Square Enix’s president and CEO Mike Fischer has come out and talked about Luminous Studio, the new engine that the firm recently created and showed off with a real time tech demo of a Final Fantasy concept.
“Every Final Fantasy game is original,” Fischer told Shacknews while discussing Luminous and the company’s plans for the future with the new engine. “We create a new world with every new number. We need to keep pushing the envelope so that every Final Fantasy game creates a new standard. Having a custom toolset like this is really helpful, because it makes that process a lot more efficient.”
He also said that having three in-house game engines- Glacier at IO Interactive, Crystal Engine at Crystal Dynamics and the Luminous engine- is not in any way redundant. HE also said that Square is not creating this engine to be used massively, like CyrEngine or Unreal Engine 3. “This is an in-house tool. We’re not building this around a licensing model,” Fischer said. He does, however, hope that developers will want to get into publishing deals with Square, since then they’d be allowed to work with Luminous. “It’s my hope that this makes teams and creative people around the world excited to work for us because they’ll get their hands on some of the best technology in the industry.”
“Our focus right now is on games. Can it do more? It can definitely do more. But our focus is on games,” he continued. “There’s no Final Fantasy movie in the works that I’m aware of, but the key thing is we’re very much a creator-driven company. We want to have the technology to help these creators turn their vision into a reality. And that’s why we made this investment.”
The Luminous tech demo was a sight to behold. You can watch it above.
Stay tuned for more updates.