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Eh, KH3D came out just over two years after Birth by Sleep, which had been gestating for twice that long. Nomura would never admit it, but the impression I get is that 3D was rushed as all get out, probably to meet some hard deadline. Not to mention, Nomura apparently had to rewrite the ending for some reason or another, which could have affected other parts of the story.
It'll be easier to say whether that's the case once I've played 0.2, of course.
It'll be easier to say whether that's the case once I've played 0.2, of course.
Well, the thing you mentioned in the spoiler tags had already been used in KHII, so it wasn't that far out of left field. My real issue with the game was that, apart from the final world, it suffered from MGSV syndrome -- in the first six worlds, pretty much every scene related to the main arc had been shown in a trailer, and the game didn't actually explain any of them beyond that.
It's entirely fair to say he has no coherent vision because he had never once shown a consistent vision for what Versus/XV was supposed to be, it changed every single time we saw it under Nomura. And it goes even further to his fanboys acting like they know what Nomura's vision is, when Wan Hazmer who had been part of the XV team ever since Versus back in 2010, stated on his blog back in 2014 that not all of Nomura's "vision" was even shown to the public yet for the game, so how the fuck can his fanboys claim to know what Nomura's vision was for the game when we barely saw anything of it to begin with and it changed each time anyway?
What I just wrote there was not a strawman, you literally said that Nomura is a perfectionist in response to changes in CGI, as if that somehow makes it OK for Nomura to waste money redoing finished CGI. Even more is that you don't seem to understand how CGI is even made or how it differs from regular game assets. For example the 6 minute CGI End of an Era for XIV cost $3 million to make. https://www.engadget.com/2013/02/21/massively-exclusive-a-dinner-with-final-fantasy-xivs-naoki-yos/
By the way only the 2006 CGI trailer of Noctis fighting the Niflheim soldiers, and the additional CGI shown in the 2008 trailer of Gladio, Ignis, Prompto, Stella, Regis and Ravus for Versus was made by 3~ people, one of the people who worked on those trailers left Square Enix in 2009. Having low amount of people working on it doesn't suddenly mean it wasn't expensive to create, and if you look at the CGI seen in 2011/2013 compared to those earlier trailers you can see an obvious amount of higher polish and effort put into the CG, indicating it did cost a lot more than those old 2006/2008 CG.
And I'm assuming you've played XV and have watched Kingsglaive too, if you have you'd know that none of the CG character assets we saw in the 2011/2013 CG were used in the final game or in Kingsglaive, having the same design for Noctis in CG form and in the game doesn't mean they somehow saved money either because they aren't the same assets used interchangeably, the CGI is not mad by game devs or vice versa, they're made by people in Visual Works Studio, a department separate from game development teams. The only CG asset we can assume they reused from that 2011/2013 CG within Kingsglaive is the room interior where Regis and Iedolas were in and maybe a weapon or two, but that's about it.
Your source for the scenario being set back in 2010 is the same source I was referencing, the scenario is the story, that is the script. In 2015 they said the same exact thing about FF7R having it's scenario complete for part 1, but why would they even need to say that? FF7 already exists so they should already have the scenario complete, oh wait it's because when they are saying scenario is complete they are talking about having a script done. And they would have had to have had a script of somesort done in 2011 because that is when they started voice recording for the game.
As for when Ferrari said that the story for XV was changed from the story the game had in 2011 when it was Versus, he had mentioned it on his Facebook but I just checked through his posts and it seems he deleted quite a few of his posts including the one's where he mentions how Umbra originally had a human form and that Gentiana was a messenger for Stella.
The things you just listed for ReCoM are not even actual story changes, that is a remake showing things that they previously had off screen and showing things rendered in proper 3D instead of limited by sprites like CoM was, if a thing happened off screen but they add a scene showing that offscreen thing happening on screen, that doesn't mean they changed the story, because that thing always happened anyway, and minor dialog updates to make it properly seamless with KH1 to KH2 aren't story changes either, the story of CoM is the same story told in ReCoM, it's only presented in proper 3D instead of as 2D sprites. And Marluxia's hair being bright pink is how his hair was depicted in artwork, whatever pallette they used for his sprite in CoM prevented a full pink like it is in his artwork and 3D model.
And you missed the point I made. Changing an in game model is not the same thing as changing CG. Tidus's design was already finished even when he had black hair, recoloring his hair to blonde didn't change his actual design, only a color choice for his hair. That isn't the same thing as entire ground up character models made in fully CG for Versus never being used ever for the game.
You also seem to be misinterpreting what I'm saying about FF6 and FF7s map structure, I'm not talking about how they are made, I'm talking about how they function within the game itself. Both have SD maps with a giant player character you move around the map, you have points of interest represented on the map while when running through the overworld between those points of interest you become engaged in random battles, the area maps are static fixed maps separate from the overworld and are more in scale with the player character, area maps that you walk on specific path and have collision on buildings and various objects/NPCs. Being in 2D or 3D doesn't change how the maps themselves function within the game for FF7 or FF6. However going from a map like FF7 to a map like FFXV is completely overhauling how the map system is even supposed to work because not only is everything 1:1 scale, but then like with XV it has roaming monsters factors, seamless travel between locations, dungeons etc.
And yes I know it is common, but what is not common is the director of the game saying they have a finished story, 3 years later saying that the story hasn't changed from what it was originally, only for that to be confirmed to be a lie years later by someone who worked on the team confirming that the story had changed between those 3 years. The story changes in XV from Versus aren't even just minor things like additions or reworded dialog that you mentioned for ReCOM, they changed Stella from originally being someone who Noctis met for the first time as an adult in Versus, to in 2013 "Stella" was someone Noctis was seen with as kids, not only does that change the entire foundation of the dynamic from what it was presented as 7 years prior but it's a blatant lie when the director, namely Nomura, says in 2013 that the story hasn't changed since Versus, when anyone who even followed statements and trailers can plainly see it had just from the few few seconds of the 2013 trailer.
In 2010 the Versus team had created a heavily modified version of Crystal Tools that they dubbed Ebony Engine, that Ebony Engine was later integrated into Luminous engine in 2013 when they were migrating to Luminous, Versus was never on the same Crystal Tools build that FF13 used, it was using it's own "game specific engine" that Nomura mentioned it was using in 2011, which we know now to be Ebony Engine. KH2.8s shitty skin shaders is because of a design choice they opted for with 2.8, that is irrelevant to their actual capabilities to make a game, especially since Versus was supposed to be a PS3 game so it wouldn't even have been as graphically demanding as XV is now.
Osaka team originally were going to make BBS as a PS2 game before they moved to PSP, so it's not like they don't know how to make console games, also a large portion of the XV team came from PSP development too coming off Type-0, so using the "but they didn't have experience" doesn't fly here, especially since they were moved to the XV team in 2012 when Nomura was still director, so he had no issues with using handheld staff on the project either. Hell just look at Wan Hazmer again, he joined SE in 2010 and was put straight onto the Versus XIII team, and he had not worked on a single AAA console or handheld game before then, all he had done was some small indie stuff, experience was never a factor for who they wanted on the team.
So this all comes back to Nomura having a team ready but he instead decided to make a KH spinoff instead of finishing Versus for PS3, all while he failed to make anything coherent in the game and it didn't even go past 25% development by the time they rebooted Versus into XV in 2012.
What I just wrote there was not a strawman, you literally said that Nomura is a perfectionist in response to changes in CGI, as if that somehow makes it OK for Nomura to waste money redoing finished CGI. Even more is that you don't seem to understand how CGI is even made or how it differs from regular game assets. For example the 6 minute CGI End of an Era for XIV cost $3 million to make. https://www.engadget.com/2013/02/21/massively-exclusive-a-dinner-with-final-fantasy-xivs-naoki-yos/
By the way only the 2006 CGI trailer of Noctis fighting the Niflheim soldiers, and the additional CGI shown in the 2008 trailer of Gladio, Ignis, Prompto, Stella, Regis and Ravus for Versus was made by 3~ people, one of the people who worked on those trailers left Square Enix in 2009. Having low amount of people working on it doesn't suddenly mean it wasn't expensive to create, and if you look at the CGI seen in 2011/2013 compared to those earlier trailers you can see an obvious amount of higher polish and effort put into the CG, indicating it did cost a lot more than those old 2006/2008 CG.
And I'm assuming you've played XV and have watched Kingsglaive too, if you have you'd know that none of the CG character assets we saw in the 2011/2013 CG were used in the final game or in Kingsglaive, having the same design for Noctis in CG form and in the game doesn't mean they somehow saved money either because they aren't the same assets used interchangeably, the CGI is not mad by game devs or vice versa, they're made by people in Visual Works Studio, a department separate from game development teams. The only CG asset we can assume they reused from that 2011/2013 CG within Kingsglaive is the room interior where Regis and Iedolas were in and maybe a weapon or two, but that's about it.
Your source for the scenario being set back in 2010 is the same source I was referencing, the scenario is the story, that is the script. In 2015 they said the same exact thing about FF7R having it's scenario complete for part 1, but why would they even need to say that? FF7 already exists so they should already have the scenario complete, oh wait it's because when they are saying scenario is complete they are talking about having a script done. And they would have had to have had a script of somesort done in 2011 because that is when they started voice recording for the game.
As for when Ferrari said that the story for XV was changed from the story the game had in 2011 when it was Versus, he had mentioned it on his Facebook but I just checked through his posts and it seems he deleted quite a few of his posts including the one's where he mentions how Umbra originally had a human form and that Gentiana was a messenger for Stella.
The things you just listed for ReCoM are not even actual story changes, that is a remake showing things that they previously had off screen and showing things rendered in proper 3D instead of limited by sprites like CoM was, if a thing happened off screen but they add a scene showing that offscreen thing happening on screen, that doesn't mean they changed the story, because that thing always happened anyway, and minor dialog updates to make it properly seamless with KH1 to KH2 aren't story changes either, the story of CoM is the same story told in ReCoM, it's only presented in proper 3D instead of as 2D sprites. And Marluxia's hair being bright pink is how his hair was depicted in artwork, whatever pallette they used for his sprite in CoM prevented a full pink like it is in his artwork and 3D model.
And you missed the point I made. Changing an in game model is not the same thing as changing CG. Tidus's design was already finished even when he had black hair, recoloring his hair to blonde didn't change his actual design, only a color choice for his hair. That isn't the same thing as entire ground up character models made in fully CG for Versus never being used ever for the game.
You also seem to be misinterpreting what I'm saying about FF6 and FF7s map structure, I'm not talking about how they are made, I'm talking about how they function within the game itself. Both have SD maps with a giant player character you move around the map, you have points of interest represented on the map while when running through the overworld between those points of interest you become engaged in random battles, the area maps are static fixed maps separate from the overworld and are more in scale with the player character, area maps that you walk on specific path and have collision on buildings and various objects/NPCs. Being in 2D or 3D doesn't change how the maps themselves function within the game for FF7 or FF6. However going from a map like FF7 to a map like FFXV is completely overhauling how the map system is even supposed to work because not only is everything 1:1 scale, but then like with XV it has roaming monsters factors, seamless travel between locations, dungeons etc.
And yes I know it is common, but what is not common is the director of the game saying they have a finished story, 3 years later saying that the story hasn't changed from what it was originally, only for that to be confirmed to be a lie years later by someone who worked on the team confirming that the story had changed between those 3 years. The story changes in XV from Versus aren't even just minor things like additions or reworded dialog that you mentioned for ReCOM, they changed Stella from originally being someone who Noctis met for the first time as an adult in Versus, to in 2013 "Stella" was someone Noctis was seen with as kids, not only does that change the entire foundation of the dynamic from what it was presented as 7 years prior but it's a blatant lie when the director, namely Nomura, says in 2013 that the story hasn't changed since Versus, when anyone who even followed statements and trailers can plainly see it had just from the few few seconds of the 2013 trailer.
In 2010 the Versus team had created a heavily modified version of Crystal Tools that they dubbed Ebony Engine, that Ebony Engine was later integrated into Luminous engine in 2013 when they were migrating to Luminous, Versus was never on the same Crystal Tools build that FF13 used, it was using it's own "game specific engine" that Nomura mentioned it was using in 2011, which we know now to be Ebony Engine. KH2.8s shitty skin shaders is because of a design choice they opted for with 2.8, that is irrelevant to their actual capabilities to make a game, especially since Versus was supposed to be a PS3 game so it wouldn't even have been as graphically demanding as XV is now.
Osaka team originally were going to make BBS as a PS2 game before they moved to PSP, so it's not like they don't know how to make console games, also a large portion of the XV team came from PSP development too coming off Type-0, so using the "but they didn't have experience" doesn't fly here, especially since they were moved to the XV team in 2012 when Nomura was still director, so he had no issues with using handheld staff on the project either. Hell just look at Wan Hazmer again, he joined SE in 2010 and was put straight onto the Versus XIII team, and he had not worked on a single AAA console or handheld game before then, all he had done was some small indie stuff, experience was never a factor for who they wanted on the team.
So this all comes back to Nomura having a team ready but he instead decided to make a KH spinoff instead of finishing Versus for PS3, all while he failed to make anything coherent in the game and it didn't even go past 25% development by the time they rebooted Versus into XV in 2012.
Versus XIII couldn't be realized on the PS3 to begin with and they were shown the PS4/XBO in 2011 Versus XIII would have looked outdated, which caused the change. Also he did have a vision for what he wanted to do, but it would've taken longer the person that leaked the entire plot of FFXV said this, and said it would have been good under him, none of the people that worked on the game from what I've seen have spoken ill of Nomura. Also the reason Versus didn't go past 25 percent was because of dev team alot of it was working on FFXIII, fixing FFXIV, so on and so forth. Not to mention that FFXV was being developed alongside the engine so that must of cost development time as well.
I think a sequel of FFXV could work in sort of a Final Fantasy Type Next or Type-0 kinda way Spoilers for those that haven't played Type-0 yet(I recommend the HD version if you are into ARPGs) Type-0 ends with everyone dying, but there are two alternate endings one where a woman named Doctor Arecia Al-Rashia is a fal'Cie that oversees Orience, she removed the Crystals from History resetting the timeline in one timeline the Crystals are removed from History which allows Ace and his friends to live normally, the other one is the Type-Next teaser. For FFXV, I suggest bringing back the fal'Cie to reset the timeline of FFXV to use it as an experiment to find the gate of Etro, or Etro rewards those involved curing the Starscourge caused by Ifrit, by sending them off into a New World, a new timeline, reincarnated into a world of a Versus Epic. So basically both my ideas are soft-reboots, and this will spawn 3 full games using the assets of FFXV, and whatever is left of Versus XIII FF Versus XV-1, Versus XV-2, and Final Fantasy Versus XV: Final boss should either be a fal'Cie, Etro, or Ardyn again(Loved him as villain he might actually be my favorite yes more than Kuja, equal to Sephiroth) The Final Chapter.I think the gate of Etro idea would be better because the fal'Cie are dicks that view humans as nothing more than tools to achieve their goals, so it could work better that way, I don't think Etro would exactly have a reason to resurrect Noctis.
So the way I'd think of it Final Fantasy XV would be like Type-0, a Versus XV(or XV-2, or XV-Next) would be like Type-Next(which seems to be in an alternate universe)
So the way I'd think of it Final Fantasy XV would be like Type-0, a Versus XV(or XV-2, or XV-Next) would be like Type-Next(which seems to be in an alternate universe)
True, but the 3D version limited the potential for further retcons while still getting the (otherwise impossible) pieces in place for the final showdown. It remains to be seen whether it'll be worth it, but the final showdown of 7-versus-13 could justify the weirdness required to set it up.
How can you claim that Nomura's vision changed every time we saw it while also claiming that he showed practically nothing? All we really know about change-wise is character designs (which he admitted were non-final) and Stella changing from someone Noct had just met at the party in Insomnia to someone he'd met as a child. Beyond that, all we have are sketchy "leaks" from "sources" other than Roberto Ferrari (who never specifically mentioned changes to the parts of the game that had actually been shown).
Obviously, we don't know what Nomura's vision was. He never got to finish the game, so it's unlikely even he knew the exact shape it would take before it left. That's how creative endeavors work -- things change in implementation, with the maintenance of one's vision depending in large part on one's ability to steer those changes towards the creation of a consistent whole.
And, for the record, that's why I'd never bother trying to compare the FFXV we have to its hypothetical Nomura equivalent. There's no way to know what that game would look like, apart from speculation about parts of FFXV that feel like FNC with the serial numbers filed off.
It's a strawman because you ignored the critical second half of my claim -- namely, that the work Nomura had done for the CG trailers was likely covered by a marketing budget rather than the general budget for the game. As such, there is no way on earth that the CG used in the Versus trailers was anywhere near as costly as a finished product like the End of an Era trailer (which, it should be noted, is far, far more asset-and-animation-heavy than anything we saw in a Versus or even Nomura-XV trailer).
And, no, I'm probably more aware of the way CG is made than you are, given the following:
Having a low amount of people working on a particular piece of CG absolutely does mean that it's much less expensive to make, assuming no abnormally high expenditures for equipment for the project. If you already have the equipment and software you need (as VisualWorks presumably does), the cost of making CG can be calculated by multiplying (the salary of each person working on it) by ((the amount of days they worked) divided by (the amount of days they work per year)) and adding the combined results together. Oh, and I guess there'd also be the cost of using the computers to render the final result, but that seems unlikely to be worth even another individual's salary. If there's three people working and the amount of time they spent is not absurdly long, the cost is bound to be an order of magnitude lower than the figure you referenced for the End of an Era CG.
The 2011/2013 CG might have been more expensive to make initially, but you're ignoring the fact that most of the work done on the earlier CG that got revised would have still been applicable to the later CG trailers even if modifications were made, so the cost of both versions shouldn't have been anywhere near double the initial cost.
In other words, I don't think Tabata was ignoring a bunch of expensive Nomura CG when he said the overall budget for the XV project was way more reasonable than people assumed.
I'm assuming you haven't read up on the Luminous Engine and its unique capabilities, then.
Dengeki: Have the main character models been replaced with the original version’s pre-rendered cutscene models?
Tabata: We’ve adapted the models we used in the PSP version’s cutscenes to be used as the playable models this time. Of course, we’ve more or less regulated them though. We followed a work flow established for converting the high end CG to real time CG being used for FFXV, so we used that same know-how for Type-0 as well.
[Source]
In fact, the first tech demo shown for Luminous (Agni's Philosophy) involved the Luminous team attempting to recreate a Visual Works CG production using the same assets:
Hashimoto said that using Luminous, you can basically take CG assets and port them into the engine for use in a game. The backgrounds such as the mountains and houses are the same assets featured in the Visual Works version of the demo, as and such were not built to be real time assets.
[Source]
I can't find the exact quote, but I've read that the reason Agni's character model was 400k polygons was because the team who converted the assets to Luminous didn't even bother to cull details that were obviously wasteful in real-time, like feet being rendered inside shoes.
And, in light of that, 2011 CG Noct is absolutely the base for in-game Noct (they've even got the same weird ears, heh), CG Ardyn and Cor are very likely the base for in-game Ardyn and Cor, and even characters like Iedolas, Verstael, and Ravus could have used work that had been done on their CG versions as a base for modifications instead of being remodeled from the ground up.
That source speculated that scenario = script, but that never really made all that much sense. There's no way they had a complete script for FFVIIR -- a 2018 game at the earliest -- back in 2015, when they'd barely even begun attempting to implement anything. And, no, just because FFVII exists doesn't mean that FFVIIR doesn't need a high-level scenario to be developed, considering the fact that Nomura himself said that he wanted to have stuff added or modified for the remake.
It's also worth pointing out that we've seen voice acting started before a game's story was set before, and not just on massively troubled projects. Birth by Sleep had a weird early trailer with voices that implied a completely different direction for one of the main character's arcs. Voice acting is an extended process, too -- Ray Chase said he was called for maybe 40 or so sessions over a period of two years when voicing Noct, and he started a lot later than Noct's Japanese VA. As such, it's entirely possible that voice acting could have started before everything was set script-wise.
I thought those were changes from what he'd worked on to the final version, not from Versus to Nomura's XV.
This Neogaf thread has a bunch of translations from Ferrari's posts, including the Umbra and Gentiana stuff.
Eh, having Lexaeus die because Riku got possessed by Xehanort's Heartless is a pretty big change from having him die as a result of his fight with the actual Riku. Having Axel suggest his actual motivations for having Zexion killed rather than just saying he finds Sora and Riku more entertaining is a pretty big change, too.
And, in any case, the point is that Nomura's fond of George Lucasing himself when he gets the chance even if he's already released a game, so the fact that he changed stuff before Versus/XV came out doesn't imply that he lacked vision. Almost all of the changes we saw from materials he actually released were in the realm of his standard perfectionist tendencies.
Apart from the fact that many of the CG models were, in fact, repurposed for use in the game proper, it's not exactly impossible to modify CG models to avoid having to rebuild them from the ground up when one wants to change them. The main difference between in-game and CG models in that regard is the need for offline rendering of CG, which, again, is a matter of computer time and whatever cost that entails.
Just because the structure is roughly the same doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't massive implications for how the game has to be developed, though. To transition from 2D to 3D, FFVII would have gone from a few different arrangements of character/monster/environment sprites depending on whether you were on the world map, in a town, or in battle to five separate game engines, with completely unique character models depending on whether the field or battle engine was in use at the time.
The only reason that sort of change is tenable is because it happened very early in the process, before any real work was done... and the same can be said for Versus. We saw screenshots of what the world looked like when it had a world map, and it was clearly using test assets rather than anything substantial. (Noct was using Sora's animation set, heh.) There's nothing strange about doing prototyping work of that sort early on.
Is there a source for Nomura saying that there weren't any story changes other than a fan translation of a Famitsu interview/article? After looking at as many articles from actual Western game journalist sites, it seems like Nomura was universally translated by professional sources as saying that the direction would be the same in spite of the name change rather than that no changes would be made to the story whatsoever.
I mean, the hinting at sequels alone was a pretty big change, and he wasn't exactly trying to sneak that by anyone. =P It seems way more likely that the "no story changes" thing was a fan mistranslation than that Nomura somehow failed to consider expanding to multiple games not to be a story change.
Ebony Engine was a heavily modified version of Crystal Tools, yes, but even if it was significantly better than Crystal Tools at open world stuff (in a way that couldn't be integrated back into Crystal Tools), it'd still be difficult to take a portable team with no HD experience and have them build an open world game on it with no engine support team.
As for II.8, Nomura even admitted that his team was struggling with HD character models in a recent Dengeki article: "We are unfamiliar with producing scenes in the next-gen engine and recreating all the character models were difficult." And he's usually not one to talk about things being difficult.
PS3 would have just made things harder for the Osaka team, due to its unusual architecture. It was absolutely mandatory to learn how to take advantage of the Cell CPU if one was to have any hope of making a game that looked good on PS3 (that's why a bunch of multiplatform games looked dire in comparison to their X360 equivalents even though PS3 was the more powerful system).
PS2 had far, far more in common with the PSP than it did the PS3, though. There's a reason why a lot of Japanese developers transitioned from PS2 to PSP instead of bothering with the HD transition -- it's the transition to HD that was killer, not the portable/console divide. And, while FFXV did use the Type-0 team, BD2 also integrated the entire engine development team for Luminous to ensure they'd have constant support, along with a ton of other people. The issue isn't "PSP devs can't make HD games" so much as "forcing PSP devs to make HD teams without engine support is a terrible idea."
The Osaka team (or, at least, the Osaka team as it existed as of the development of KH3D) absolutely does not constitute a meaningful dev team for AAA development for all the reasons mentioned above. Without the support of an engine support team, it's unlikely that they'd have been able to transition smoothly to HD development, and even if they did have an engine support team to back them up, the total team size still wouldn't have been anywhere near what was needed to make a AAA HD game (there's something like 42 people listed in KH3D's credits who worked on game content rather than working on CG or in ancillary roles, and most of them were contractors).
Also, as far as I can tell, the 25% figure represents development between 2011 and 2012, which seems... pretty standard for a AAA game, really.
It's also worth pointing out that we've seen voice acting started before a game's story was set before, and not just on massively troubled projects. Birth by Sleep had a weird early trailer with voices that implied a completely different direction for one of the main character's arcs. Voice acting is an extended process, too -- Ray Chase said he was called for maybe 40 or so sessions over a period of two years when voicing Noct, and he started a lot later than Noct's Japanese VA. As such, it's entirely possible that voice acting could have started before everything was set script-wise.
I thought those were changes from what he'd worked on to the final version, not from Versus to Nomura's XV.
This Neogaf thread has a bunch of translations from Ferrari's posts, including the Umbra and Gentiana stuff.
Eh, having Lexaeus die because Riku got possessed by Xehanort's Heartless is a pretty big change from having him die as a result of his fight with the actual Riku. Having Axel suggest his actual motivations for having Zexion killed rather than just saying he finds Sora and Riku more entertaining is a pretty big change, too.
And, in any case, the point is that Nomura's fond of George Lucasing himself when he gets the chance even if he's already released a game, so the fact that he changed stuff before Versus/XV came out doesn't imply that he lacked vision. Almost all of the changes we saw from materials he actually released were in the realm of his standard perfectionist tendencies.
Apart from the fact that many of the CG models were, in fact, repurposed for use in the game proper, it's not exactly impossible to modify CG models to avoid having to rebuild them from the ground up when one wants to change them. The main difference between in-game and CG models in that regard is the need for offline rendering of CG, which, again, is a matter of computer time and whatever cost that entails.
Just because the structure is roughly the same doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't massive implications for how the game has to be developed, though. To transition from 2D to 3D, FFVII would have gone from a few different arrangements of character/monster/environment sprites depending on whether you were on the world map, in a town, or in battle to five separate game engines, with completely unique character models depending on whether the field or battle engine was in use at the time.
The only reason that sort of change is tenable is because it happened very early in the process, before any real work was done... and the same can be said for Versus. We saw screenshots of what the world looked like when it had a world map, and it was clearly using test assets rather than anything substantial. (Noct was using Sora's animation set, heh.) There's nothing strange about doing prototyping work of that sort early on.
Is there a source for Nomura saying that there weren't any story changes other than a fan translation of a Famitsu interview/article? After looking at as many articles from actual Western game journalist sites, it seems like Nomura was universally translated by professional sources as saying that the direction would be the same in spite of the name change rather than that no changes would be made to the story whatsoever.
I mean, the hinting at sequels alone was a pretty big change, and he wasn't exactly trying to sneak that by anyone. =P It seems way more likely that the "no story changes" thing was a fan mistranslation than that Nomura somehow failed to consider expanding to multiple games not to be a story change.
Ebony Engine was a heavily modified version of Crystal Tools, yes, but even if it was significantly better than Crystal Tools at open world stuff (in a way that couldn't be integrated back into Crystal Tools), it'd still be difficult to take a portable team with no HD experience and have them build an open world game on it with no engine support team.
As for II.8, Nomura even admitted that his team was struggling with HD character models in a recent Dengeki article: "We are unfamiliar with producing scenes in the next-gen engine and recreating all the character models were difficult." And he's usually not one to talk about things being difficult.
PS3 would have just made things harder for the Osaka team, due to its unusual architecture. It was absolutely mandatory to learn how to take advantage of the Cell CPU if one was to have any hope of making a game that looked good on PS3 (that's why a bunch of multiplatform games looked dire in comparison to their X360 equivalents even though PS3 was the more powerful system).
PS2 had far, far more in common with the PSP than it did the PS3, though. There's a reason why a lot of Japanese developers transitioned from PS2 to PSP instead of bothering with the HD transition -- it's the transition to HD that was killer, not the portable/console divide. And, while FFXV did use the Type-0 team, BD2 also integrated the entire engine development team for Luminous to ensure they'd have constant support, along with a ton of other people. The issue isn't "PSP devs can't make HD games" so much as "forcing PSP devs to make HD teams without engine support is a terrible idea."
The Osaka team (or, at least, the Osaka team as it existed as of the development of KH3D) absolutely does not constitute a meaningful dev team for AAA development for all the reasons mentioned above. Without the support of an engine support team, it's unlikely that they'd have been able to transition smoothly to HD development, and even if they did have an engine support team to back them up, the total team size still wouldn't have been anywhere near what was needed to make a AAA HD game (there's something like 42 people listed in KH3D's credits who worked on game content rather than working on CG or in ancillary roles, and most of them were contractors).
Also, as far as I can tell, the 25% figure represents development between 2011 and 2012, which seems... pretty standard for a AAA game, really.
No, the only reason it couldn't be realized was because Nomura kept changing things on a whim, and all you are doing is just regurgitating old as fuck interviews and the leaker from May, who by the way was only right about the story plot point leaks and nothing else, he also got a few things wrong too by the way.
And no the reason Versus didn't get passed the 25% mark was because Nomura is a shitty director who can't manage teams at all. In 2008 it was stated by SE that the Versus XIII team is only helping out on XIII during their spare time, they were not completely pulled off Versus, and again Nomura instead decided to focus on KH spinoffs with a large team instead of making Versus, even though he had the staff available to work on Versus too, he could have made Versus in the time it took him to make BBS and DDD, and XIII came out in December 2009.
People from Versus wouldn't have even had to be put onto the XIV team until after it bombed in late 2010 at the absolute earliest, and yet none of the people who worked on Versus are even credited as having worked on XIV so there is no proof at all that any of the Versus team was pulled to work on XIV. Crystal Tools was being developed alongside XIII and both Crystal Tools and XIII were finished in 2009, in 2010 is when the Versus team modified Crystal Tools for a game specific engine for Versus they dubbed Ebony Engine and that is also when we saw the first ever in game stuff for Versus, the level of visuals we saw in the 2010/2011 Versus footage was not even any more than what XIII or even XIII-2 had going for them, so trying to fall back on tech problems is just an excuse, Luminous wasn't designed for open world games any more than Crystal Tools was.. The Luminous Engine was the engine that was being developed alongside XV only after it was rebanded from Versus into XV, back when it was Versus the only thing they planned was implementing some Luminous lighting into it. It wasn't until July 2013 that Nomura said they would be migrating the game entirely to Luminous Engine. And even then Versus devs were all put into the XV team alongside the Type-0 team and Luminous engine devs in July 2012, a whole year before XIV was released as A Realm Reborn.
And no the reason Versus didn't get passed the 25% mark was because Nomura is a shitty director who can't manage teams at all. In 2008 it was stated by SE that the Versus XIII team is only helping out on XIII during their spare time, they were not completely pulled off Versus, and again Nomura instead decided to focus on KH spinoffs with a large team instead of making Versus, even though he had the staff available to work on Versus too, he could have made Versus in the time it took him to make BBS and DDD, and XIII came out in December 2009.
People from Versus wouldn't have even had to be put onto the XIV team until after it bombed in late 2010 at the absolute earliest, and yet none of the people who worked on Versus are even credited as having worked on XIV so there is no proof at all that any of the Versus team was pulled to work on XIV. Crystal Tools was being developed alongside XIII and both Crystal Tools and XIII were finished in 2009, in 2010 is when the Versus team modified Crystal Tools for a game specific engine for Versus they dubbed Ebony Engine and that is also when we saw the first ever in game stuff for Versus, the level of visuals we saw in the 2010/2011 Versus footage was not even any more than what XIII or even XIII-2 had going for them, so trying to fall back on tech problems is just an excuse, Luminous wasn't designed for open world games any more than Crystal Tools was.. The Luminous Engine was the engine that was being developed alongside XV only after it was rebanded from Versus into XV, back when it was Versus the only thing they planned was implementing some Luminous lighting into it. It wasn't until July 2013 that Nomura said they would be migrating the game entirely to Luminous Engine. And even then Versus devs were all put into the XV team alongside the Type-0 team and Luminous engine devs in July 2012, a whole year before XIV was released as A Realm Reborn.
Well, Kingdom Hearts is Nomura's baby, too. And, as @Nova said, Nomura does have a co-director handling the day to day work on Kingdom Hearts.
Not to mention, Nomura's now on both Kingdom Hearts III and FFVIIR, so it's not like making a KH game renders him incapable of making other stuff at the same time. It's very unlikely that working on KH between 2006 and 2011 was the reason why he couldn't work on Versus at that time.
Not to mention, Nomura's now on both Kingdom Hearts III and FFVIIR, so it's not like making a KH game renders him incapable of making other stuff at the same time. It's very unlikely that working on KH between 2006 and 2011 was the reason why he couldn't work on Versus at that time.
On there spare time bullshit, they were taken off the project to help, not in there spare time(Why on earth would Square Enix who had more faith in XIII not take them off full time and put Versus in the back burner), we are talking programmers, the dev team, those people don't get credited, your not going to see anyone of the 200 men that worked on Versus XIII getting moved to FFXIV in the credits you very well know this, only the heads are. You do know that Engine isn't just visuals right? Versus XIII simply couldn't work on Crystal Tools period which is why the thing moved to Ebony for the gameplay, Crystal Tools for the graphics alone, and Luminous for the Lighting, Crystal Tools couldn't do the seamless open world, nor could the PS3 either the PS3 has 512MB of RAM in it's entire system they were presented the PS4 and Xbox One in 2011 you know this right? And both systems had 8GB of RAM so which do you think they were going to go with. Also saying Crystal Tools and FFXIII being developed alongside each other doesn't matter, because 1 it was known the game had issues hell some issues that some people criticize FFXV for except worse like no town or the linearity, also you can't compare an absolutely linear from point A to point B game,where they drop in enemies, where the people are nothing more than background characters. To an open world where you have to design towns, have NPCs for each town, not only that but you have to work within the confines of the console hardware the PS3 at the time, it was impossible. It has been catagorically known that the Crystal Tools and the PlayStation 3 wasn't cutting the mustard, and the PS4/XbO was shown to them in 2011, so you can bet your ass that they would move the game to those systems instead of the development conundrum that is the PlayStation 3 which is proven and known to be hard to program for, and is limited in specs much more than the PS4 or Xbox One. Hell the PS4 and Xbox One were having troubles in Luminous under Tabata so yes development is an excuse, why do you think the escape from the citadel got cut and put into Kingsglaive Tabata said that would take 3 years to develop that alone, and he only had 3 years to get the game out the door, unless you want to tell me all the cut stuff because of time was because they were being lazy and didn't work on them within the time period they were given. FF Versus XIII only got 25 percent of the way because of the development troubles, as well as the game being a trilogy no longer a singular game, as well as during that time Square Enix wanted Nomura on KH3, and the FF7 Remake, so they took him off the project. Also one of the programmers who were working on FFXV(who got the plot spot on) under Nomura said he was removed because of his trilogy hopes and said it would have taken 2 years more to get part 1 out(which probably included the citadel escape), and Square wanted him to be working on the FF7 Remake, and Kingdom Hearts 3, and the directoral shift started in 2013, not 2014.
Updating this after having played 0.2 and watched Back Cover -- I've got significantly more trust in Nomura to tie everything together now than I did before playing. XD And I'm even more confident that Nomura never in a million years would have given up control of Kingdom Hearts, since he apparently wrote 0.2 himself. Considering the way he described his experience the last time he wrote a KH game (namely, that writing 358/2 Days involved locking himself in a basement with cup noodles for weeks and he never wanted to do it again), it's obvious that that series means a lot to him.
I'm always kind of paranoid about the way male creatives are going to handle female protagonists, because there are so many examples of how it can go horribly wrong. The idea that Aqua was one of the people who Sora had to save raised some red flags, too.
But I really liked the way Aqua's been handled so far, especially since the scenario could have easily lent itself to Aqua relying on Mickey/the Power of Friendship to survive things that would have otherwise overwhelmed her. She's pushed to her breaking point but overcomes it, and when Mickey arrives, he takes the role of partner instead of savior. In fact, she sacrifices her freedom (again!) to save him and Riku, which makes it feel symmetrical that they're the ones who are tasked with freeing her.
I'm particularly impressed by Nomura saying that he initially wanted to tug at players' heartstrings by having her cry out that she wanted to go home, but ended up changing it because he felt that showing her determination at the end would be more in-character. It kind of reminds me of the thing Ray Chase said about Noct's final words to Regis being rerecorded to sound more determined instead of breaking down. And then that makes me want Aqua and Noct to get together in a "sacrifice isn't all it's cracked up to be" support group. XD;
On a somewhat related note, I think Nomura might have decided to use Back Cover to continue playing with his FNC ideas. XD You've got a Master who gives specific roles (Focuses, Callings) to his apprentices (Fal'Cie) with the goal of dealing with an encroaching darkness (chaos, the Starscourge) and passing on an eye that sees the future (Eyes of Etro, "eyes that see the light of expiring souls") before disappearing, an apprentice who wants to summon Kingdom Hearts (open Etro's Gate) to bring back his master (Maker), people chosen by the apprentices (l'Cie) to use Keyblades (magic) to serve the apprentices' ends who turn into Heartless (Cie'th) when they fail... by the end of KHIII, I'm pretty sure we'll be able to tell which parts of FFXV were drawn from Nomura's concepts just by seeing which parts end up with direct KH analogues. XD
But I really liked the way Aqua's been handled so far, especially since the scenario could have easily lent itself to Aqua relying on Mickey/the Power of Friendship to survive things that would have otherwise overwhelmed her. She's pushed to her breaking point but overcomes it, and when Mickey arrives, he takes the role of partner instead of savior. In fact, she sacrifices her freedom (again!) to save him and Riku, which makes it feel symmetrical that they're the ones who are tasked with freeing her.
I'm particularly impressed by Nomura saying that he initially wanted to tug at players' heartstrings by having her cry out that she wanted to go home, but ended up changing it because he felt that showing her determination at the end would be more in-character. It kind of reminds me of the thing Ray Chase said about Noct's final words to Regis being rerecorded to sound more determined instead of breaking down. And then that makes me want Aqua and Noct to get together in a "sacrifice isn't all it's cracked up to be" support group. XD;
On a somewhat related note, I think Nomura might have decided to use Back Cover to continue playing with his FNC ideas. XD You've got a Master who gives specific roles (Focuses, Callings) to his apprentices (Fal'Cie) with the goal of dealing with an encroaching darkness (chaos, the Starscourge) and passing on an eye that sees the future (Eyes of Etro, "eyes that see the light of expiring souls") before disappearing, an apprentice who wants to summon Kingdom Hearts (open Etro's Gate) to bring back his master (Maker), people chosen by the apprentices (l'Cie) to use Keyblades (magic) to serve the apprentices' ends who turn into Heartless (Cie'th) when they fail... by the end of KHIII, I'm pretty sure we'll be able to tell which parts of FFXV were drawn from Nomura's concepts just by seeing which parts end up with direct KH analogues. XD