When approaching the likelihood of getting post-launch DLC, you're not accounting for the massive changes in contexts from when
Remake was released vs. what exists now just prior to the release of
Rebirth –
because they're night & day different. Those are things that you have to know a fair bit about software development, as well as looking at things we know about what's been released to understand why they're nothing alike at all.
Remake was running into struggles with deadlines and bumped its release from March to April of 2020, and even then you can still find lots of pieces of things in
Remake from about midway through Chapter 16 where making sure that things got completed wasn't done with the same level of polish as the other chapters of
Remake. They were under deadlines from the PS5 launch that limited how far back they could push their release (which are related to why there's a lot of PS5 tech investment in
Remake's PS4 release, why they wished that they'd announced the game later than they did, why the partnership with CC2 shifted to move dev efforts in-house, and a number of other things where the project was up against an impending deadline that they couldn't move).
After
Remake released, there were still a number of elements that were in a place where those things could be polished up and retroactively refreshed post-launch, like Red XIII not being playable or party selection mechanics being partially implemented in Chapter 17 in Aerith's Room as well as the elevator in The Drum, as well as in Chapter 18 at Destiny's Crossroads. The division of
Remake's story into individual chapters already facilitates a means of the teams releasing their follow-up content at scales of anything from just a single chapter at a time, to putting together another 20 chapters for a full game release. As those content delivery methods hadn't been tested yet, and just assessing the content delivery model and dev time without looking at the added scope of interconnecting to the preexisting content are a good test case, we got the PS5-only release of a two-chapter story of
INTERmission as DLC.
Aside from just the contextual evidence of what the development environment was like at the time, interviews explicitly give context that the
INTERmission DLC was made during a point when
development of EVERYTHING following Remake still didn't have a definitive plan for how those parts were going to be released, due to it being undecided how big a "part 2" would be, and how much of the story it could/would contain. This is because there were a
LOT of different ways to approach the continuation of the project at this point, but especially with the PS5 being brand new, the technical possibilities for the options that were available were already different than if a "part 2" were being made for PS4. This is why they needed to transition into full-time PS5 dev work for a while before they'd be able to get a better sense of their expanded capabilities and the system's boundaries before they'd be able to t-shirt size & scope the dev work they needed to do, as well as determine just how much they could include in a single release, and what the turnaround time on that dev effort looked like in a post-COVID environment with all the impacts that had.
The release of
INTERmission was something intrinsically interconnected to the
Remake dev team's transition over to full-time PS5 development which is why that got repackaged as "
Remake Intergrade" to encompass those as a complete title, where
INTERmission has a selectable chapter from the main
Remake title screen. This was at a point when it was possible that ALL of the parts following
Remake could have been delivered exactly like this as modular PS5 chapter installations that would evolve into a single "complete" remake (which you can see with the "Intergrade" title even alluding to that type of development). This would have made
Remake into something more like a live service, but that viability would have to match the development times, and other potential risks and benefits of doing that – which they wouldn't know until they made at least one piece of content using that model – which was
INTERmission.
You can tell that they had a focus on this type of agile development model around an interconnected live service split up into chapters not ONLY because
Remake introduced those arbitrary divisions – but because it's exactly what
The First SOLDIER as well as
Ever Crisis followed and how they both receive(d) modular content updates. There was a period of time where this type of a continuous DLC model to have
Remake Intergrade also be a continually growing game would have been something that they'd be investing a lot of focus on in tandeom with the whole ecosystem of FFVII-related games. You can see that in everything that came out of the development that was taking place during those windows of transition, but also it's important to remember just how big of an impact COVID had on top of that because despite
Remake coming out in April 2020 under tight constraints to be completed, the very first patch of the game (1.01) didn't release until October.
Ultimately, they didn't follow that Chapter-modular DLC path for the creation of the parts following
Remake, which makes sense for a number of reasons – most of which weren't things that could have been predicted at the time: There was a
very low PS5 install base, due to extremely limited availability linked to global supply chain issues from COVID, which meant that shifting over to that continuous-update model exclusive to PS5 without having parallel development for PS4 would leave behind a majority of their players, rather than help synergistically ramp up Sony's new console generation. This is something that they could measure on the number of players who played
INTERmission compared to the other install bases of the game. COVID also changed the efficiency of how software teams worked together and what turnaround times on development would be, and those differences are monumentally impactful when you're working on making sure that the gaps in a living-service-type software model don't stretch out for too long.
That information and data wouldn't be possible for them to be able to assess without them having made INTERmission as PS5-exclusive content to get that data, which is a factor that would eventually shift them towards a model where they're
NOT releasing anything under that type of a DLC model at all, but instead focusing on a completely different type of large-scale, single title development instead. That's why what happened then is a very different point than they're at now – which is where
the entire roadmap for the Remake Project has been laid out AND publicly announced during the FFVII 25th anniversary livestream in June 2022. Since that point, the Remake Project is definitively being created as a total of 3 separate (and utterly massive) games. This
also means that all of their story content for the release of
Rebirth as well as all of the story content for Part 3 are already roadmapped into that development plan – something that was not true when
Rebirth &
INTERmission were developed.
On top of having an explicit roadmap of just
Rebirth & Part 3 scoped out to contain everything that they're planning to make, they also EXPLICITLY STATED that they're not planning any DLC for
Rebirth. There simply isn't anything that would "warrant DLC" in this sort of a context, because everything that they are intending to create are included explicitly in the 2 games that they're making, otherwise any of those story details would be planned as DLC
already.
This is why a majority of my response
wasn't actually about DLC
at all, despite talking about the two chapters of
INTERmission story content that's relevant to Vincent, Yuffie, & Deepground that was contained in
Remake Intergrade. It's more helpful to look at the fact that ever since 2022 the Remake Project is set up as a trilogy that doesn't have any story-content DLC:
Part 1: Remake Intergrade
Part 2: Rebirth
Part 3: (title unrevealed)
This is how it's looked at from the director / producer perspective, and they're the ones who drive all of the individual pieces of software content that get made. Each of those games is also designed to be able to exist as a completely standalone game for all intents and purposes, and there isn't any DLC in that roadmap model. Those are scoped to contain everything that they plan to make period. This is why, knowing the content of the original story contains elements in Part 3 that link to things that have been already established in Part 1, it's necessary for those threads to continue naturally within the game that comes between them –
Rebirth.
That's why when you're expecting that they're likely to deliver additional content that wasn't in the original story as DLC, when they've stated that the game will contain additional content that wasn't in the original story and they're not making DLC... it's not at all a reasonable expectation to have at this point, even despite
INTERmission being
seemingly confirmation that that's reasonable to expect – it's the exact opposite.
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