Like most Japanese developers, Square Enix has traditionally built the technology for each new game from scratch. While middleware solutions like the Unreal Engine have long been a favored solution for Western developers, the Square approach has been to tackle every new project from the ground up. But this is changes as development costs skyrocket; the upcoming
The Last Remnant will be built on Unreal 3, and
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King for WiiWare was deliberately conceived to test the feasibility of building a game almost entirely with middleware tools and scripts. Even more ambitious is
Final Fantasy XIII's proprietary White Engine, now called Crystal Tools. As Square Enix's first companywide technology platform, it's a full suite of authoring tools and runtime libraries for PlayStation 3, PC and Xbox 360. (There's even a bit of support for Wii in place, although the latter is still in development.) Not only is Crystal Tools the power behind FFXIII, but also
Final Fantasy Versus XIII and the company's as-yet unannounced next-generation MMO RPG as well.
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Source: 1Up
Feb 23, 2008, 11:47 AM
