With so many franchises shifting to Unreal Engine 5 – including but not limited to Cyberpunk, The Witcher, Halo, and more – it’s surprising to see the Final Fantasy 7 Remake Part 3 team sticking to Unreal Engine 4. Game director Naoki Hamaguchi previously explained that the familiarity is “more beneficial,” but it also has to do with the timing of Unreal Engine 5’s release.
In an interview with Automaton Media, when told that many probably perceive the higher version number to mean it’s “more advanced,” he said, “I think that’s mostly how the general public sees it, and I do believe it’s true. Around the time we began developing Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Unreal Engine 5 was just entering its pre-launch phase.
“What makes Unreal Engine 5 groundbreaking compared to Unreal Engine 4 are two features: Lumen, its lighting system (related article), and Nanite, which allows you to portray dense graphical detail (related article). These represent the current trend in graphics pipelines, and of course, such pipelines are important to us as well.
“However, if we had tied our development schedule and milestones too closely to Unreal Engine 5’s roadmap, we would have risked our own progress being stalled if the engine encountered any kind of delay. For that reason, we decided early on in development of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth to stick with Unreal Engine 4. We’re using a graphics pipeline built in-house, which also makes optimization and porting to various hardware more straightforward.”
There’s also the benefit that any experience accrued with Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth would lead to further refinements in Part 3. “So even for the final installment of the trilogy, rather than rebuilding our pipeline from scratch in Unreal Engine 5, it’s far more efficient for us to use Unreal Engine 4, which we already have a well-established pipeline for. This also allows us to further refine things based on the experience we accumulated with Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.
“With all of this in mind, we judged that continuing with Unreal Engine 4 would definitely lead to a better third installment for our customers. I never imagined it would become such a hot topic (laughs), though a lot of people took it quite positively, too.
“We’re using the know-how and development environment we cultivated with Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth as a base and further refining it to create the third game. In that sense, the quality will certainly not drop, and we’re working hard to deliver something even better. Production of the third installment itself is progressing very smoothly.”
That last point is especially important considering the interval between releases. Final Fantasy 7 Remake released in April 2020 for PlayStation 4, and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth followed in February 2024 for PS5. About two years later, Final Fantasy 7 Remake Part 3 is in a playable state, and while it’s likely to launch in 2027 or even early 2028, it’s set to be a massive experience with tons of content.
Look no further than Rebirth, which boasts much more content and larger-scale regions than the first part. And that’s not even accounting for the implementation of the Highwind, further improvements to the visuals, or the fact that it’s launching on multiple platforms.
Of course, Square Enix hasn’t confirmed whether it’s a day one launch on Xbox Series X/S, PS5, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2. Or even the official title, though it’s apparently locked. Nevertheless, it should be interesting to see how Final Fantasy 7 Remake Part 3 ends the trilogy.
