If I had to guess, 2025-ish.
When do you realistically see this thing being released?
- Thread starter WaltK
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I'm going with mid to late 2024 at the earliest.
Late 2024-early 2025. I have no expectations for 4.
I'm usually in anticipation of delays, if this development cycle is anything close to KH3's where information was sparse up til actual release, im leaning towards a 5-6 year development cycle from initial reveal.
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2029 at the earliest, I say this because It's almost 10 years ago that KH3 was announced, and that came out in 2019 at the earliest.
Huh, I feel like I’m not being particularly optimistic by saying early/mid 2024. 5 years of development seems like plenty, and my impression is SE is not tryna repeat KH3 mistakes. Plus, there’s still that NVIDIA leak which has been shockingly accurate to date. It did say Sept 2023, which is obviously not gonna happen, but I’d be inclined to believe that date wasn’t entirely pulled out of thin air. I’m pretty confident the next time they show a trailer they’ll give us a release window.
Either in January 2024 or January 2025. I think they're keen to try and replicate as much of KH3's sales success as possible, and will target that exact month again.
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I think FFVII Rebirth will be December ‘23/January ‘24. So don’t think KH4 will come out in that same window. I could see Rebirth taking KH3’s window and KH4 taking FFVIIR’s (April ‘24.) Would not be surprised if Nomura wants to release it on or the week of 4/10/24, exactly two years after its announcement. (4/10 was also FFVIIR’s release date, so he clearly has a thing for that day. Lol)
April is also the start of their fiscal year, so it would help them get their earnings off to a strong start for that FY. They’ll already have FFXVI and FFVIIR Rebirth in the previous fiscal year.
April is also the start of their fiscal year, so it would help them get their earnings off to a strong start for that FY. They’ll already have FFXVI and FFVIIR Rebirth in the previous fiscal year.
KH3 underwent some unique circumstances being the first HD title of the franchise.
1) it was the first HD title of the franchise, which meant all assets had to be built from scratch rather than reused.
2) Swapping engines early on in development set it back by a year. The developers were anticipating using Luminous, but found out they wouldn’t be due to the engine’s many issues and the prioritization of using FFXV as the game to document the engine.
3) Assets that had been worked on by outside 3rd party asset farms were not up to the quality that SE and Disney required them to be, which required SE to recreate all of those assets over again.
4) The development team had never worked with Unreal Engine 4 before and had to be trained, which took time out of the development cycle
So yeah it took them 6 years to release from 2013 to 2019. But the game was only truly in development from 2014-2018, so a 4 year development cycle is a fairly good one considering all of the issues the development team was dealing with.
KH4 in comparison should not be as insane of a cycle like KH3 was.
They have a strong understanding of UE so working with UE5 will be easy.
UE5 has a ton of cool automation and scaling tools that has streamlined a ton of work processes.
Also SE probably isn’t going to hire asset farms without good vetting or prior experience with them so they don’t have to worry about that.
That doesn’t mean there can’t be issues, but I think KH4 will have a smooth development cycle. They had likely been working on it since 2018/19, and accounting for the pandemic setting them back by a year or so, 2024/2025 is a fairly appropriate window for release given they haven’t run into any extremely awful issues beyond that.
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I hope your right, I got into the KH series kind of late because a friend loaned me his back in 2005 or 2006, so the wait between KH1 to KH2 wasn't as big for me, but Chain of Memories was coming out around that time, and I ended up skipping it by mistake because I thought it was a remake for the GBA, but compared to that, KH3 almost took a decade, or that's what it felt like anyway, for the record the second after beating KH2, I was waiting for KH3 to be announced, then the release date, but got all the games (COM RECOM BBS recoded and DDD) in the mean time , so I did not skip any of the games after COM.
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The wait between KH1 to KH2 wasn't big for anyone because it was only three years (also with an aforementioned full length RPG between the two).
If handhelds hadn't died, there probably would have been even more games before KH3 instead of a big gap between 3D and 0.2/BC, and then...
If handhelds hadn't died, there probably would have been even more games before KH3 instead of a big gap between 3D and 0.2/BC, and then...
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Handhelds aren't dead, the 3ds was still selling up until the Nintendo switch released, and the Nintendo switch is a handheld, and Nomura wanted all the games up to KH3 to be on one console, and we had games between 3D and 0.2/BC, they were the remasters.
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In addition to all this, they didn't even get started on KH3 until after DDD. This was because after KH2 instead of having the team begin work on the next main entry they instead started working on Final Fantasy Versus XIII. And then the Fabula Nova Crystallis ended up being a development disaster.
So SE learning the lesson of "If you want a series to be big you need to keep the momentum going instead of getting distracted by other projects," is probably why we're seeing KH4 sooner rather than later.
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Wrong, wrong and wrong
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Care to explain why I'm wrong, please?
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I love a good contrarian, but if you're not adding anything to the discussion posts like this are basically spam.
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I'm pretty confident it will be in 2024 or January 2025.
I feel like they were working on KH4 alongside ReMIND, so I'm guessing it's been in production since 2019. If you don't count 2020 as a working year, then it would be about 4 years of work by 2024 (2019, 2021-2023).
I actually think they may drop a DISNEY world trailer next year - possibly Star Wars. I'm even more confident in saying that after seeing Kingdom of Corona/Olympus were revealed in a trailer in 2015 - 4 years before KH3 released.
I'm actually hoping they DON'T reveal every world in the game and switch up the marketing tactic. Keep a lot under wraps especially because it's a new era in the KH series. They should treat this as if it's a brand new game being released rather than a franchise game. Show off gameplay and graphics, but keep the story to a minimum.
I feel like they were working on KH4 alongside ReMIND, so I'm guessing it's been in production since 2019. If you don't count 2020 as a working year, then it would be about 4 years of work by 2024 (2019, 2021-2023).
I actually think they may drop a DISNEY world trailer next year - possibly Star Wars. I'm even more confident in saying that after seeing Kingdom of Corona/Olympus were revealed in a trailer in 2015 - 4 years before KH3 released.
I'm actually hoping they DON'T reveal every world in the game and switch up the marketing tactic. Keep a lot under wraps especially because it's a new era in the KH series. They should treat this as if it's a brand new game being released rather than a franchise game. Show off gameplay and graphics, but keep the story to a minimum.