It was quite a shock at Square Enix’s E3 conference when they dropped a bombshell announcing that Final Fantasy XV and Kingdom Hearts III were both going to be on the Xbox One. Originally believed to have been exclusive to the PlayStation 4, many fans couldn’t believe that Square Enix was making these new titles multi-platform. Whatever the case was for this decision, Tetsuya Nomura, director of Final Fantasy XV and Kingdom Hearts III, didn’t let console bias interfere in his work as he described porting Kingdom Hearts III to both consoles in an interview with Japanese magazine Famitsu.
In the interview, Nomura describes himself as someone who doesn’t prefer either console to the other. He explained how the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 were very similar, especially concerning the use of the new Luminous engine.
We used Luminous as [the] main engine for the game. We’re developing over-spec, so porting to both the PS4 and Xbox One is very similar. In addition to this, in the battle part of the trailer there was an issue with the tool so we had to use pre-rendered video, but if you look at the parts where it is animated in real time there’s no big difference.
Nomura also gave some tidbits on a new shader that will be used for Kingdom Hearts III and how its use will help the development team bring about a high degree of visual variety.
We’re using a visual tool called “Kingdom Shader.” In the original world characters will retain their original textures, but the shader is adjusted by world, so we’ll have an unique visual style in each of Disney’s worlds.
We will see have to wait and see what the Luminous engine and this “Kingdom Shader” will bring to the Kingdom Hearts series when Kingdom Hearts III gets released for the Xbox One and the Playstation 4 consoles.
