Yeah, it took me longer than I would wanna admit to realize Mr. fdsgdhr44 wasn't a human. I thought some poor soul with bad English was coming by to talk about their wishes for how the open world should be handled in Remake part 2, lol.
Mako's got a point, JENOVA is probably at play here.
Been holding out on my next playthrough for something like this. I imagine they'll be a bit backlash though. Even if they add new content I think most people would be annoyed Square is re-releasing the game so soon. The remake is already memed to death with how many parts it'll be.
A two-part article/interview posted on CGWORLD.jp twitter page about the development of the remake. All the technicalities that we always crave for. Completely in Japanese, but Google translate will do the trick.
Part 2 of the article features the variety of facial expressions that Cloud may display, and a few of them look suspiciously similar to certain Crisis Core scenes including particular angles and sightlines. Hmm. Hhhhmmmmmmm.
Holy moly those production pics are to die for! I can't recall the last time I saw so much of the actual development tools (and even coding snippets) for a modern game!
If I'm reading this right, they replaced the entire drawing system within Unreal Engine 4? I've read both the Japanese and an automated translation and it seems to say that. If so, then its no surprise it took so long to develop. It also says that they're continuin with UE 4 so that will help production speed, because if the same problems exist in newer UE versions then they'll be going through that process again.
A two-part article/interview posted on CGWORLD.jp twitter page about the development of the remake. All the technicalities that we always crave for. Completely in Japanese, but Google translate will do the trick.
Part 2 of the article features the variety of facial expressions that Cloud may display, and a few of them look suspiciously similar to certain Crisis Core scenes including particular angles and sightlines. Hmm. Hhhhmmmmmmm.
I finally took the time to get through that. Thanks a lot for the links. It was a bit hard to digest because I could only do with Google translate, but it's been very interesting.
I really appreciated the section on the lighting. When I was 3d modelling to recreate some of these environment (the stuff on normal maps and AO made me feel nostalgic), I was generally trying to go for a more 'realistic' lighting than what the OG field screens displayed, but the devs showed that cranking it all the way to 'ultra-realistic' was not the way to go - in the absence of "added lights" which physically do not exist, it's actually much harder to create an atmosphere and have the characters convey emotions. I do think they did strike an excellent balance between realistic and fantasy visuals thanks to that. I used to think ultra-realism was the way, and I was quite wrong about it.
All the work done on the light bakes also explains why this game, though made with UE4, has a much better visual feel than most games made with UE4 - where lighting and shading seem a lot more "plain", for lack of a better word. I'm thinking of "The Outer Worlds" as a standard example of UE4-rendered visuals.
What I'm wondering is if they're going to implement dynamic lighting for the next installments (as in: variations of ambient lighting depending on the time of the day or weather, like they did for FFXV), and how.
And from Yoshi-P. I anticipate 2021 to be the year of FF16. Don't think we'll get any substantial info on part 2 until after its hype cycle has finished.
We might get some info for E3 next year, or anything equivalent. Nothing big, but some info - they won't want the hype for FFVIIR to die down when they are developping the next parts. From memory, one of them (Kitase? I don't remember) wanted a 2 years release between the parts of FFXIII to avoid this phenomenon.
Probably a reveal trailer next year, revealing what the title will be (I've been feeling it might not just be Remake part 2) and giving us a little glimpse of some part of the game. Much like a lot of the early marketing for part 1 was centered on the first reactor, I think 2 will focus on the Nibelheim incident early on since it's something fans will immediately recognize.
I'm hoping for a reveal trailer of some sort to come earlier than E3 2021, maybe Jan 31 (FFVII anniversary). I'll be sad if we don't get any info until June or later, even if that seems more likely. The actual release can obviously wait until 2022 or 2023.
