A Game Development Blog

GDC 08: The Technology of Final Fantasy XIII

 Like most Japanese developers, Square Enix has traditionally built the technology for each new game from scratch. While middleware solutions like the Unreal Engine have long been a favored solution for Western developers, the Square approach has been to tackle every new project from the ground up. But this is changing as development costs skyrocket; the upcoming The Last Remnant will be built on Unreal 3, and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King for WiiWare was deliberately conceived to test the feasibility of building a game almost entirely with middleware tools and scripts. Even more ambitious is Final Fantasy XIII’s proprietary White Engine, now called Crystal Tools.

As Square Enix’s first companywide technology platform, it’s a full suite of authoring tools and runtime libraries for PlayStation 3, PC and Xbox 360. (There’s even a bit of support for Wii in place, although the latter is still in development.) Not only is Crystal Tools the power behind FFXIII, but also Final Fantasy Versus XIII and the company’s as-yet unannounced next-generation MMO RPG as well.

aku Murata, Square Enix’s general manager of research and development, spoke today at GDC about the evolution of this new technology. According to Murata, Crystal Tools’ evolution began with 1997’s Final Fantasy Tactics for PlayStation, which was created with the aid of the company’s first real-time development preview system. Murata was impressed by the efficacy of these tools, and took them a step further for 2000’s Vagrant Story, his first game in real-time 3D; it featured a unified tool to create cut-scenes and preview textures. Murata’s next major project was PlayOnline, the company’s online game technology (primarily used for Final Fantasy XI) — the company’s first attempt at creating a common platform. Then came Final Fantasy XII, whose sheer enormity of FFXII required the creation of separate, specialized tool sets.

Murata realized that standardizing the technology behind Square Enix’s game development was a matter of necessity as budgets and requirements soar in the high-definition era and spearheaded the creation of an internal R&D group. The White Engine was announced before the advent of the R&D division, but soon after evolved into Crystal Tools. It’s a development environment specifically tailored to Square Enix’s trademark big-budget style, notably allowing fine control over character close-ups, lighting and cut-scene editing. We sat down with Murata after his panel to discuss both the philosophy and the specifics of Crystal Tools.

Taku Murata: Compared to FFXII, in terms of concept they’re similar, but the technology is very different, because the current generation requires a higher level of quality. The data volume is much higher.

1UP: Crystal Tools represents something new for Square Enix, doesn’t it? This sort of technology middleware is more popular among Western developers.

TM: Well, the American and Japanese markets are very different. In Japan, it used to be that the PS2 was huge, so as long as everything was being developed for PS2 everything was OK. But in the west, there were more hardware platforms to consider, such as Xbox and PC, and developers were forced to account for all of them. So in that sense, the western market has been more advanced than Japan. Since PS3’s arrival, the market has become more multiplatform. Here, I have a slide that I didn’t get to use in my presentation — as you can see, in 2003 our top games were mostly PS2. But in 2007, the popular hardware in Japan was DS and Wii while the western market was more geared toward Xbox 360 and PC.

1UP: So what we’re seeing in Crystal Tools is something more Japanese developers will be doing?

TM: Definitely — anyone interested in competing in the worldwide market needs to considering a cross-platform approach. But it requires a large investment, so I don’t know that all Japanese developers will be able to follow in our footsteps.

1UP: Crystal Tools is developed internally, but in the west licensing others’ engines is also popular. Did you consider using middleware instead of building your own solution?

TM: We’ve considered licensing out Crystal Tools, but this brings with it certain considerations like supporting licensors…which isn’t something we want to deal with at the moment.

1UP: Actually, I mean — did you consider licensing someone else’s technology?

TM: Actually, The Last Remnant uses the Unreal Engine, because we felt it was a good choice for a game targeted to the western market. However, for Final Fantasy XIII we chose to build our own tool set to reflect the culture of our creators. Crystal Tools is a means for our developers to express themselves. Ultimately, licensing isn’t out of the question… it really just depends on the title.

1UP: I’m glad you mentioned Last Remnant… that seems like an Enix game. Even though the company is “Square Enix” I feel like you still create “Square” games and “Enix” games. Will Crystal Tools be used to build Enix games, or is it something specifically designed for games like Final Fantasy?

TM: Of course, Crystal Tools can be used for those games, but as you say, it’s very “Square-like.” An internal tool, really. Most Square games are developed inside the company, while Enix games are outsourced to other developers, so Crystal Tools wouldn’t be appropriate for them.

1UP: I also noticed that the evolutionary path of Crystal Tools consisted of games and projects you worked on with Yasumi Matsuno. Is that simply because these games are your own frame of reference, or was this team simply ahead of the curve?

TM: Well, Matsuno’s group, and particularly [art director] Hiroshi Minagawa, who is very influential… well, even myself, as I was the main programmer on those titles. We all share the same influences, so in a sense it’s a very traditional, Square-like approach to production. But the process of Crystal Tools’ creation has been very long, and we’ve been part of this paradigm shift, which you can see beginning with Tactics’ real-time preview tool.

1UP: The most important aspect of Crystal Tools is that it’s a multi-platform environment. How easy it is to move a game from one platform to another? Say, hypothetically, you wanted to port Final Fantasy XIII from PS3 to Xbox 360… how difficult would that be?

TM: Traditionally at Square we used to target just to a single platform and work deeply within that system, so it was very difficult to move a game to another system. But I’d say it’s easier now. You still have factors like video memory and processing cores, so you have to adjust things like texture sizes. But Crystal Tools is a shared library, so it’s much easier now. Those factors are already accounted for by the libraries, and it’s possible to develop for different systems in parallel.

1UP: You mentioned at the panel that Nintendo’s Wii is partially supported by Crystal Tools, but not completely. Why is Wii development lagging so far behind?

TM: The differences between Wii and 360, PS3 and PC are much bigger, and we’re just not at the point in development where Wii support is completely ready.

1UP: Well, contrast Crystal Tools with Mr. Tsuchida’s WiiWare team — do you think what they’re doing with Crystal Chronicles, using NintendoWare and third-party scripts, is a better fit for the platform?

TM: It really all comes down to the title in question and what you’re doing with it. For instance, hypothetically — don’t take this seriously! — if you wanted to create Final Fantasy XIII for PS3, Xbox 360, PC and Wii simultaneously, you’d need to use Crystal Tools.

1UP: Why “Crystal Tools”? And what happened to the White Engine? Was it absorbed? Abandoned?

TM: No, no, the White Engine wasn’t abandoned. Actually, that was just a code name we used. Eventually we decided to give it a name that was more representative of Square. “Crystal” sounded nice, because it’s something that’s clear but can also be full of color — and, of course, there’s the Final Fantasy connection. So White Engine was version 1.0, which was released last year, and for version 1.1 we gave it the new name and a logo.

1UP: The presentation seemed to focus on tools for character creation and cut-scene direction. Is Crystal Tools also for combat and field graphics?

TM: Actually, one of the slides I presented shows field graphic elements being edited. Sorry, maybe I just focused too much on how cool the cut-scenes are! But yes, it’s a visual framework for creating a whole game.

1UP: Crystal Tools encompasses everything except handheld and mobile games. Do you think there’s a need for a similar sort of framework for these platforms?

TM: Well, Crystal Tools was mainly designed for large-scale development. That’s why it targets PS3 and 360 — systems where large volumes of data are used. For smaller systems, something like this wouldn’t really be necessary. The tool is usable, but we don’t have the libraries in place for portable systems and don’t really see the need to go in that direction.

1UP: Were there any advantages to the old way of doing things, building each project from the ground up?

TM: Well, this framework is expandable, which is very useful as we have many different teams inside Square, and as I mentioned before Crystal Tools is tailored to our culture. So even if there’s something that the tools don’t do, something that doesn’t exist in the current release, we can always add new abilities to account for these needs. In that sense, rather than building each title from scratch, we can continue to build better things on top of what we already have in place.

1UP: How has the parallel development of Crystal Tools impacted the development cycle of FFXIII or Versus XIII?

TM: Well, Crystal Tools will allow the development of games to be shortened, although in the end we’ll probably be directing our energies in new ways, such as creating better visuals — so in fact it may not shorten the development time required for our games. As for FFXIII, we’ve been working with the team as we develop Crystal Tools; while one group has focused on one thing we’ve focused on the other. So no, I don’t think developing this system has complicated or delayed the game at all.