Tetsuya Nomura finally stepped down from Final Fantasy XV and began working on Kingdom Hearts III last month and the director has already made a crucial change to the game's development. Kingdom Hearts III will no longer be using the Square Enix ‘Luminous' engine, the game will now be made using Unreal Engine 4.
As we know, Final Fantasy XV has been in development for almost ten years, perhaps a lot of this time was spent actually getting the engine right, which is why Nomura chose to use Unreal Engine 4 for Kingdom Hearts instead. The engine change could help provide an easier development process.
Speaking with Famitsu, Nomura confirmed the engine change: “Development is steadily proceeding as planned. Due to the impact of changing the game engine to Unreal Engine 4, which we did for various reasons, there is some difficulty rendering images. And with the full support of Epic Games, we'll be able to progress smoothly.”
Square Enix is no stranger to the Unreal Engine, the publisher's European studio often utilizes it during development so this isn't the craziest switch in the world.
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KitGuru Says: Hopefully the switch to Unreal Engine 4 will ensure an easier development process, Kingdom Hearts fans have already been waiting close to ten years for the third main game, I'm pretty sure they don't want to wait ten more. Do you guys think the Luminous engine could be responsible for Final Fantasy XV's development troubles?
Source: NeoGAF
Cool, now bring it to the Wii U.
Wait, you mean this game *still* hasn’t been released?
(Yeah, I’ve kinda been out of the loop. :P)
It was only announced last year…
Actually, it was announced shortly after Kingdom Hearts 2’s American release. Nomura talked about it in an interview, then promptly stopped talking about it.
The game being developed and actually worked on was announced last year. He stopped talking about it because nothing was happening. Those years don’t count if it’s sitting there and gathering dust.