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Square Enix Hiring for Final Fantasy VII Remake in Tokyo

Posted: 12th March 2018 15:49

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A job posting appeared on Friday from Square Enix, looking for "core members" of the Final Fantasy VII Remake project. It appears that this specific listing is for a level planner, laying out areas in the Remake world using Unreal Engine 4. The listing also mentions potential roles for battle planners, designers, and engineers (in this context, likely game developers), with some of those roles coming from inside Square Enix and others being outside hires.

Part of this news was new to me in the case that the development of the game was previously being done outside of Square Enix, by a company called CyberConnect. Now it appears that headquarters has fully assimilated the project, hence the need for some hiring and organizational shifting to accommodate the work.

This news is also a bit illuminating as a look inside the company's practices that I personally haven't seen before. At least for this role, they are not looking for a minimum level of experience, implying that the hiring will be done based mainly on prior portfolio. The salary starts at about USD $34,000 a year, with no upper bound mentioned; that would seem to me like they're willing to bring in a very junior person for this specific role if necessary. I don't know what game devs typically make in Japan, but I do know that you wouldn't get much of a developer here in the States for that money. They also promise a forty-hour work week, which I would find a little difficult to believe in this industry and on a game of this importance.

The other big conclusion you can draw from this is probably a bit more sad - if they're just now bringing the work in house and are hiring for roles like these currently, that would probably indicate that there hasn't been much progress in development yet. I wouldn't hold my breath to see much new this year, though the late-year Tokyo Game Show might be an option.

Source: Siliconera, Kotaku
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Posted: 12th March 2018 16:28

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It's possible that they were not satisfied with the progress the outside company was making on the project in some way, and have shifted development in-house in response to the negative reviews FFV, FF6 and Chrono Trigger's releases have had (i.e., farming development of their older IPs out to smaller companies). They could have looked at the latest build they were doing and said, "Fans have been complaining about these sorts of things, maybe its time to start bringing this stuff in house."

...Does it ever feel like there's a ton of resistance to impulsive decision making in this culture compared to the West? That gels with what I know of them, to be honest. It seems strange that all these years have gone by since they started doing this kind of outsourcing, and they would only now pivot, but I honestly do not have enough knowledge to make a proper assertion about it. But it seems like perhaps its simply taken this long for them to change their mind about it.

But then, I'm so bloody distractable, I change my mind like a pair of socks. smile.gif So what do I know?

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Posted: 12th March 2018 16:49

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Quote (Spooniest @ 12th March 2018 10:28)
It's possible that they were not satisfied with the progress the outside company was making on the project in some way, and have shifted development in-house in response to the negative reviews FFV, FF6 and Chrono Trigger's releases have had (i.e., farming development of their older IPs out to smaller companies). They could have looked at the latest build they were doing and said, "Fans have been complaining about these sorts of things, maybe its time to start bringing this stuff in house."

I think there's probably some level of that involved, but it's also worth noting that some of the games that have been pretty well-received in terms of ports and remakes have also been developed in an outsourced fashion, particularly those ports by Silicon Studios (FF3, FF4 3D, FF9 for Windows). It could also be as simple as the fact that they'd like to do everything in-house and now find they have the money to do so.

I would doubt that they're far enough along to have anything that they could consider a "build," but I could be wrong. It has been a while.

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Posted: 26th April 2018 21:52

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I found this article while looking at Reddit, do you guys really think what this guy is saying is credible? We know that they took development in house, but do you think they scrapped everything? Report – Square Enix abandoned all of CyberConnect 2’s work on FFVII Remake and started fresh

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Posted: 27th April 2018 13:30

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Quote (Harlequin @ 26th April 2018 15:52)
I found this article while looking at Reddit, do you guys really think what this guy is saying is credible? We know that they took development in house, but do you think they scrapped everything? Report – Square Enix abandoned all of CyberConnect 2’s work on FFVII Remake and started fresh

Like I mentioned in chat last night, I'm not sure there's any reason to think the guy isn't credible, but at the same time the definition of "all the work" might be something we don't understand for years.

The article implies that CyberConnect were doing "action gameplay and video quality," which, while obviously a big part of the game, isn't necessarily the worst thing to have to pull back. It'll definitely cause some big delays, but let's face it, Square has a lot invested in both action gameplay and video quality thanks to Final Fantasy XV's extended development, which resulted in Luminous Engine. Maybe the end result of this is that the Remake ends up feeling a bit like XV - that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world!

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