IT House News on February 16, foreign media Automaton reported today that the director of the "Final Fantasy 7 Remake" trilogy Naoki Hamaguchi responded to players' concerns about whether the multi-platform development of the third part will lower the quality.
Naoki Hamaguchi made it clear that the multi-platform strategy "will in no way diminish the quality of the third installment." He emphasized that the development process was not designed around the minimum specification platform. "Our development structure is not designed to work that way… This is something I may need to repeat again and again."
Naoki Hamaguchi said that he hopes to take this opportunity to systematically explain the technical details so that players can understand why there is no need to worry. He explains it step by step from the hardware level. In terms of storage, the Switch 2 version comes in Game-Key Card form, so there's no need to compress game data for physical cartridge capacity issues.
In terms of memory, the Switch 2 has ample RAM space and does not constitute a bottleneck. Although Xbox Series S has certain limitations, the team has optimized each platform individually to the extreme, so the memory constraints of a certain platform will not hinder the overall design.
At the CPU level, the development team's principle is: if it runs stably at 30fps on Switch 2 or Xbox Series S, it should be able to reach 60fps on higher-end hardware. The team isn't going to just target 30fps on a high-end CPU and completely squeeze the performance out of it.
On the contrary, when the hardware has more processing headroom, the picture density will be increased, such as increasing the number of NPCs in the town. Towns on high-spec platforms will therefore be busier and more lively, while low-spec platforms will moderately reduce the number of NPCs. This scalable design prevents CPU bottlenecks from becoming a cross-platform limitation.
When it comes to GPUs, the team follows the principle of “make for high specifications first, then adapt downwards”. All assets are prioritized for high-end PC environments and then scaled down based on platform capabilities.
Naoki Hamaguchi revealed that the studio internally regards PS5 and PS5 Pro as "mid-range platforms." Compared to high-end PCs, texture sizes can vary by 1.5 to 2 times, model load sizes can vary by 1.5 to 2 times, and polygon counts can even vary by more than three times.
Among the currently supported platforms, the lowest specification is the Steam Deck, whose performance is not even half of the PS5 baseline. Therefore, the so-called "compromising overall quality for a low-end platform" does not hold true.
IT House learned from the report that Naoki Hamaguchi explained why the third part continued to use Unreal Engine 4 instead of upgrading to Unreal Engine 5. The team has conducted a large number of customizations and optimizations on UE4 over the years, forming a stable and mature development system. Rather than migrating to a new engine and re-adapting it, it is better to use a system that has been highly modified and mastered, which is more conducive to ensuring development efficiency and quality stability.
