DracoSuave said:
Arqus_Zed said:
Well, they wasted all that time and effort making that worthless "Crystal Engine", so they might as well milk it for what its worth. Think about it, they can re-hash their engine and tons of character models. Pure profit.
You know, kind of like CoD, sports games and Pokémon.
Thing is, that engine's actually pretty decent.
I mean FF13, for all its faults, IS a very pretty game at least.
Let's not toss out the baby with the bathwater.
You can say that about any current gen engine.
Any contemporary engine, or even a basic current generation DirectX framework can be programmed to support gloss maps, normal maps, etc. Past Final Fantasy titles pretty much had their framework/engine built up from scratch, but now that processors allow normal mapping and more advanced lighting effects, a lot more time gets into creating the basis for rendering visual information.
Graphics programming is a lot of work, yes, but most games use more or less the same core mechanic. That's why a lot of companies use a third party engine, just to have a tool that instantly renders your meshes into an interactive environment, complete with maps and animations.
However, this does nothing for gameplay or story. Why do you think it's so hard to create a game other than an action or shooter game with the Unreal engine? Except for the graphics rendering, there just isn't a lot of interesting stuff to work with if you're exploring other genres. That's why the guys who made AION actually created "CryEngine v1.5". The original CryEngine they used had to be modified so extensively to be useful in an MMO environment, they pretty much created an entirely new engine on top of the old one. And let's not forget the trouble Square Enix had making The Last Remnant with the Unreal Engine.
So, what I'm getting at is that the Crystal Engine can render nice images, but that's nothing new in this day and age. I'd have to get my hands on the thing myself to be sure, but I can't imagine they spent a lot of time on making combat and stat accrual mechanics (and it's not like they had to implement an extensive physics system). Why else would the Crystarium system (though pretty) be a step back from both the sphere grid and the license board? Why would the combat be so unstable that they actually have to allow a "retry" function before every battle you do?
The reason FF XIII and FF XIII-2 played almost exactly the same, yet FF X and FF X-2 had wildly different combat and stat accrual systems? My guess, it's baked into the engine and they don't want to spend time and effort to do something new. God knows if the engine was actually written in such a way that it would allow to add new mechanics without too much trouble.