Kingdom Hearts 3 dev Talks Unreal Engine

When Kingdom Hearts 3 was announced, it was being built on Square Enix’s own Luminous Engine. That has since changed, with development switching to Unreal 4.

Tai Yasue, co-director and game designer on Kingdom Hearts 3, doesn’t think it caused any major delays though, and in fact the positives more than outweigh the negatives.

From Eurogamer:

“The technology is moving forward a lot,” he said. “That’s something we’ve learned from the West, I think, in a big way. We’re using Unreal Engine 4 right now, and that really has changed the way we make the game.”

“There was nothing wrong with the Luminous engine at all,” Yasue countered. “We decided that Unreal 4 was right for us. There was a huge network of people actually using it, we were communicating with the Japanese people at Epic a lot – it was like a complete product.

“It was easy to shift to, but at the same time though, there was a lot of stuff specific to Kingdom Hearts that we couldn’t really do on Unreal 4 at first. So we had a lot of co-operation from Epic – they did a lot – at the same time we were doing a lot of customisation of the engine as well, to suit our needs.”

For more on the types of customizations, ditching the E3 trailer and the reasons behind Kingdom Hearts 1.5 and 2.5, read the full article by clicking above.