I think most people take Nomura's statement out of context. It was said in response to the question of whether it's gonna be a trilogy.
Kitase said: "We have a rough idea on that, but it’s not been completely decided yet. It’s impossible to talk about this right now. It seems that many people think it will become a trilogy."
"It all depends on how many parts we make,” said Nomura. “If we separate it into bigger chunks it will take more time, but if we take smaller portions it can be done on a shorter span. Personally, I would like to deliver it fast.”
So this is how I'm understanding this: If they were to stick to an arbitrary trilogy format without cutting any major content like they promised they wouldn't, parts 2 and 3 would likely be even bigger and take even longer to make than part 1. So instead they might just do more than 3 if necessary.
So it's smaller portions in relation to how long it would take if they stuck to a trilogy format rather than making smaller games than part 1, which is what a lot of people seem to assume he means.
Mostly it still comes up because of those comments from Nomura you quoted in your last post.
This is the primary reason that I mention it.
The other component parts to their collective statements is connected to how
Remake is currently made, and how games are built to work compartmentally for PS5. You'll have the ability to only keep sections of games installed – like just the Single Player or just the Multiplayer. That's intended to help prioritize what gets out onto the onboard SSD to benefit from optimized performance, and what gets stored elsewhere.
What that means from a development standpoint is that if you have a game that's broken down into isolated Chapters (which
Remake already does) it's beneficial for you to allow users to be able to only keep certain chapters installed as they need/want to play them. That's why I've suggested that there's a decent possibility that the follow-up games to
Remake could just plays through the exact same main menu & interface, like you're continuing playing
Remake and just picking back up of your existing Save file – sort of like you did with the original games when you swapped disks.
They can still do the full gigantic title launch of however many games they want, but that also means renaming each release. If they just want to release the Expansions, they can label them more softly as a release like
FFVII Remake "Journey to Junon" (Contains Chapters 19-24). The architecture of the PS5, the existing chapter segregation of
Remake, and the development structure that it allows means that
Remake could just continually expand its story over time, and always just be called "
Final Fantasy VII Remake". Plus, they already did this exact thing with
FFXV's content, and even had sections that were level-capped – so it's not really something that's new or unexpected from them at all.
The benefits are that there's less time between releases which helps people stay in touch with the storyline as a single cohesive narrative, they're regularly getting income as soon as those pieces of development are completed, and they can continually bring in user feedback from a regular audience (which they do all the time via the Twitter account that this thread is about), and that allows them to keep in touch with their fanbase as they develop. I think that it's probably a sort of thing that we might start seeing more is that big games launch, but that they have the ability to grow more naturally over time.
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