14 DAY TRIAL // Square Enix is a Japanese game publisher best known for its extremely popular Final Fantasy franchise, which is the benchmark for any other RPG (Role Playing Game) developed in the Land of the Rising Sun. The company is now slowly but surely starting to release games that are aimed at a global market, which would be more profitable.
As such, it has made quite a lot of decisions in order to become a worldwide publisher. After partnering up with Microsoft, producer of one of the most popular consoles in the West, the Xbox 360, it has announced that a lot of the previously PlayStation 3 exclusives will be available for the North American console and will be released simultaneously across the world.
The first example of this new strategy is the company's latest title, The Last Remnant, which was released at the end of November. For it, Square Enix employed a multi national team, which created the game on one of the most popular graphics engines available, Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3. Yusuke Naora, the art director of The Last Remnant, talks about using this tool on the development of the game.
“It was the first time we’d used the Unreal Engine, so work was certainly slow going at first. But as we got the hang of it we were able to do a lot of things that would’ve been harder with our traditional tools. That said, the decision on whether to use Unreal for future projects will be decided on a case-by-case basis; we’re not going into game productions thinking we want to use this or that middleware. Rather, we’ll examine what it is we want to achieve with a game and then decide on the best tools to use in reaching that goal.”
It definitely seems that the Unreal Engine will become one of the most widely used graphics tools, as it is implemented in a wide number of titles that have appeared and will appear for quite some time. Square Enix definitely made the right move when it used this engine, as it has ensured that the game will perform as expected on all of the platforms it will be released on, as the PlayStation 3 and PC versions still haven't received concrete launch dates.