The wait for Kingdom Hearts III has been lengthy and ongoing, and the latest twist involves Square Enix moving the game from its internal Luminous Engine to Unreal Engine 4.

Siliconera translated director Tetsuya Nomura's thoughts on the surprising change during a recent interview with Famitsu.

“The [development] is going steadily and according to the schedule,” he said. "Due to having switched to Unreal Engine 4 for various reasons, we’re having trouble on some parts as far as rendering goes, but with help from the folks at Epic Games, progress is going safely."

Long rumored, Kingdom Hearts III was finally announced at E3 2013 for Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Though we've heard sporadic updates about the game since then, we have no idea when Kingdom Hearts III might actually be finished. Nomura is famous for taking his time, but he recently removed himself from the director's chair on Final Fantasy XV, signaling Kingdom Hearts III may be his priority going forward.

Well this is unexpected.

Well, I'm just glad they've finally (publicly) got a game plan going for it's development.

Weird. Is it common for Japanese developers to use Unreal? I don't recall hearing about it that often.

This is pretty remarkable if you ask me.

Should we be expecting a PC release as well?

"We jumped engines mid-development" is always a pretty scary thing to hear about a game.

Can't wait! Played every KH game up to this point so I think I'm one of those few who's up to date and understands where the story is at this point.

Can I active reload my Keyblade?

"AW COME ON!"

In past interviews they've talked a lot about having issues with their engine, so this isn't super surprising. They made some pretty tall claims about what their engine could do (i.e. change the lighting so that the look of each world matched the art style of the source material), so I'm sure it gave them a lot of trouble. Still, a bit of a bummer that they spent so much time wrestling with their engine only to ultimately ditch it. Hopefully now they can really get development moving and maybe get this game out in my lifetime.

At least they have a direction. Also, they told their audience something for once.

I only want to know if it will be good like the first one or shit like the others. But at least they are working on it I guess

So what game is actually using the Luminous engine? FF15? Anything else? At least Konami's Fox Engine, which is most of the reason MGS5 is taking so long, is being used in other stuff that isn't MGS5.

Maybe this'll speed up development for them once the transfer is ironed out? Either way, best of luck to 'em on getting this thing done.

This is indeed quite unexpected, especially since they have the still unchristened Luminous engine. I can only assume the pipeline was more flexible and quicker for the not fully realistic look they were aiming for.

this means that the game is coming in 2017/2018

@loktarogar: FFXIV:ARR also uses the Luminous Engine in its code.

What I wouldn't give for John DiMaggio to voice Sora. I'd gladly pay full price on each game for it.

so square goes onto ANOTHER engine, it worked so well for Duke Nukem.

@crithon: DNF's problems ran deeper than that. It wasn't the engine changes that were the problem, but the horrendous project management that led to multiple engine changes and constant feature creep. George Broussard was a poor leader with terrible decision-making skills and no one in a position to tell him no.

So we will get it in 2022 instead of 2025. Great!

@hassun: I think the movement to co-PC development has finally hit Japan. Konami and Square Enix both are embracing PC-versions of all the mainstay franchises, and it seems like an easy way to expand the base audience for their games. I'd be shocked if there wasn't one at this point.

that's kind of a big Playstation exclusive, and those never come out on PC

Not surprised at this news given the earlier reports of Square Enix wanting to use more 3rd party engines instead of building a new engine in-house for every game in an effort to control costs. Probably a smart move.

This means it's going to be at least 2016 doesn't it? =(

That's pretty rare. Square licensed Unreal Engine 3 for The Last Remnant. They had hope the experiment would lead to an easy multi-platform future for all their games, but the development actually turned kind of hellish. All of Unreal's support documents were only in English, and Epic didn't have any Japanese speaking staff on their support team. (This is at least what I recall from some VG site article from years ago.)

Since then Square Enix has absorbed Eidos, and maybe Epic gives more of a crap about Asian licensees now, considering their new Chinese management. Maybe there won't be such a language problem this time... or it will be another messy, long development.

That's not very good news for Luminous, I had high hopes for that engine.

@cloudymusic: Well Square Enix's last effort with using Unreal for an RPG let's just say didn't turn out too well. See The Last Remnant and its insane technical issues for more. Short story is that the Xbox 360 version pretty much didn't work, which lead Square Enix to completely cancel the PS3 version, with the PC version the only version that actually functioned as advertised, assuming you had a (for the time) beast of a PC where you could simply brute force your way past the technical issues. It's a shame because the game itself is actually pretty good. But not many people play their JRPG's on the PC and the Xbox 360 version just isn't worth messing with. But, hey, with Unreal 4 and the ridiculous amounts of RAM on the PS4 they don't have to worry about actually making their world stream in correctly so hopefully there will be no problems.

@loktarogar said:

FF15 only uses the lighting code from Luminous. Everything else is custom, presumably the same code they used when they decided to dump crystal tools.

That is not really good news for the game. The last story I remember of a game changing engines within development was Duke Nukem, and they are rarely associated with quality products.

I guess it is good news that we got any news about the progress of develompent, but not such good news that those are "we had to scrap a lot of work and go back a few spaces, but we are making progress..."

KH3 is not a PS exclusive.

@hermes: Pretty sure Duke Nukem Forever problems are not exactly attribuited to a especific engine change (more like, insane lack of direction and management)

KHIII is not even past PreProduction right now...

@soundlug: Not to a specific one... but the main issue its long development is attributed to is its mercurial director continuously demanding to scrap years-worth of work, several times, because he wanted it to use the latest technology available.

Perhaps I am being overly cynical, but having a highly anticipated game last seen more than a year ago in a Sony E3 conference being completely silent and having no news besides "we have nothing new to show, but we would like to assure you we are working on it" gives me bad memories.

@hermes: All they showed last year was a teaser of super-early work. They're likely still early enough in development that an engine change won't impact the game in any meaningful negative way.

@manbot47: KH3 is also coming to XBONE.

There's no mismanagement like Squeenix mismanagement.

I wonder how much of this game's development has been spent having to retool and refactor for each engine they've been on. I think they've been through at least 3.

Its the new shadow of the colossus great !

Reminds me of a certain person with a belt obsession...

@hailinel: Did you know DN4 actually had at one point Star Wars prequel artists work on concept art for it..... think about it.

@paulunga: Though Versus XIII's development dragged, there's nothing to indicate the fault of any issues experienced. And even then, they righted that ship. Also, there are people at Square Enix capable of telling him no.

I thought square made their own engine? Kind of strange they would abandon it.

Or maybe this is evident of shifting priorities?

Can't wait for to be reunited with my favourite disney characters; Mickey, Donald and ＭＡＲＣＵＳ ＦＥＮＩＸ

Sweet, UE4 is a swell engine.

That said, having just migrated a tiny tiny tiny project to UE4 I can't even imagine what their To Do list looks like now.

The Gears of War jokes are confusing me, considering how ubiquitous Unreal Engine is at this point. It's been used in several hundred games of all types of genres including JRPGs.

Kind of unrelated, but I have no idea how Klepek chooses stories to write about. This kind of story is expected on sites like Polygon or Destructoid, but they're almost entirely news focused. Why does this story deserve a story, but other stuff doesn't? This is hardly going to have huge impacts on the games industry, and it's not like Patrick did any research into the story outside of what I could find on another site.

@brodehouse: Sora will just be running around with a do-rag on screaming, "God damn it, Goofy!!"

So we can expect a Winter 2016 release. Got it.

I hope they can hold the reins on this. A next gen game on a next gen engine could mean the wait was worth it. As if the HD remakes aren't gorgeous enough.

Well my only experience with JRPGs using Unreal engine are Lost Odyssey and The Last Remnant and it certainly didn't do any favors for those games.

Put me under intrigued

So that means there's camera script is already in there, right? No real way to fuck it up unless they decided to rewrite shittier camera.

What? KH1 had a bad camera but 2 totally fixed that.