Fans of Final Fantasy VII have gotten accustomed to waiting. After all, what are some more months or years when you’ve been mercilessly teased since that one PlayStation 3 dech demo back in 2005?
It took another decade for the Final Fantasy VII remake project to go official, and now, eleven years later, director Naoki Hamaguchi believes the third installment won’t be “too far in the future”.
The statement came in a conversation with Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, where Hamaguchi also explained why keeping the team together is just as important as making sure the games are different.
Final Fantasy VII Banks on Stability to Guarantee Freshness
This era in gaming has seen more remakes and deep remasters than any before, but none have come anywhere close to the scale and quality of Square Enix’s biggest project.
Where many remakes tackle games on a one-to-one basis (sometimes very successfully, like Metal Gear Solid Delta), director Naoki Hamaguchi is adamant that the newer Final Fantasy VII titles must not only be original relative to the source material, but also feel very distinct between installments.
The team was not interested in making “a reskinning of the same game over and over again”, choosing instead to expand with each iteration. You can get a good feel for this when jumping from Final Fantasy VII: Remake to Rebirth, where, among other changes, you go from a fairly linear recreation of Midgar to a quasi-open world.
Director: The Third Instalment of Final Fantasy 7 Remake is ‘Already in a Playable State’
The Director of the third entry in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series has confirmed that the game is in a playable state from beginning to end.
Hamaguchi is keeping his cards close to his chest for the time being, but the Final Fantasy VII boss assured Bloomberg that the third game would keep with that tradition, going as far as saying that “flying the Highwind [airship] is a very large part of” the experience.
However, the commitment to shaking things up ends in the gameplay experience. Hamaguchi and Square Enix have banked on staff stability for the game’s success, despite the overall air of uncertainty in the gaming industry.
According to Hamaguchi, the team working on the third new Final Fantasy VII game “is closer to 95% of the Rebirth staff”. Between 80% and 90% of the developers of the second game were also involved in Remake, and it seems that Square Enix is happy with the results.
Fighting the Layoff Hydra
You would think that keeping talent working together would be a given, but that only makes sense when you think of artistic and entertainment outcomes instead of shareholder value. Unfortunately, a lot of gaming executives have forgotten that the latter is a consequence of good games, rather than the raison d’être for this medium.
Stories like that of the Final Fantasy VII remakes are the best-case scenario, where talented teams are kept together, and established workflows are preserved. Many publishers, however, are not willing to recognize the value this brings.
The churn rate in the gaming industry has intensified this decade, and has trapped many skilled professionals in a vicious cycle of layoffs.
Hamaguchi and Square Enix have banked on staff stability for the game’s success, despite the overall air of uncertainty in the gaming industry.
Talented workers who departed AAA studios frequently flock to AA or indie projects established by former colleagues, who use their experience and portfolio to secure funding.
Investors and publishers on that level, however, don’t tend to have the deep pockets of your Ubisofts and EAs of the world, and are quite trigger-happy with cancellations at any sign of uncertainty.
The result? Workers leave, some set up new studios, others join in, and the cycle continues. Some of these stories have happy endings, like the former DICE employees who have dominated the shooter landscape with ARC Raiders. Others, like Highguard or Gang of Dragon, are tragic.
As the Final Fantasy VII trilogy approaches its conclusion, only destiny knows what will be of the developer team once the project is over. Until then, Naoki Hamaguchi is keeping the family together.
Highguard Calls It Quits (But At Least It Beat Concord)
The developers of Highguard have confirmed that the game will shut down on March 12, marking a remarkably short lifespan, but one that beats Concord.
- Released
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February 29, 2024
- ESRB
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T for Teen
- Engine
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Unreal Engine 4
- PC Release Date
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January 23, 2025
