KINGDOM HEARTS 3 Director Announces Shift Of Game’s Engine To Unreal 4!
One of the pleasant “surprise announcements” which happened during this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) consisted of Square Enix finally unveiling a gameplay footage from Kingdom Hearts 3—along with its much storied brethren, Final Fantasy XV—despite Square executive Shinji Hashimoto publicly saying otherwise during the lead-up to the gargantuan gaming event.
So, what could possibly go wrong with KH3 now that series director Testuya Nomura has been freed up from his Final Fantasy duties to properly focus on the game that is probably the nearest and dearest to his heart? Well, it’s probably this: Japanese gaming mag Famitsu recently released a statement from Nomura revealing that they had switched the development of the game from Square’s Luminous Engine—presumably created in 2012 to assist with the company’s current flagship projects like KH3 and the aforementioned FFXV—to Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4.
In the interview, Nomura said that the change between engines was decided because of “various reasons”, and he assured the public that there will be no slowdowns even though he admitted as much to the game experiencing technical issues caused by rendering as of the time the statement was made; he also mentioned how the team at Epic are helping them make the transition from Luminous to Unreal 4.
Now, that may not be a bad thing—consider the huge numbers of good-looking games from the West like the original Bioshock, the Mass Effect series, and the more recent X-COM reboots which have made use of the previous generation of Unreal Engine—but KH3 and Final Fantasy XV are quite notorious in the rest of the gaming press because of their infamously protracted development cycles. For fans of the Kingdom Hearts series who are looking forward to a “true” sequel that is slated to launch on PlayStation 4 next year, this is sure to be another worrying prospect for them.
Regardless, there’s always the chance that Square Enix may be throwing us another red herring, but who knows at this point? Well, we’ll just leave the E3 trailer below to assuage your fears at the moment.
SOURCE: IGN
Joseph Batcagan
