The Final Fantasy VI Remake Everyone Wants Could Take 20 Years To Make
Big games take way too long to develop
Programming note: I decided to bump this week’s Dead Game news roundup to Monday to make room for a deep-dive on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League later in the week after it’s been out a few days. It’s been almost nine years since Rocksteady Studios’ last game, the critically-acclaimed Batman: Arkham Knight, and everyone is eager to see if Suicide Squad will turn out to be an unexpected miracle or another expensive always online live service loot shooter flop. Speaking of games that take forever to come out…
Final Fantasy VII Remake was exceptional. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the second part of the trilogy, looks like it could be even better. The success of the nostalgia-fueled project to update and remix one of Square Enix’s most beloved RPGs with modern graphics and systems has ramped up calls for the Japanese publisher to do the same with Final Fantasy VI, the only other game in the series often considered as good if not better than its PS1 successor.
Yoshinori Kitase, head of Creative Business Unit I, the team in charge of developing the FFVII remakes, sparked hope for FFVI to get the same treatment in a roundtable discussion for the Pixel Remaster anthology’s release last year. “There are many FF6 fans inside the company and they often ask me 'when are we making 6?” Kitase joked at the time. But he said it would be very difficult, even more so than converting FFVII. Original series director, Hironobu Sakaguchi added that as a pixel based game Square would have to change FFVI’s story and making it realistic-looking would be challenging.
Kitase was asked about those comments over the weekend in a new interview by French YouTuber Julien Chièze. He said if a FFVI remake ever did happen it would take even longer than FFVII because of all of the characters and everything that happens in it. The FFVII remake trilogy has taken 10 years so far, and is only two thirds of the way done. Kitase pegged a FFVI remake at 20 years, which, if you assume Square Enix didn’t start on it until FFVII was finished, would take us to around 2047. Kitase would be about 80. I would be 59. The original game itself would be 53 years old. According to a translated summery by ShinraArch, he said lots of people inside the company want to remake FFVI but he can’t ever give them an answer, which bums him out. It bums me out too.
If you aren’t familiar with FFVI, it was an RPG released for the SNES in 1994. Instead of focusing on a single main protagonist, its story about imperial oppression and a magic-induced apocalypse followed the personal triumphs, failures, and regrets of 14 different characters. Alongside slick, numbers-based combat, FFVI conveyed its high stakes and intimate drama through meticulously crafted 16-bit pixel art scenes full of unique gestures, expressions, and scenery. It’s considered one of the best games ever made, especially for people old enough to have played it back when it first came out.
But 20 years is a bonkers amount of time for a company to make any game, let alone remake one. I’m not sure how much the estimate is an indictment of Square Enix’s own production processes and expectations, or of the growing unsustainability of the blockbuster game development in general. Despite rare exceptions like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, “Games aren’t two or three years [to make] anymore,” Xbox game studios head Matt Booty told Axios last year, “they’re four, and five, and six years.” By comparison the original FFVI, which Kitase directed, took just one year to make.
Another quote that haunts me is something Starfield director Todd Howard said last year. Bethesda’s less than stellar sci-fi RPG took eight years to make. It was first revealed in 2018 and delayed by a year after previously being scheduled to come out in 2022. IGN’s Ryan McCaffrey asked Howard last year how many games he has left in him at this rate:
So are you okay with things taking eight years again in the future, or...
TH: Not my plan. I don't think you would ever, ever plan for that. Sometimes that's how it ends up, so that you know that what you're putting on the screen is what you want. But you're right, I'm not getting younger. You sort of start...
Like how many games do you have left in you?
TH: Yeah, how many games are ahead of me versus behind me. So that does start to enter your head.
At the current rate, who knows when the next Elder Scrolls game will be complete, let alone the next Fallout. I’m less concerned about whether Bethesda goes on to actually make them than the fact that if it does it could take over a decade. That’s a lot of time and resources for any person, but even more so when the video game industry is undergoing an unprecedented number of cutbacks and layoffs. Longer games means an even higher chance of people working on something that isn’t good when it finally arrives, or never even sees the light of day to begin with. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported that project Odyssey, Blizzard’s upcoming survival game, was in development for six years before Microsoft came in after the acquisition and canned it last week.
Suicide Squad’s review-less early access launch
Rocksteady’s latest DC universe game is now out in New Zealand and will slowly go live throughout the rest of the world for those who purchased the $100 Deluxe Edition to get the game three days ahead of its official February 2 launch. But there are no reviews of the game to turn to as players decide whether or not to pick it up themselves.
That’s not unusual for a live service game that can only be played online, but it is rare for a major blockbuster to arrive with hardly any advance coverage. Sometimes publishers will host special offsite sessions for reviewers to play a game on company controlled setups along with other press and content creators. In Suicide Squad’s case, what’s particularly weird is the fact that no one seemed to know if or when review codes for the game would be sent by PR to press outlets. What we do know is that IGN isn’t getting one.
The website published an unusually scathing preview of Suicide Squad at the beginning of the month. “We won't have our review of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League at launch as review codes have not been sent ahead of time,” Tom Marks, executive reviews editor at IGN, tweeted over the weekend. “In fact, WB Games has declined to send IGN codes at all. We'll get our impressions up as soon as we are able after release, thanks for your patience!”
I think publishers punishing an outlet for coverage they don’t like is unequivocally bad. I’ve said it before and professional fans of gaming corporations get very mad about it. No one is “owed” review code they’ll say. Which is true. But also playing favorites is aimed at distorting the reality of a game and its launch by manipulating media coverage. Outlets might think twice about publishing something fair but negative, or self-censor in other ways, like not reporting on things the companies don’t want them to report on. Or more often there will simply be an initial burst of more positive coverage before the more negative assessments can filter in. This was the case with Starfield after Eurogamer, Edge, and others were denied access to the game in time for the review embargo. Also sometimes games are busted at launch, and early reviews are a good way to warn people to wait before checking them out.
That doesn’t seem to be the case with Suicide Squad but it did have to be taken offline within the first two hours of release today because of a bug that autocompleted the game’s story for some players. Ooops! As of sending this newsletter it has been almost six hours since the servers went down for maintenance without a peep from the development team expanding on what happened or when it will be resolved. “At least give ongoing updates. After 6 hours I’d settle for a ‘we are still working on it just a few more hours,’” wrote one player on the official Suicide Squad Discord. Some other fans are claiming this is completely normal and fine.
Another one of the big questions surrounding the game is also what it’s live service microtransaction economy will look like. While seasonal content updates are free, special character costumes for Harley Quinn, King Shark, and the gang all cost money. How much? It looks like $10-11 for each pack of one alternate suit and two additional color variants. What’s the in-game currency called? Luther Coins. Seems appropriate based on how fans talk about microtransactions like they’re part of a super villain plot cooked up in a company boardroom to make players miserable.
AI watch
"Yes, we have to act," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told NBC News when asked about AI-deepfakes of Taylor Swift circulating online. "I think we all benefit when the online world is a safe world. And so I don’t think anyone would want an online world that is completely not safe for both content creators and content consumers. So therefore, I think it behooves us to move fast on this." The head of the company investing billions in rushing generative-AI products to market called for “guardrails that we need to place around the technology.”
Meanwhile the AI-generated “George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead” comedy special that prompted a lawsuit by the late comedian’s estate was apparently written by a human. Billed as the work of a program trained on decades of Carlin’s work, it was apparently just an AI copy of the voice reading a script created by Chad Kultgen. The lawsuit is still moving forward.
It’s more evidence that most AI still kind of sucks. Author Corey Doctorow, who coined the term “enshittification” to describe how everything online is getting worse, tweeted, “We're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that *fails* at doing your job”
And the first dead game of 2024 is Warhaven
The free-to-play medieval warfare game came to Steam in Early Access last September and is already biting the dust. Made by South Korean publisher Nexon, the game sported high-end graphics and a unique roster of warriors reminiscent of a fighting game but left players cold. They complained about a lack of balance and a shift away from big team sizes and complexity after the initial 2021 alpha test.
“To create a game that could be cherished and enjoyed over an extended period, we invested much consideration and effort,” Nexon wrote last week. “However, regrettably, we must bid our sincere farewell as of April 5, 2024. We apologize that we could not come to you with better news.” Payments for the game have been suspended. It will have lasted just seven months before it poofs out of existence.
Some links
Nier director Yoko Taro apparently made the big Nier church hoax by a modder into canon in a recent concert for the game’s music.
Elden Ring lore sanctum SmoughTown on YouTube has released an epic three-part series explaining what everything in the game means. It will only take you 35 hours to watch.
Last week’s PS5 firmware update may have been aimed at blocking cheating. The patch blocked Cronus devices which Call of Duty players and others use to essentially hack their controllers and gain unfair advantages in matches (via CharlieIntel).
Data miners may have discovered Palworld’s version of Mewtwo. The model looks almost identical to the one for Mega Mewtwo Y, an evolution from the Gen 6 games.
Sony is making the creator of the Bloodborne Kart racing game change its name, PC Gamer reports. It’s not surprising, but the PlayStation maker waited an awfully long time to say something. “As much as I pushed for this to be "the meme made real" so to speak, turning this into an original game that we have full creative control over is kind of exciting,” developer Lilith Walther tweeted in response.
Developer Shane Lynch made a Sonic 1 hack that lets player two use a light gun to zap enemies, rings, and power-ups. Gotta shoot fast.
