Maidenofwar
They/Them
Eh there's another quote that says they have a draft for the third game but the story might change based on reaction to Rebirth. I agree with Ody, I'm mostly going along with the ride and vibing for now 
VII REBIRTH RELEASES FEB 29! NEW TRAILER!
- Thread starter Tetsujin
- Start date
X-SOLDIER
Harbinger O Great Justice
- AKA
- X
Not expecting something to appear, "since it wasn't there in the original" doesn't really hold up at all.
The Whispers in Remake were the major plot point of that entire game, and weren't in the original. There's a vast difference in the story of the Remake Project still following the original game like Remake already did, while still understanding that this is also done while including additional content that wasn't there in the original.
INTERmission has already established Deepground within the Remake Project, Sonon was taken by Nero, and those are all things that are designed to be interconnected to Vincent's history that was established in Dirge of Cerberus. There are extant story threads that interweave into those elements that weren't in the original game already, so there's zero reason to expect that content to suddenly not continue in Rebirth. Vincent & Yuffie were both characters in the OG whose content wasn't as complete as the others, hence them being made into optional characters – which they're not in the Remake Project. It would be extremely surprising for there to NOT be a decent amount of additional content like this for Vincent in Rebirth after what they did for Yuffie already, but especially by the time you get to the final game when Vincent becomes a fully playable character.
On top of this, INTERmission introduced Hojo's digitization of his own personality into Weiss' physical form within the VR Training environment, which is the exact plan that he executes in Dirge of Cerberus, and is also a major point in him testing out the Jenova Cells on his own body in Midgar because he already has a backup of his mind. Those things being set up already for when the team returns to Midgar after the Diamond Weapon attack, and you fight Heideggar & Scarlet in the Proud Clod – which was being built in the lower levels that Yuffie & Sonon infiltrated, and where Scarlet has access to summon Deepground as well as where she does her own weapons testing for personal projects like the Crimson Mare.
The story has VERY clearly telegraphed that Deepground is an extant part of Shinra already as well as how and where a number of those threads are going to be followed up on in the last game. Since we have a start point of those elements in Remake Intergrade and an end point for them in the final game, there's basically no possibility that those things won't continue to be developed in this game, but especially with Yuffie becoming a core party member in Junon. If anything, Vincent being an experiment who they find LITERALLY rising out of a coffin establishes a hook to Nero taking the seemingly deceased Sonon into the darkness with him, and this making Yuffie even MORE focused on the need to try and rescue Sonon or at least retrieve his body when they return to Midgar.
With all of the new confirmed story elements around the Shinra Resistance Committee having the support of the Wutai interim government as well as the P0 SOLDIER like Glenn seemingly being involved in that, Genesis & the Deepground experiments around the G-Project SOLDIERs from that wartime era will almost undoubtedly be covered in far more detail as well, especially since the cloaked Sephiroth copies are former members of SOLDIER who are suffering from cellular degradation. There are just FAR too many details that they need to develop as well as story threads that they have to maintain from INTERmission to think that Rebirth won't have them in spades.
X
LNK
Pro Adventurer
- AKA
- Nate
Not expecting something to appear, "since it wasn't there in the original" doesn't really hold up at all.
The Whispers in Remake were the major plot point of that entire game, and weren't in the original. There's a vast difference in the story of the Remake Project still following the original game like Remake already did, while still understanding that this is also done while including additional content that wasn't there in the original.
INTERmission has already established Deepground within the Remake Project, Sonon was taken by Nero, and those are all things that are designed to be interconnected to Vincent's history that was established in Dirge of Cerberus. There are extant story threads that interweave into those elements that weren't in the original game already, so there's zero reason to expect that content to suddenly not continue in Rebirth. Vincent & Yuffie were both characters in the OG whose content wasn't as complete as the others, hence them being made into optional characters – which they're not in the Remake Project. It would be extremely surprising for there to NOT be a decent amount of additional content like this for Vincent in Rebirth after what they did for Yuffie already, but especially by the time you get to the final game when Vincent becomes a fully playable character.
On top of this, INTERmission introduced Hojo's digitization of his own personality into Weiss' physical form within the VR Training environment, which is the exact plan that he executes in Dirge of Cerberus, and is also a major point in him testing out the Jenova Cells on his own body in Midgar because he already has a backup of his mind. Those things being set up already for when the team returns to Midgar after the Diamond Weapon attack, and you fight Heideggar & Scarlet in the Proud Clod – which was being built in the lower levels that Yuffie & Sonon infiltrated, and where Scarlet has access to summon Deepground as well as where she does her own weapons testing for personal projects like the Crimson Mare.
The story has VERY clearly telegraphed that Deepground is an extant part of Shinra already as well as how and where a number of those threads are going to be followed up on in the last game. Since we have a start point of those elements in Remake Intergrade and an end point for them in the final game, there's basically no possibility that those things won't continue to be developed in this game, but especially with Yuffie becoming a core party member in Junon. If anything, Vincent being an experiment who they find LITERALLY rising out of a coffin establishes a hook to Nero taking the seemingly deceased Sonon into the darkness with him, and this making Yuffie even MORE focused on the need to try and rescue Sonon or at least retrieve his body when they return to Midgar.
With all of the new confirmed story elements around the Shinra Resistance Committee having the support of the Wutai interim government as well as the P0 SOLDIER like Glenn seemingly being involved in that, Genesis & the Deepground experiments around the G-Project SOLDIERs from that wartime era will almost undoubtedly be covered in far more detail as well, especially since the cloaked Sephiroth copies are former members of SOLDIER who are suffering from cellular degradation. There are just FAR too many details that they need to develop as well as story threads that they have to maintain from INTERmission to think that Rebirth won't have them in spades.
X
Sorry X, I just don't have the exact same expectations as you. I am expecting a little bit, just not much more than what we got in the original. What I'm hoping for, is more than what the other character's get for their side content, that would warrant a DLC (similar to Yuffie). Most of what you brought up, was DLC anyway.
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X-SOLDIER
Harbinger O Great Justice
- AKA
- X
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.
X
cold_spirit
he/him
- AKA
- Alex T
During Square Enix's monthly Save Point stream, the Associate Manager of Mobile Marketing confirmed that the hooded character in the latest Rebirth trailer has connections to The First Soldier.
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Makoeyes987
Listen closely, there is meaning in my words.
- AKA
- Smooth Criminal
Knew it was Glenn, so awesome to have confirmed 
So that's 2 Compilation characters we have in Rebirth so far.
So that's 2 Compilation characters we have in Rebirth so far.
LNK
Pro Adventurer
- AKA
- Nate
Respectfully, I'm not responding anymore. You're still misinterpreting what I've been saying. Have a good oneWhen 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.
X
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cold_spirit
he/him
- AKA
- Alex T
Technically speaking, it's not confirmed to be Glenn. Considering that Glenn's cloak has a different design from that of the mysterious man in the Rebirth trailer, I'm leaning towards them being different people, but part of the same organization. The new Shinra Resistance Committee specifically.
Side note, the Shinra Resistance Committee is described as being backed by Wutai, and the CGI of Glenn below takes place in Wutai (it's also the only time we see Glenn wear the black cloak). So there's a connection.
Side note, the Shinra Resistance Committee is described as being backed by Wutai, and the CGI of Glenn below takes place in Wutai (it's also the only time we see Glenn wear the black cloak). So there's a connection.
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Makoeyes987
Listen closely, there is meaning in my words.
- AKA
- Smooth Criminal
I'm sure seven years is more than enough time to update a wardrobe you wore back during the Wutai War.
And unless Rosen bleached his skin, changed his entire face and dyed his hair color there ain't no way that guy is him. Come on lol
And unless Rosen bleached his skin, changed his entire face and dyed his hair color there ain't no way that guy is him. Come on lol
Makoeyes987
Listen closely, there is meaning in my words.
- AKA
- Smooth Criminal
Glenn would be in his mid to late 40s in FFVII so any thinning of his features due to age would be expected. As for his hair, it's a dirty blond. Not the bright blond from EC but shading has always been inconsistent.
cold_spirit
he/him
- AKA
- Alex T
Really enjoyed this uploader's footage. Found the Fort Condor comment:
You can set aerial shortcuts for Cloud and Tifa, but you can't for Barret, Aerith, and Red XIII. The latter surprises me the most. Being a physical fighter, Red XIII not having any aerial game sounds a bit limiting. I wonder how they'll compensate.
Wanted to talk about the difference between Synergy Skills and Synergy Abilities. Synergy Skills can be activated while a character is guarding and can be used any time. They appear to have a variety of effects. For example, Cloud and Aerith's Spell Blade appears to be a damaging skill that you can charge up. Synergy Abilities are the big moves we see in trailers. Using them requires synergy points, which you get from using ATB abilities. Cloud and Aerith's synergy ability is Firework Blade.
Synergy Abilities do a truck ton of damage, but they also give you buffs. Most interesting of them is increasing a character's limit level. Here's the in-game explanation:
And here's how a limit break level looks in the UI. That's right, we're able to take multiple limit breaks into battle now:
So the flow of battle appears to be:
Use basic attacks to build up ATB -> Use ATB on abilities to gain Synergy points -> Use Synergy points on Synergy abilities to gain limit break levels -> finish off the battle with a massive limit break.
I love this. In this system, everything you do feeds into something else. Brilliant. Also, Barret has an ability that gives him special ammunition, or he just has ammunition now to manage. Interesting!
You can set aerial shortcuts for Cloud and Tifa, but you can't for Barret, Aerith, and Red XIII. The latter surprises me the most. Being a physical fighter, Red XIII not having any aerial game sounds a bit limiting. I wonder how they'll compensate.
Wanted to talk about the difference between Synergy Skills and Synergy Abilities. Synergy Skills can be activated while a character is guarding and can be used any time. They appear to have a variety of effects. For example, Cloud and Aerith's Spell Blade appears to be a damaging skill that you can charge up. Synergy Abilities are the big moves we see in trailers. Using them requires synergy points, which you get from using ATB abilities. Cloud and Aerith's synergy ability is Firework Blade.
Synergy Abilities do a truck ton of damage, but they also give you buffs. Most interesting of them is increasing a character's limit level. Here's the in-game explanation:
And here's how a limit break level looks in the UI. That's right, we're able to take multiple limit breaks into battle now:
So the flow of battle appears to be:
Use basic attacks to build up ATB -> Use ATB on abilities to gain Synergy points -> Use Synergy points on Synergy abilities to gain limit break levels -> finish off the battle with a massive limit break.
I love this. In this system, everything you do feeds into something else. Brilliant. Also, Barret has an ability that gives him special ammunition, or he just has ammunition now to manage. Interesting!
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LNK
Pro Adventurer
- AKA
- Nate
I definitely like that. Especially for people who had limits that did other things besides cause damage. I hated having to lose limit gauge if I switched "levels"
ForceStealer
Double Growth
I always wondered why that was...was it a consequence of coding a la saving to change PC boxes in pokemon, or an intentional design decision?
Odysseus
Ninja Potato
- AKA
- Ody
They dropped some new Shinra lore in an interview
tragically you can't browse twitter without an account now though.
tragically you can't browse twitter without an account now though.
Ryeleigh
Pro Adventurer
- AKA
- Rye