space where its a little too... fantastical in a lot of ways to be an actual city/slum, but also too realistic for the fantasy characters to blend in with the environment.

There are points where I feel like the characters are running home from an anime con.

 

[ForceStealer]

There were some people with guns in the slums, but yeah there could've been more. Or maybe the occasional materia

 

[oty]

I am curious if Square does their NPCs in house? I am sure the more important ones were. I am wondering because I could have used a few more background characters carrying swords and whatnot.

I kinda felt that Midgar in remake exists in this liminal space where its a little too... fantastical in a lot of ways to be an actual city/slum, but also too realistic for the fantasy characters to blend in with the environment.

There are points where I feel like the characters are running home from an anime con.

I absolutely felt that as well. I guess the same could be said about the OG, but those little blocky poligons just made it less of a contrast for me.

 

[Odysseus]

The main characters blended in a lot more with the old NPC designs I think. The new ones look too generic, the old ones were more individually distinct

 

[ForceStealer]

At the cost of there being far fewer of them, in fairness.

Hell, they reused Biggs' and Jessie's models! lol

 

[Odysseus]

At the cost of being far fewer of them, in fairness.

Hell, they reused Biggs' and Jessie's models! lol

Back when I was plotting my own Jessie prequel I was really stumped on how they could still be adults in that elmyra flashback scene. Devs were just being lazy, was the answer.

 

[ForceStealer]

It'd be one thing if their models had been reused, but that they were both reused together? Come on, lol

 

[Eerie]

I am curious if Square does their NPCs in house? I am sure the more important ones were. I am wondering because I could have used a few more background characters carrying swords and whatnot.

I kinda felt that Midgar in remake exists in this liminal space where its a little too... fantastical in a lot of ways to be an actual city/slum, but also too realistic for the fantasy characters to blend in with the environment.

There are points where I feel like the characters are running home from an anime con.

Haha actually the NPC are something that made the French streamer I watched go absolutely NUTS. He HATED them, absolutely HATED the fact that they kept reusing the same models over and over, it totally broke the game for him. He was like "OH HELLO OLD MAN WHOM I HELPED EARLIER" lololol.

So I think they could use more models, I hope next game will have more different NPCs.

 

[Odysseus]

I mean, you gotta expect some reused models in a game with this many NPCs.

 

[looneymoon]

Honestly, I wasn't too bothered by the reuse since I had just played XV...

I understand the sentiment though, because I had the exact same reaction during this important scene where Noctis is listening to Luna's speech:

the same dude... is literally FRAMING Noctis. I was already pretty frustrated at the game but when I saw this I had to just laugh. I could not.

 

[oty]

Honestly, I kinda gave up complaining about NPCs in general nowadays. With these ever growing worlds, you have to populate them, exceeept you dont have the time and the hardware isnt strong enough to have 150 different models.

I will say that FFVIIR went a lil bit overboard. Not only I didnt like the NPCs visuals, they were literally 2-3 copies of them at the same scene. Like....really?

 

[Eerie]

Yes, that was his main problem I think, that the NPCs copies were everywhere in the same scene. It would have affected him less, I think, if they were a little bit more varied. But then again, the ending was rushed, so...

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Could they not do a randomization thing? Make [X] amount of clothing results for XYZ NPC body types, and it's all just procedurally generated?

 

[looneymoon]

I am not an expert on 3D/game rigging, but I'd imagine that NPC creation would be such a budget sink for something that adds relatively little to the overall experience? I feel like remake was kinda doomed by design on this front, and they did an okay job. I just wish that the "important" characters didn't stand out so much compared to the BG ones - hence why I was wondering if they may have been outsourced/bought from a different studio.

Also @Tres - I believe they are randomized to some extent. They have random outfit swaps, but I think in order to change body types it would require more complicated changes to the skeleton of the character. I am sure someone very smart could figure it out though.

I never saw anything quite as offensive as that Noctis scene I timestamped, so it's kinda whatever. That was an actual important shot.....

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Also @Tres - I believe they are randomized to some extent. They have random outfit swaps, but I think in order to change body types it would require more complicated changes to the skeleton of the character. I am sure someone very smart could figure it out though.

What I meant was more like ... say they design eight different body types that could randomly appear, and for those eight, each has (for example) 40 different articles of clothing that may randomly appear.

So, the RNG would go [body type]>[shirt]+[pants]. Am I making sense?

 

[looneymoon]

I think they may have forgone something like that, because of the risks of having something like this:

this is a final fantasy game, no uggos allowed

 

[ForceStealer]

I thought maybe something like that was being used. Since I saw similar haircuts on multiple different characters, so I figured some mixing and matching was going on. But obviously I have no idea. I notice the reused models a lot more in the OG, probably on account of them being more individually memorable. Catch-22, lol.