Final Fantasy XV Development News By Environment Artist

Some fresh Final Fantasy XV development news has been revealed as Square Enix itself interviewed the game’s Environment Artist, Hiromitsu Sasaki.

Sasaki’s full interview was translated into English on Square Enix’s official blog. He gave some interesting insight on the game’s development so far plus some other interesting details on the level design in general.

Here’s what Sasaki has been working on now: We are fine tuning the lighting and textures in the dungeons right now. It links directly with improving the final visual quality. We are really tweaking how things look, such as the balance between light and shadows, making sharp rocks look like they would hurt if you touched them or surfaces to look slippery etc.

He also mentioned that players can fight on different types of terrain: For example the slope angles. When you are placing monsters in the world, most of the time they will be fighting on flat terrain, but for FFXV you can also have battles taking place on some pretty severe terrain, such as steep slopes. In that sense FFXV really pushes the rules of the environment so there are heated debates on how those rules should handle things, right down to deciding on a single angle etc.

He further went on to say that he and the other developers took many real life photographs and actually scouted locations as inspiration for the levels in Final Fantasy XV. The reason why they spent so much time photographing objects like rocks is because they wanted everything to look and feel authentic.

Final Fantasy XV will be released later this year for the PS4 and Xbox One consoles. A release date for the game will be revealed during a special event happening on March 30th.