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[lostinblue]

Crystal took many years to develop and in the end the games suffered from it. Square just doesn't have the resources to develop proprietary high end engines.

They need to focus on the output instead of wasting money polishing rocks.

If Capcom has they do as well.

Issue is down to lack of organization and goals as well as planning, Square-Enix was used to do bad code optimization (ie: optimize code too much for the target platform just so porting would be balls later on) and White Engine/Crystal Tools started exactly like that being very optimised for CELL and it's SPE's for particle effects and shit.

Their structure simply doesn't work well to serve several games in a row unless they're direct sequels, you'll be moving and entirely rewriting huge chunks of code, as seen with FFXIV and Dragon Quest X.

Scalability also looks to be shite, it's clearly not hardware abstract enough.

And then again it's hard to compete with Unreal Engine 4 being the step up over several successful engine generations - they don't rewrite it all from the ground so some stuff is just there ready to be used. They don't have that stable platform to climb up from.

Perhaps they should have bought some engine provider a few years back like most did and fork their work going up, EA bought Renderware (and sadly ran it into the ground afterwards) and Bethesda bought Id Software. Square bough no-one with proof record for that, they chose to just press through.

They could have invested on Crystal Dynamics for that, they have their engine solution that seems to work for the most part, scalable no less judging for how long they supported the PS2 and Wii... They only needed to separate the engine development from them. But they won't.

S-E is a megalomania patient and trust only themselves (to fuckup, no less), so perhaps it's better this way or Crystal Dynamics would be blamed for their inability to work with it, like Eidos in general was blamed a while back for their bad showing even though they were the only ones releasing games; good games at that, but S-E expectations were world domination or something.

 

[Parsnip]

Whoa.

It's for the better in the end.

 

[daegan]

Very interesting. Makes me wonder who was so insistent on a proprietary pipeline, because that seemed to be the source of a disproportionate amount of problems for Square.

Last Remnant says hi

 

[sörine]

If Capcom has they do as well.

Panta Rhei doesn't seem to really be going anywhere either. We're over a year from it's announcement, 3 years in on development, and the only game to show for it is an eternally delayed f2p randomized dungeon crawler from their PC/mobile studio. Not quite the revolutionary force that MT Framework was, which at this point already had a game on shelves and 3 more major titles announced.

The only recent custom engine that seems to be making any headway from the Japanese is Konami's FOX Engine and that one's still rooted in DX9 class hardware. It's sort of like the engine Konami should've already had 5+ years ago.

 

[Stone Ocean]

I don't disagree necessarily, I just think Crystal Tools was salvaged somewhat. Luminous doesn't look like it will be though.

My point is that it should never have gotten to that point. Square could have avoided like half of last gen's development problems if they had just stuck to UE3.

Hell, Versus might had come out already.

 

[dramatis]

Also whatever, as long as I'll get my Kingdom Hearts 3.
Isn't the development of the Luminous engine one of the factors that held FFvs13/FFXV in development hell for so long?

No, the original plan was that Luminous was a project to prepare an engine for 'next gen' platforms. FFvs13 was, after the Crystal Tools problem, using its own custom built engine. The version found in the 2011 Michael Bay Trailer was shown Jan 2011; Sep 2011 Nomura remarked in Famitsu that Vs13 was using custom engine for gameplay, with lighting tech from Luminous.

 

[Meowster]

I think this will be for the best.

 

[Xpliskin]

Capcom : PASS
Konami : PASS
From Software: PASS
Tecmo Koei: PASS
Nintendo: PASS

Namco, S-E:

 

[DMiz]

I - I don't even begin to understand

Spoiler

no matter how much they ask me to.

I thought the whole point of Luminous was to have something for the PS4/XBOX ONE generation that would allow Square to bypass the whole Crystal Tools/White Engine fiasco. Now you're telling me that they're basically abandoning it wholesale?

What the hell was the point of Agni's Philosophy?

It's no wonder that the lead technical director left... the studio itself seems to have zero interest in pursuing its own engines.

 

[Poodlestrike]

Probably for the best. Square really seems to be struggling on the technical front. Odds of the game coming out this decade just went up

 

[Amir0x]

lmfao. SquareEnix, biggest mess ever

 

[Marceles]

Crystal Tools all over again....

 

[Hibiki Kurosawa]

I - I don't even begin to understand

Spoiler

no matter how much they ask me to.

I thought the whole point of Luminous was to have something for the PS4/XBOX ONE generation that would allow Square to bypass the whole Crystal Tools/White Engine fiasco. Now you're telling me that they're basically abandoning it wholesale?

What the hell was the point of Agni's Philosophy?

It's no wonder that the lead technical director left... the studio itself seems to have zero interest in pursuing its own engines.

Basically, they are running into problems with Luminous as well. It's not about interest.

 

[epmode]

I remember being so happy about Square-Enix when Human Revolution was released. It might not have stood toe-to-toe with the original but their heart was absolutely in the right place. I figured that it was an indication of where the studio was headed.

Oh well.

It's no wonder that the lead technical director left... the studio itself seems to have zero interest in pursuing its own engines.

Seems to me that the opposite is true.

 

[Seik]

After all these years they've been working on the luminous engine, to finally ditch it in the end.

They'll have what, FFXV running on it? One game? I think they have elements from the luminous engine in FFXIV, too...

What a waste, unless they have other unknown projects with it.

 

[Scum]

I would kill to have an 'Iwata Asks' about all this. Bloody hell, SE! D:

 

[Mathaou]

Wut. No he's not. Iwata is the CEO of Nintendo. Nomura isn't even on the board of directors in Square Enix. Stop talking nonsense.

After that giant stroke I just had, it occurred to me that Tetsuya Nomura is indeed not Hironobu Sakaguchi .
But now that I have my Japanese game devs straight, (changing my statement to be less ridiculous) what I meant was that a creator of a game or franchise if often used as a scapegoat. People blamed Miyamoto for Skyward Sword (if they didn't like it), if anything went wrong in Minecraft, people blamed Notch. So people are going to blame Nomura because he directed the first Kingdom Hearts.

 

[Alo81]

Why is everyone laughing about this? It sucks that a developer who can and has provided tons of great games ended up dumping a bunch of money into building an unsuccessful engine that could have gone into getting us more quality games.

It's crazy how eager everyone is to revel in the misfortune of others in the industry. I want more quality content and games to come, not less.

 

[epmode]

Why is everyone laughing about this? It sucks that a developer who can and has provided tons of great games ended up dumping a bunch of money into building an unsuccessful engine that could have gone into getting us more quality games.

It's crazy how eager everyone is to revel in the misfortune of others in the industry. I want more quality content and games to come, not less.

Perhaps you've missed the last few public statements from Square-Enix's new CEO. They're already dead.

 

[Amir0x]

Why is everyone laughing about this? It sucks that a developer who can and has provided tons of great games ended up dumping a bunch of money into building an unsuccessful engine that could have gone into getting us more quality games.

It's crazy how eager everyone is to revel in the misfortune of others in the industry. I want more quality content and games to come, not less.

shitty management is no one's fault but their own. We can laugh at how hilariously obvious this all is at this point

 

[Digital-Hero]

Why is everyone laughing about this? It sucks that a developer who can and has provided tons of great games ended up dumping a bunch of money into building an unsuccessful engine that could have gone into getting us more quality games.

It's crazy how eager everyone is to revel in the misfortune of others in the industry. I want more quality content and games to come, not less.

Because of the incompetence of Square Enix to hit their development milestones and Luminous is not the first engine casualty. The Crystal Tools also was plagued with issues.

 

[Famassu]

Its not, although I'm not convinced Luminous is some unworkable engine disaster due to the talent involved in creating it. He is just now constantly facing a "can't ship games" label regardless of if its all his fault or just partly. Hopefully moves like this to just using established industry engine tools will help him get stuff out there faster and more efficiently so he can turn that around.

Constantly? He's been one of the most productive people at Square Enix. For all we know, even FFXV is far from being Nomura's fault. Let's not forget Square Enix is the company who forced Matsuno to rework FFXII into having Vaan as the "main character" that was a big part of the problematic development of that game. Something similar could be behind FFXV as well.

1. Kingdom Shader was straight BS from the beginning and buzzwords, and this proves they probably didn't have anything substantial.

Umm.. Nomura said that they just have something they like to call Kingdom Shader. He never talked about it like it is some Luminous level tool set, it was just about how they were approaching the graphical style of different Disney worlds It sounded like they wanted to do maybe something a bit similar to Okami's brush-cel-shading. Again, this doesn't mean that is scrapped at all (maybe it's the source of problems when moving to UE4 from whatever they had before).

3. Thing is, there's not really a proven track record for UE and SE. That's why I'm lowering my expectations a ton.

Yes, there isn't, and that's probably exactly why Epic is directly involved with helping them with the problems. They don't have a proven track record exactly because UE3 had shit support. That support has improved and SQEX have even gotten Epic to help them with whatever problems they have. I wouldn't expect a major game like KHIII to suffer from problems like Last Remnant.

You'd think Square would learn after Crystal / White

Luminous was supposed to be the answer to Crystal Tools, learning from their past problems. Turns out they still weren't able to create versatile tools they could use efficiently with many games. That said, don't act like using something like UE3 was only sunshine & blue skies. A lot of developers, western & eastern, had fucktons of problems with UE3. Let's not forget all the sub-HD, sub-30fps games on last gen consoles that used UE3.

 

[Stone Ocean]

Why is everyone laughing about this? It sucks that a developer who can and has provided tons of great games ended up dumping a bunch of money into building an unsuccessful engine that could have gone into getting us more quality games.

It's crazy how eager everyone is to revel in the misfortune of others in the industry. I want more quality content and games to come, not less.

Because it's not the first time they did this and they have no one to blame but themselves.

Luminous was supposed to be the answer to Crystal Tools, learning from their past problems. Turns out they still weren't able to create versatile tools they could use efficiently with many games. That said, don't act like using something like UE3 was only sunshine & blue skies. A lot of developers, western & eastern, had fucktons of problems with UE3. Let's not forget all the sub-HD, sub-30fps games on last gen consoles that used UE3.

UE3 wasn't perfect, but it was a better start than trying to come up with something from scratch. If they really wanted an engine to call their own, why not make their own adaptation of UE like others?

 

[Mufausa The 3rd]

Unreal Engine 4??? Plus Disney games showing up on Steam recently??? cough cough... Kingdom Hearts 3 confirmed for PC.

 

[Begaria]

Unreal Engine 4??? Plus Disney games showing up on Steam recently??? cough cough... Kingdom Hearts 3 confirmed for PC.

Not just Disney games but even Final Fantasy games to! At this point, I think it's almost a dead lock that FFXV and KH3 will be hitting PC at some point.

 

[CHC]

Square should just stop making engines

Yes - there is nothing that they are doing that someone else's engine can't. It'd be nice if they turned out an actual game every once in a while.

 

[Two Pikachus]

I love the number of people in this thread who don't know anything about UE4.

It's not the brown bald engine guys ffs

 

[LiK]

I love the number of people in this thread who don't know anything about UE4.

It's not the brown bald engine guys ffs

People like to stereotype an engine. It's amusing.

 

[BlueTsunami]

Capcom : PASS
Konami : PASS
From Software: PASS
Tecmo Koei: PASS
Nintendo: PASS

Namco, S-E:

The old SE guard have been getting hits the whole previous generation into this one, starting with FFXIII on the 360. Its amazing. This is the final blow.

 

[sixteen-bit]

So luminous was a big failure I take it?

 

[Rymuth]

Oh wow, you called this before, Duckroll...

 

[Newboi]

Kingdom Hearts 3 switching to UE4 is fantastic. The tools are amazing, the rendering features out of the box are state of the art, SE has full source code access to the engine so they can build new functionality or modify any portion of the engine they'd like, and they have an extremely large community that will work out issues and create new features for them for free.

The awesome thing too is that UE4 will make PC ports much much easier if SE so chooses. Epic is looking to be doing eveything right this generation with their engine.

 

[Myths]

It seems there's no practical use for their engines outside trademarking convincing, "cool" names and "tech demos." Shame...

 

[Nirolak]

Capcom : PASS
Konami : PASS
From Software: PASS
Tecmo Koei: PASS
Nintendo: PASS

Namco, S-E:

On this note I looked at Epic Games Japan's webpage and they do list Tecmo Koei so I'm wondering if that's for some random product or if they're actually using UE4.

 

[dramatis]

Basically, they are running into problems with Luminous as well. It's not about interest.

I think it's partially about interest. Crystal Tools and Luminous, I think, are mostly Yoichi Wada ideas. Around the time Luminous Studio was conceived (2010-2011), in Japan mobile games had yet to take off. The big thing was portable game systems. However Wada was thinking about SE as a global company rather than a Japan company, which is why he probably considered investment into an engine for high end graphics, realistic physics and so on a good investment. As long as he was CEO, these are the kind of things that will receive support. That changed in 2013. The new CEO would be pressured to show quick results to maintain his position, so the easy route is to turn to mobile games. It's only natural that Luminous members would be reassigned to assisting on a game specific engine to save on time and to make use of existing labor.

 

[KoopaTheCasual]

So luminous was a big failure I take it?

Seems like it from the outside. Absolutely insane the amount of money that was probably flushed with this. (Baseless speculation incoming) I reckon it's FFXIV 1.0 sized money sink, ugh.

I think it's partially about interest. Crystal Tools and Luminous, I think, are mostly Yoichi Wada ideas. Around the time Luminous Studio was conceived (2010-2011), in Japan mobile games had yet to take off. The big thing was portable game systems. However Wada was thinking about SE as a global company rather than a Japan company, which is why he probably considered investment into an engine for high end graphics, realistic physics and so on a good investment. As long as he was CEO, these are the kind of things that will receive support. That changed in 2013. The new CEO would be pressured to show quick results to maintain his position, so the easy route is to turn to mobile games. It's only natural that Luminous members would be reassigned to assisting on a game specific engine to save on time and to make use of existing labor.

Wait?! I still get to blame Wada for SE problems?

I don't know why that amuses me/makes me happy, but it does.

Edit: Let's add this to the list of reasons to hate Wada with a fiery passion as a poison to SE.

 

[Hibiki Kurosawa]

I think it's partially about interest. Crystal Tools and Luminous, I think, are mostly Yoichi Wada ideas. Around the time Luminous Studio was conceived (2010-2011), in Japan mobile games had yet to take off. The big thing was portable game systems. However Wada was thinking about SE as a global company rather than a Japan company, which is why he probably considered investment into an engine for high end graphics, realistic physics and so on a good investment. As long as he was CEO, these are the kind of things that will receive support. That changed in 2013. The new CEO would be pressured to show quick results to maintain his position, so the easy route is to turn to mobile games. It's only natural that Luminous members would be reassigned to assisting on a game specific engine to save on time and to make use of existing labor.

Perhaps, but I think development issues had a large part in their decision to move away from the engine.

 

[lostinblue]

Panta Rhei doesn't seem to really be going anywhere either. We're over a year from it's announcement, 3 years in on development, and the only game to show for it is an eternally delayed f2p randomized dungeon crawler from their PC/mobile studio. Not quite the revolutionary force that MT Framework was, which at this point already had a game on shelves and 3 more major titles announced.

They've dropped the ball then.

Framework MT was glorious, I fail to understand why they couldn't scale it up and update it.

And given time it'll get there, that's what UE2.5 to 3 and 3 to 4 did.

The only recent custom engine that seems to be making any headway from the Japanese is Konami's FOX Engine and that one's still rooted in DX9 class hardware. It's sort of like the engine Konami should've already had 5+ years ago.

That Silent Hill demo looks good though.

Metal Gear Solid as well, DX9 or not. Its probably only rooted on DX9 in order to be scaleable, they are still supporting X360 and PS3 after all.

 

[Dark_castle]

Hopefully SE stop making their own game engines from this point onward. I just don't see why they should.

 

[Kai Ozu]

Interesting.

The switch to UE4 is not bad, but why? Tekken 7 to me, looks pretty good.

 

[Nirolak]

How much Epic will cut from any UE4 game Profits ?

For regular licensees they don't. They just charge you money up front.

The revenue sharing thing was so they could court indies effectively. Large publishers would still do a regular license because that makes more sense for them.

 

[falconxcrunner09]

So has there been any games made by SE that actually uses Luminous?

 

[2+2=5]

Lol.
Good news though, the sooner Japanese developers understand that third party engines are not the devil the sooner we'll get the games.

 

[plutoknight]

Because it's not the first time they did this and they have no one to blame but themselves.

UE3 wasn't perfect, but it was a better start than trying to come up with something from scratch. If they really wanted an engine to call their own, why not make their own adaptation of UE like others?

I need someone on GAF to maybe correct or corroborate me, but I think that's what FFXIV 2.0 uses (that is, a custom version of UE or st least parts from URL).

I want to say I heard that in an interview before FFXIV 2.0's launch (even then, they created a new engine for that game in 2 years that scales wonderfully and is very malleable...so it isn't all of SE who is terrible at this stuff!)

 

[Mesoian]

If Capcom has they do as well.

That being said, Capcom might be in that same hole right now.

Where is Phanta Rhei? Why haven't we seen anything showcased on Deep Down for months? That game seems like a slam dunk and yet Capcom is being so cagey about it.

 

[DNAbro]

That being said, Capcom might be in that same hole right now.

Where is Phanta Rhei? Why haven't we seen anything showcased on Deep Down for months? That game seems like a slam dunk and yet Capcom is being so cagey about it.

Didn't they show it at TGS?

 

[-Horizon-]

So luminous was a big failure I take it?

Pretty much.

 

[Alo81]

Perhaps you've missed the last few public statements from Square-Enix's new CEO. They're already dead.

More and more developing and publishing studios dying isn't something to be celebrated. I don't want to live in a future where EA and Activision are the only devs making AAA titles.

shitty management is no one's fault but their own. We can laugh at how hilariously obvious this all is at this point

Because of the incompetence of Square Enix to hit their development milestones and Luminous is not the first engine casualty. The Crystal Tools also was plagued with issues.

Because it's not the first time they did this and they have no one to blame but themselves.

Even though it is no ones fault but their own, it can only really be a detriment to us getting quality video games in the long run.

THQ's death was no ones fault but their own, but I was still sad to see them go.

 

[stryke]

Didn't they show it at TGS?

We got a trailer. Woopdeedoo.

We were meant to have an public beta in Feb. Something went wrong.

 

[Muppet of a Man]

If SE gets out of the engine building business, maybe we will finally see games produced by them in a less absurd time frame.