Kitase Talks About Why a FF7 Remake on PS3 Would Be Difficult

They should just let Bioware do the remake. They'll finish it in 4 months.

And there we have it, folks: proof positive that graphics get in the way of making quality games. Straight from the horse's mouth too, as it were. I guess this means that as things stand, an FF7 remake can't be done on any console other than the Wii.

Man, oh man, would the Sony fanboys melt down if THAT ever happened. I call dibs on selling tickets to that one, by the way; my intended price point is $599 US.

Ahh the good ol' days when Cloud had horse hoofs for hands.

I would buy it, so would a lot of other peeps, like, millions of peeps, just saying.

Meh. Square is sure lazy if they decide to forfeit cities in the name of cutscenes.

By the way, a Final Fantasy VII remake wouldn't be the best move on their part for the following reasons:

1) Pointlessness. Do we really need an updated version of Final Fantasy VII that cost 60 bucks? The differences will be HD, voice acting, remixed music, some extra quests, items, etc. More like a fan's wet dream than a necessity, that's for sure. Not enough to pay 60 bucks.

2) Expensive. Final Fantasy VII had an estimated 32 million budget. I dread to think how much will a voice-acted, HD version of the game cost.

3) Much smaller userbase. The 32 millions PS3s can't be compared to the 100+ million PS1s.

4) Curse of the remakes. Remakes will always sell less. Even if the console of the remake has a much larger userbase than the original's console.

5) Final Fantasy XIII. Square must have blown tons of money on the development of this game. I don't think that creating another similarly budgetted game released anytime soon would do them any good.

6) PSN version. For those who really want to play the game, perhaps they could buy it for the PSP or PS3 for a mere 10 bucks.

Personally I think they'd be better off doing it for the 360 or Wii. It would probably be a lot easier and sell a lot more.

Actually, it doesn't matter what happens, an FF7 remake will not see the sales of yore. If they left the game alone, only tinkering with and updating the graphics, half the fans would complain that it's the same exact game. If you make game changes, additions, extras, etc, the other half will while that they weren't faithful enough to the original. So no matter what Squenix does, they've lost half their fans from the gate. And the spiraling costs incurred over there don't bode well for making much of anything, anymore.

i find ff 7 graphs perfect why screw it up with a remake!

That's garbage - 3d programmes are easier to use than ever before. 3DS Max, Maya etc are very simplistic to use and with the amount of people that can use it and photoshop, a remake shouldn't at all be a problem.
I think it's a case of "can't be bothered until we really need to".

I'd rather they spend time making new games not revamping old personally anyway. I can play FFVII anytime I like even now.

Does SE even NOT make excuses? Seriously... the PS3 is TOO powerful, and thus we can't remake a game from the mid-90s. WHAT??

C'mon SE, give us some credit for being half-way intelligent.

Oh, and for those people (such as Quartz) saying that it'll be too expensive, that's garbage. FFVII was one of the best selling FF games, and would sell great if they'd give it a chance. If you want to talk expensive, how about working on FFXIII for 2 years before changing platforms, and then STILL taking another 3 years after that to finish it for the PS3. SE is notorious for their slow and expensive development cycles, but I can't imagine a FFVII remake would take longer than the 5+ year development time of FFXIII. Sheesh!

Ahh. FFVII remake talk.

Would take ages to make,
Would be difficult to reproduce,
Would be expensive to do...

List goes on really.
Thing is people harp on about wanting a remake but will it be how as you remember enjoying it? Could that ever be recaptured with better Graphics? If the game could be improved - play wise, would you want that to change?

If a remake were to be made just imagine if it got a really bad score for being 'unoriginal' or needing updates because of gameplay issues. That would really damage the games image and possibly start a massive hate campaign!

Yeah, I enjoyed the original game. Black Chocobo's... Beating Sephiroth
with the Buster Sword...

Can't you tell I enjoyed the game?

;)

*we, meaning me.

And me, being the definitive go-to source for all things true in life.

In other words, it would be a project the size of FFXIII or even bigger. So.....what's there to lose?

@Kinneas14 "Exact. We want RPG games as those done in the past, but for the PS3."

True. We want RPG games with the exploration and dungeon mazes of the past.

We don't want actual games from the past remade.

Stop whining people - HD Dev is very expensive and difficult, especially on the PS3.

And they didn't say they couldn't do towns, just that each town was unique. It's one thing to spend 2000+ man hours on a reusable town, but when you need to make tons of them, each different and unique? that's a lot of time and effort and prohibitively expensive. So many people here call them "lazy", but it sounds to me like it would require a massive budget that they may not make back. Everyone claims they will, but even the most successful non-remakes on PS3 only sell a couple million copies. How many people wouldn't spend $60 on a remake? It's just not worth the risk, when they know anything with the Final Fantasy name is going to be profitable anyway.

Sounds like an excuse to me.

@LokeSTL
Exact. We want RPG games as those done in the past, but for the PS3.
Not excuse Kitase, the problem of the new JRPGs isn't the graphics or the effects, is the story.
The latest Final Fantasy (X-2,XII) are the example of this: nice form, but not content!

Confirmed!

Seriously, so much talk about it... It's going to happen. SE have 5 games in development, remember... ;-)

Besides the FFVII remake, those things are exactly what us RPGers want: RPGs like we had in the past made in PS3 HD. Of course it's going to be 'difficult', just like it was more difficult to go from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit to 64-bit, etc.

It's aggrevating that the further the technology goes forward, the further SE gets from the formula that made their RPGs great. It's like the say: "Making open worlds and towns is hard, let's just screw with the battle system and make it pretty. They'll love it because we'll tell them it's evolved and innovative." Then they wonder why everyone isn't as happy with it. Because no matter how pretty you make a turd, it's STILL A TURD. *looks at X-2 & FFXII* But who cares what we say, we're only the FRIGGIN' CONSUMER.

The longer they take to re-make VII, the more "difficult" it will become. If they thing the PS3 is hard, wait till the PS4. And at the rate we're going with the mainline FFs, XVIII will just be a 6 hour movie with random button presses to progress.

Stop complaining, dang they can do what they want. Still if you think about if the towns in the new hd games arent as explorable as the old games. Look at start ocean 4 you couldn't go into most houses in the towns. Same for other games with towns this gen they were big but not alot of exploration detail like back in the psone and ps2 era.

@rccsetzer: thanks for the info, I just looked him up on wikipedia, and Damn, EVERY game he made, produced or directed was successful. FF1-9, Chrono Trigger, Parasite Eve, Xenogears, Vagrant Story, Kingdom Hearts Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, He pretty much Invented and revolutionized the RPG genre.

The only thing that didn't work out was the FF movie, but hey, everybody can make one mistake, right? To let him go was a BIG mistake of Squeenix.

lots of hilarious comments.

I'm w/ SE on this one. I'd rather them focus their development on a slew of new IP's than devote allt he resources it would take to rebuild everything about a 13yr old game from the ground up (except the story).

So, from now on I shouldn't expect any towns in any of SE's HD games because it's to much work? Lazy...

What makes anybody think a remake would even sell? It's not like the original sold something amazing and SE knows that remakes never sell as well as the original. It's tragic that we won't be able to see Sephiroth and play as Vincent in their wonderful HD glory, because there's no way this will happen. At least I hope it doesn't, because there's absolutely nothing wrong with the original.

Silver-Tiger, they don't have Hironobu Sakaguchi anymore, the man that used Square to release a movie with a budget higher than most holywood movies : Spirit Within. It failed and so he was fired. Since then Square has not being the same.

but if they make it even if if costs time and money, you just know it would sell like crazy.

What a lazy comment....Square Enix sucks.Things were a lot different when the companies hadnt merged .I remain a Squaresoft fan.

kiefer23 aren't those games quite a lot shorter than FF games usually are?

In other words: They are too stupid and too lazy to develop.
Seriously, how LAME can Square-Enix get?

What happened to the company that developed FFVII to FFX? Because Square-Enix isn't it anymore, that's for sure.

Lost Odyssey had towns, Mass Effect 2 has towns, Infinite Undiscovery has towns, Star Ocean IV has towns.

The only difference is all of the above don't fill the fucking disc with CGI cutscenes!! Cut the cutscenes down and add more in-game content. One 10 minute 1080p cutscene would take up enough storage space to fill possibly 1-2 towns?

They'd save alot of development time not hand crafting these CGI scenes also. I love them but I would much rather have a better non-linear game. Wasn't Final Fantasy XIII like 8gb of data and 34gb CGI-cutscenes or something?

Everyone thinks they can do it only using one dual layer blu-ray disc. It is impossible. I think in the end three dual layer blu-ray discs would be used. So, it is impossible on the Xbox360 and very, very expensive (at the moment) to develop exclusively for PS3.

They wanna make it but no money. Sony pay up already or Microsoft i don´t care.

It's Final Fantasy VII. It's the most wanted remake.

Do you seriously think that it wouldn't sell enough to make back everything and make tons of profit?

They wouldn't need advertising.

Is it me or i smell BullSh*t.

People need to stop reading this literally. He doesn't mean they can't do it, he means it's TOO EXPENSIVE.

They could obviously do it if they spent enough money. Read between the lines...

1. You can MAKE towns in White Knight Chronicles.

2. You can even populate your towns however you want.

3. Players will be able to visit other player's towns 24/7

4. SE can't make towns

Ehh.. does he DENY! remaking FF7?

As i see it he just states that it would take some time to do it...

I think this is the first time a developer is publically admitting that HD development costs are forcing games to be downsized.

I don't remember that many towns. Didn't Fable have more? I think it's a pretty pathetic excuse.

This is the weakest excuse I have ever heard. Because of towns? Oh BS. Every freaking game out now has towns, full cities even. Sure you can't go everywhere, but they still have to render everything you can see. Plus if they had a similar world map, then while you're walking towards a town, that same town could be loading in so there are no loading times. Why haven't people taken advantage of tricks learned last gen so there are little to no load times? Jak and Daxter, anyone.

If they wanted they could wait for even better specs and read time on the PS4. Actually that is what I would like to see. This way the graphics could look like top of the line graphics of the PS3, but be able to be larger in scale using all the PS4 has to offer.

well if they remake FF7 it wud sell like balls so the effort wud be appreciated lol

BS!

i call bs on this too since its a remake, not meant to be a completely new game, it is possible to rebuild what they build if they put the effort in

sounds like bullsh!t to me. Kitase is a lazy mofo, for example look at the towns and areas in WKC. they are huge...very HUGE. level 5 did a great job with that.

Uh...I'm sorry, but after 5 years of development and multiple millions of dollars already invested, simply saying 'it would cost too much' is a pretty lame excuse.

They are going to have TONS of egg on their face when Dragon Quest X comes out with a whole plethora of free roaming exploration and, get this, unique and explorable towns to explore. And all on the Wii. And no Kitase, because the game is on an HD console doesn't make adding towns and more freedom of exploration 'harder' or 'more expensive'. Its just something you need to focus on early in development. Frankly, its something they should have thought of on the PSX as well before FFVII went with pre-rendered backgrounds and deformed polygons.

Well it's pretty simple really, keep the birds eye view and just make everything more detailed and realistic (ps3 graphics or as close as possible) make everything about the game EXACTLY the same just give it the next-gen quality. Add in some special side quests/ story elements, since crises core came out. :)

Bah, I think this is a load of crap. I don't buy the "it would be too difficult to make towns, but not dungeons" line. I just doesn't sound right. I understand the basic premise that towns have more landmarks and thus, require more time and disc space to render than do your generic ass dungeons Square-Enix(not that I buy that, but I see the logic), what I don't understand is why wouldn't it be worth it, if you already have the layout, design, coding, gameplay, and script lain out for you identically to your desired end result, but you just can't make the graphics better? They don't need to be XIII level quality, just make them better ffs. They know the game would be a huge success, even without HD graphics, people crave a remake.

Other developers find ways to work around these issues Square-Enix. They make their graphics bend when corners need bending, and not the gameplay. That's the basic flaw. If your graphics are hindering your game quality, then WHY sacrifice game quality, why not sacrifice graphical quality? That runs contrary to everything all of us here believe, and contrary to what SE SHOULD believe, which is, gameplay > graphics. Period.

FFXIII with towns only possible on Wii CONFIRMED!

meh...would it really take any longer than it does for normal games for this gen to come out?

"So is he admitting that enhancing graphics past a certain point actually hinders game design because it becomes too expensive to make... towns?"

I think you COULD make towns... it's just, they'd have to reuse a lot of assets so what's the point?

I mean, FF7 with all the different assets would probably cost more then FF13!

I kept telling people it'd be too expensive to redo all those assets in HD, because they reused much less assets then modern games.

So why not remake FFVII with last gen graphics In HD.

Example:Kind of like the recent God of War Series HD update.

So is he admitting that enhancing graphics past a certain point actually hinders game design because it becomes too expensive to make... towns?

What about Wii, DS, 360 and PSP?

"In my opinion, better to actually put in the time and get it done on PS3. A game like this really does deserve it, and the sales would reflect that."

Not necessarily. Enhanced remakes aren't known for huge sales, no matter how popular the original game was.

About the only exception is Super Mario All-Stars, but that was an enhanced remake of four games.

I say a DS port is the most financially reasonable, especially with their other FF and DQ games selling so well on the system.

Well you know that for it to be a remake, it doesn't have to have FFXIII caliber graphics. Hell, I'm sure that a FFVII remake with FFXII graphics (or maybe even a little better) would be achievable and would make fans very happy.

So would they do it on... gasp... Wii!? Or PSP!?!? DS!?!?!?!?!?!?

In my opinion, better to actually put in the time and get it done on PS3. A game like this really does deserve it, and the sales would reflect that.

But hell, I'd gladly accept the game if the towns were at static angles like in the original. Just make it!

they will only do it if square enix was to be in a financial trouble

Never give up the faith.

*sighs* one can only wish

Fair enough