VentureBeat Interviews Tai Yasue on KINGDOM HEARTS 2.8

[kirabook]

Sorta related but not really... do you think developing it for the Xbox too is the reason why they switched the engine? Or was it truly because they really felt restricted and wanted something they could customize more?

 

[maryadavies]

The way I understand it and from what I read (I'm paraphrasing here):

Crystal Tools or whatever they started with was a PITA to do anything with. Not to mention, they were having trouble getting help/tech support when things went south/didn't go the way they wanted. All the devs on the engine were busy or weren't in the company anymore. So they swapped, and Unreal actually has a office in Japan now, so they were able to get the help they needed to make it dance right. Seems also Square had bought a license to it a few years back, but until now they didn't use it.

Also developing a engine is a expensive thing, the way I understand it. I THINK square doesn't want to do that again for a while.

 

[kirabook]

I can attest that game engines are expensive because I totally played Gamedev tycoon and it took forever and was barely even worth it.

But I guess the engine switch was more related to restrictions rather than trying to accommodate the Xbox, though it could still be a mixture of both.

 

[Chaser]

Sorta related but not really... do you think developing it for the Xbox too is the reason why they switched the engine? Or was it truly because they really felt restricted and wanted something they could customize more?

Nah.

The team from the Luminous Engine was absorbed into the Final Fantasy XV dev team so any issues on XV could be quickly fixed and what not.

With that team now unavailable, any issues KH would have faced in dev would have taken a while to get fixed due to their busy schedule so Square said "diddly it" and changed engine to Unreal Engine 4.

September 2014:

However, we are having a lot of trouble with the image creating part of things due to the engine.

October 2014:

It’s moving steadily along the estimated schedule. As an effect of us changing the game engine to Unreal Engine 4, which we did for several reasons, we had a lot of problems with the image creation, but we have been able to progress without incident with the collaboration of Epic Games.

They've said they've been customising the engine and working closely with Unreal devs so any problems on KH are being solved in a timely manner.

 

[Oracle Spockanort]

Not to mention Luminous wasn't even a finished engine. I don't think they ever actually got the game to Luminous and all of the assets they had made up until that point were still running on DirectX 11 which isn't even an engine lol.