While Final Fantasy 7 Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi has spoken quite a bit about how the upcoming action RPG’s open-world gameplay is being designed, more details are now being revealed thanks to the title’s presence at Gamescom. In a new interview with IGN, Hamaguchi has spoken about how the team designed the open world, and even confirmed that players will be able to explore the entire planet in Final Fantasy 7 Revelation.
On the subject of bringing back many of Rebirth’s zones for the world in Revelation while still ensuring that the upcoming game feels meaningfully different, Hamaguchi noted that the team’s focus “was on the open world aspect of the game. So, we wanted to introduce a lot of large, vast areas that offered the horizontal width in terms of how big the area is going to look like. With FF7 Revelation, we want to take it a step above. So, in addition to the horizontal width, we’re now adding a vertical depth that allows players to explore using the Highwind or the Chocobo. So, both of these modes of transportation allow you to fly and jump high in the air and things like that. So, it does give you a more expanded feel of how the open world is going to look like in the world of the FF7 Remake series.”
The team’s thought process in how it could expand the world for Revelation ultimately came down to wanting to make sure that each entry in the trilogy also represents an escalation in terms of how much players can explore.
“So, from Remake to Rebirth and from Rebirth to Revelation, we wanted to take a step above. So, from the evolution from going from Rebirth and then heading into Revelation was that, again, ‘How can we expand the open world?’ And the way we achieved that is to achieve this planetary exploration, the open-world map scale where players can just really just explore the entire planet using the Highwind. So, taking on that challenge was one of the rather difficult parts of the development for sure.”
Interestingly, wanting the characters to be able to jump off the Highwind with parachutes was an idea that the team came up with early during Revelation’s development. The reason behind this is that, unlike the original Final Fantasy 7, the high-fidelity open world of Revelation wouldn’t be able to guarantee landing spots for the Highwind.
“So, we needed designed surfaces where it would make sense for the Highwind to be able to smoothly land, if that makes sense. But that wasn’t really realistic for us to consider. So that’s why we had this parachuting idea.” This also gave the team a chance to “introduce a seamless transition from the air to the ground. And I think the end result turned out well for us.”
Hamaguchi had previously spoken about how, despite having a massive world to explore in Revelation, the team wanted to avoid open-world fatigue among players. This led to the game featuring enough guidance that would make sure that players didn’t get lost.
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is coming to PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2.
