Final Fantasy Members Working on Large Scale American Project
by VGChartz Staff, posted on 01 September 2010 / 1,619 Views
During the CEDEC annual conference, Final Fantasy Dissdia director Yosuke Shiokawa and Final Fantasy XIII concept artist Yuki Matsuzawa today revealed and discussed develpment on a project that's called a "large scale project" and "a top class title that targets overseas core gamers." For this game, Shiokawa is serving as creative director, with Matsuzawa serving as concept artist. They will be working outside of America, however.
According to their presentation, this game has been in development for a year and a half. Development has progressed through these phases:
Six months spent looking into the key features of the product and creating a prototype.
Vertical Slice
Six months spent making a 15 minute gameplay build at 70% quality.
Pre-Production
Four months spent focusing the concept by playing the vertical slice build and getting feedback. Also, creation of the "pipeline" and other areas of the development environment.
Apparently the game is in full scale development right now but is still a ways out. Instead of seriously talking about the game, they instead described issues with cross cultural development. The session was called "Our First Japanese and American Group Development."
Shiokawa and Matsuzawa first believed North American development focused on three points: "focus on realistic games," "top down production model" and "lots of documentation." Instead, it turns out they had the wrong idea.
Shiokawa had issues with the characters in games and a focus on reality. Western games are expected to have macho tough-guy characters solving their problems through brawn. Western gamers may even believe slender or female Japanese characters fighting isn't realistic.
Surprisingly, many of the Western staff didn't want realism in this game, thinking that things looked uninteresting or too plain. But when the concept was changed to fantasy, the staff felt while the style was flashy it was difficult to understand.
Shiokawa came to the conclusion that the macho characters in Western games aren't believable because they're tough, but because they're tough and have various backgrounds. Shiokawa summed up this presentation by saying, "Not a focus on realistic games, not fantasy, but believability." He illustrates this concept with an image of a cat.
Matsuzawa, on the other hand, approached the project with a top down approach. Meaning, decisions such as the character design of the main character would be forced from above. The Western staff didn't like this, however, and prefer to take part in and debate this process and then Matsuzawa would act according to the general feel of the debate.
Matsuzawa summed up his approach by saying, "Not top-down decision making, but group decision making and reading between the lines." Matsuzawa also illustrated his concept in an image, but unfortunately it was blocked out by a Famitsu window, although it seems to be the second picture in this image.
No other information was given at this time about what the genre is or what studio is developing the title, but this definitely seems like an ambitous title coming from Square Enix that's not another Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, or Kingdom Hearts. It'll definitely be interesting to see how this project progresses especially since it seems like Square Enix expects this to be a "AAA" title with a 90+ on Metacritic.
