Following its announcement earlier this month, Sq. Enix has printed a brand new interview on its official weblog for Ultimate Fantasy Ways – The Ivalice Chronicles with Director Kazutoyo Maehiro going over many matters. This interview confirms that the upcoming enhanced remaster doesn’t embody the brand new content material from Ultimate Fantasy Ways: The Warfare of the Lions and that Sq. Enix misplaced the unique recreation supply code.
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Director Kazutoyo Maehiro goes over why the group determined to not embody content material from The Warfare of the Lions launch, the group’s concentrate on this enhanced launch, how the supply code and grasp information of the unique recreation not exist, and extra. I’ve quoted some related excerpts from the interview beneath:
Why did you determine to concentrate on updating the unique Ultimate Fantasy Ways relatively than the Warfare of the Lions model?
I and different members of this growth group weren’t straight concerned within the Warfare of the Lions, however I do imagine that the content material in that recreation did totally meet expectations for gamers at the moment.
Nonetheless, as we appeared again on all the things almost 30 years later, throughout the creation of this recreation, we requested ourselves what our group – those that created the unique Ultimate Fantasy Ways – might do to carry this recreation to a brand new technology of gamers.
It was by means of contemplating this query that we got here to the conclusion that essentially the most acceptable path for us was to pay respect to the unique recreation’s expertise and recreate that in the perfect type attainable.
Did you take into account including parts from Ultimate Fantasy Ways: The Warfare of the Lions like Balthier, Luso and the Onion Knight and Darkish Knight jobs?
We did in fact take into account the addition of recent jobs, talents, and characters – together with the roles featured in Warfare of the Lions. Nonetheless, the unique model of Ultimate Fantasy Ways is a really full recreation each from a recreation design and story perspective. If we had been to make main adjustments, it will solely be a loss for not solely followers of the unique recreation, but additionally these new to the title.
With this in thoughts, our first step in reviving Ultimate Fantasy Ways within the current was to stick to the unique and put a highlight on the unique recreation’s characters and jobs, in addition to the unique gameplay expertise.
The event group had been passionate when it got here to bringing an expertise as near the unique as we might, and consequently we now have recreated and used the unique VFX and SFX – one thing I hope followers of the unique specifically will get pleasure from as they play.
What was the most important problem you confronted when creating Ultimate Fantasy Ways – The Ivalice Chronicles?
There have been plenty of main challenges, however all of them stemmed from the truth that the grasp information and supply code from the unique recreation not existed.
This is not to say that they had been mishandled or poorly managed or something like that – maintaining that sort of information wasn’t a standard factor to do on the time.
In these days, we did not have the form of strong resource-management instruments that exist at the moment, and on prime of that, the manufacturing workflow for the sport was such that the Japanese model was produced first, after which we might create localized variations by overwriting the info with that of different languages, together with English.
There was additionally no such factor as on-line patches or updates, so until there was any main purpose to do one thing totally different, when you’d made the sport, that was it.
So, I believe it is truthful to say that growing this recreation with none grasp information or supply code was the most important problem.
How did you remedy that drawback?
Put merely: by sheer power (laughs).
We analyzed plenty of present variations of the sport and reconstructed the programming of the unique, however there have been additionally occasions the place we performed the unique recreation and labored it out by really feel alone…
The whole course of was the results of cumulative laborious work – on the one hand working to implement new options, whereas behind the scenes our work was much like porting an previous arcade recreation to the NES.
The workers who labored on this recreation had been actual lifesavers. I am unable to thank them sufficient.
Ultimate Fantasy Ways – The Ivalice Chronicles launches on September 30, 2025 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Swap, Nintendo Swap 2, Xbox Sequence X|S, and PC (Steam).
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