Being able to make a new game in ”one to two years” like Western studios is ”something we need to follow up,” said Kitase-san, as it’s the best way to keep fans ”interested and attracted”.
Square Enix ”learnt a lesson” from the long development time of Final Fantasy XIII, and it pushed them to bring FFXIII-2 out in a much shorter time period, which is about 1 and half years.
”The current generation console, Final Fantasy XIII, was obviously the first game, and personally I think we took a little too long getting it out. When you think of Western triple A titles like Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Assassin’s Creed, they seem to work with a lot shorter turnaround - they make a new game in 1-2 years,” said Yoshinori Kitase.
”That is something we need to follow up, because that seems to be the best way to keep our fans interested and attracted to the franchise.” Final Fantasy XIII continued the trend away from the series more traditional JRPG roots.
”With Final Fantasy XIII we took a long time to complete it, so we learnt a lesson. We were determined to produce Final Fantasy XIII-2 in a short time, actual development took about 1,5 years. And we’ll be able to make it available to western fans less than two years after the release of Final Fantasy XIII. Which is okay,” added the producer.
Adopting Western technologies however isn’t the way forward for Square if they want a quick turnaround as they don’t fit the RPG mould at the studio - they need too much customisation to get right.
”One of my colleagues at Square Enix has used Unreal Engine, and his post mortem analysis on Unreal Engine says it’s a great engine, but it does take a lot of customisation. So all in all it takes much the same effort, the same cost. I think Unreal Engine would be better suited to games such as a FPS, but with an RPG we would have to adapt it to lots of different types of needs. So I think it doesn’t necessarily allow us to cut down on costs really,” Kitase-san told GameReactor.
Final Fantasy XIII-2 releases on Xbox 360 and PS3 December 15th in Japan, January 31st in the US, February 3rd in Europe. Are you glad to hear Square Enix want faster ‘Western style’ turnarounds?
