Square Enix, that’s who. With an impressive tech demo showing off its next-gen prowess, the Japanese outfit has plenty to say about the future of HD games. Michael French investigates
IN THE AGE of Unity and Unreal, games developers collaboratively came together during the current generation to solve the secret of how wild ideas can become a tangible product. The solution has been third-party tools,
used by studios of all sizes. Few people grow their own tech, and the biggest hits these days are often built on someone else’s. As the next-generation of games hardware vaguely looms over the current fractured
20 | JULY 2012
market – consisting of a console- smartphone-handheld-browser-PC-tablet mix few would have foreseen three years ago – most of us are expecting more of the same when new games hardware is on the market. Studios can’t create technology for all of this alone, right? Square Enix thinks otherwise. At E3 it
unveiled its long-in-gestation Luminous Studio engine, a new proprietary technology built in-house.
Everything about Luminous seems to run
contrary to the direction triple-A games are going. It’s not for sale to third parties. Square Enix thinks it can use this to form a cross-studio internal technology base. And it reckons it can do that by either keeping team sizes the same, or at least empowering its artists and coders in the face of spiraling asset demands. Oh, and it will also rescue its ailing Final Fantasy series by living up to the dream offered by the franchises luscious cut-scenes.