Final Fantasy XVI Almost Cut Moogles Due To Its Mature Tone

Ultimate Fantasy XVI is out in mere weeks, arriving on PlayStation 5 on June 22. And whereas the sport seems to be prefer it’ll be fairly a little bit of enjoyable to play, questions over the unconventional shift in tone for the sequence stay. And in a latest weblog, the builders shared a number of the ideas, issues, and challenges that went into making this new, darker Ultimate Fantasy. Because it seems, Moogles, the cute sequence staple, proved each stylistically and technically demanding.

Learn Extra: Ultimate Fantasy XVI Sounds Enjoyable, However Sequence Vets May Have It Tough

With a sequence that spans a number of mainline entries and plenty of spin-offs and sequels, Ultimate Fantasy has had many twists and turns through the years. However maybe none have aimed for such a pointy departure from custom like Ultimate Fantasy XVI does. Drawing inspiration from latest hit video games like God of Struggle and darkish fantasy works like HBO’s Sport of Thrones, Ultimate Fantasy XVI is reportedly darkish, grim, edgy, or, because the studio typically categorizes, “mature.” Whereas followers will argue, accurately, that Ultimate Fantasy at all times had tough themes, the video games typically had cheery moments and adorably cute characters. One such instance are the Moogles, chibi-esque magical creatures who kinda appear to be what would occur should you tossed a cat and a teddy bear right into a blender after which caught a pom-pom on its head. Although in line with the sport’s producer, Naoki Yoshida, it wasn’t straightforward maintaining that custom of cute alive.

Yoshida: ‘The moogle was probably the most difficult factor’

Addressing the brand new artwork path, which aspires for a higher stage of realism with out dropping a dream-like, fantasy spirit, Yoshida mentioned that “the best problem, on a basic stage, was the moogle.”

Yoshida elaborated:

The event workforce was frightened that the moogles would each be too tough to create, and wouldn’t match the texture of the world, however our Assistant Producer was like, “I don’t care, simply put them within the sport!”

Ultimately, we took her recommendation and put one within the sport but it surely was much more work than we anticipated.

The moogles weren’t only a stylistic change, as their furry our bodies additionally proved technically difficult with the PS5’s “Efficiency Mode,” which sacrifices enhanced visible results to boost the body fee of the sport to a better and extra constant stage. On that entrance, artwork director Hiroshi Minagawa mentioned:

The largest moogle downside arose after we had been implementing efficiency mode, in the direction of the top of improvement.

Efficiency mode alters the looks of the polygons barely, and we significantly struggled with the moogle…it simply ended up with much less fur.

It type of ended up trying like a hedgehog! We had been like: “Is that this a moogle? Hmmm…”

Finally, we ended up placing in some processing particularly for the moogle.

So there it’s, of us. I firmly count on “Moogle Processing” to be slapped on the entrance of the field.

Learn Extra: Ultimate Fantasy XVI Will Have Excellent Grapes

The rest of the interview with the event workforce spans a number of matters and contains some very fairly screenshots of assorted environments. In contrast to Ultimate Fantasy XV, Ultimate Fantasy XVI gained’t be set in an open world, which is able to hopefully imply extra intentional set items and environments.

I could also be skeptical of this entire “mature tone” enterprise, however rattling these appear to be the sorts of worlds I’ve missed from a mainline Ultimate Fantasy sport.