Welcome to the first Dev Insights article covering Final Fantasy XVI. In this series, we will discuss questions that popped up while playing the game, and potential reasons for the developers making the choices they did.
Disclosure: I did not reach out to the game developers to ask why certain decisions were made. These are simply insights into why teams would make decisions based on my experience leading engineering teams in the video game industry. I have worked with Japanese developers in the past, so it is possible that some of those individuals worked on Final Fantasy 16.
Refer to the Final Fantasy XVI Trophies Guide for details on all 50 trophies in the base game.
The M-Rating
Did you wonder why Final Fantasy XVI is rated M, when previous iterations in the series were lower? I have to admit, this one confuses me. As a developer, we had many discussions for each game on who our target audience was and which rating would fit their expectations and the game/story’s needs. In the few circumstances when we were on the border of two different game ratings, we listed the pros and cons for each.
Development teams with strong, experienced leadership would always state that there needed to be a solid reason for jumping to a higher rating. Doing so would drop the potential sales and size of the target audience. Especially with an intellectual property (IP) that had a track record of lower ratings.
The developers of Final Fantasy XVI clearly embraced the M-rating in most circumstances, but not all. I found it odd that the conversations and cinematics included M-rated content, but the majority of the game did not.
If a game embraces an M-rating, violence and blood would not only show up in the cutscenes, but also in every battle you fight. I did not see blood flying/spattering while playing the bulk of the game. That disconnect tells me that there was potentially a dispute between members of the team working on the game and those working on the story about the content. Another possibility is that they intentionally chose not to include blood in battle for other reasons, like performance.
Level Vs. Open World
Many people online have talked about Final Fantasy XVI as an open world game. Let’s be clear, this is not an open world game. It is utilizing a very simple level building technique that is sometimes referred to as hub-spoke. Essentially you have an area of the world where you can run around to a limited extend, the hub. Hubs are connected together by a series of corridor sections of the level, the spokes. Each hub can have one or more spokes connected to it.
In a true open world game, you can travel in almost any direction at high speeds. The player is given full freedom to go where they want to go. Examples of games with real open worlds are the Assassin’s Creed, Forza Horizon, and Far Cry series. In the Forza Horizon series, you can drive at 200+ mph without breaking the streaming system.
Why is the hub-spoke model commonly used in game development? There are a few reasons for this.
Memory
The first is the limited memory that the game allocates for level content (geometry, textures, collision data, etc.). The less memory the team gives to this pool of resources, the smaller the hub areas will be and the less populated they will be with vegetation and cosmetic variations. As you travel around the levels in Final Fantasy 16, you will notice that the hubs scarcely have vegetation and the spokes are quite long.
Streaming
Another reason for choosing to use this method is the efficiency of the game’s ability to stream data. Meaning how fast can they load the next hub before reaching it. Streaming data in a video game is the process of reading data from the drive/disc and processing it for the game to use.
The spokes are added as time-fillers to give the game engine sufficient time to load in the assets needed for the next hub. Unfortunately, they can’t predict player behavior, so they need to wait until the player is far enough along the spoke that they can freely remove the last hub without risking the player changing their mind and running back to it.
Ultimately, it comes down to a combination of the power of the game engine and the development team’s ability to utilize it without geometry and textures popping in. The responsibility is split between the programmers optimizing the power of the engine, the designers deciding what to place in each hub, and the artists building each area with the fewest polygons that don’t compromise the visuals fidelity.
Since Final Fantasy XVI is utilizing the hub-spoke model and the spoke/corridor sections are long, they either couldn’t squeeze more power from the engine or the content team couldn’t improve the performance of the levels.
Slow Doors & Elevators
While exploring dungeons in Final Fantasy XVI, did you feel frustrated by and wonder why you needed to not only open doors with X, but also hold R2? Have you played other games with a similar mechanic, like the Gears of War series? Or, have you played games with excessively long elevator sequences, like Mass Effect? This game development technique also ties into the streaming capabilities of the game engine.
Often these door/elevator mechanics are employed to let the game engine know that you are committed to moving forward and will not turn around and head back the way you came anytime soon. This allows the engine to remove the previous level and character/enemy data from memory. It also gives the game additional time to load in the next room or series of rooms and characters.
If the level streaming data is grouped and packed efficiently, many of these stalls in game play can be avoided. Instead of waiting for the game to load in the next 2-3 rooms, they can separate the first room and only wait for it to be loaded. While you are fighting enemies in that room, the engine can stream in the next rooms without a break in the flow of game play.
Travel Speed in Towns
Did you get frustrated and question why you couldn’t ride your chocobo through towns or that your running/walking speeds were reduced in areas of the game? This is another common design decision that ties back to the robustness and power of the game engine.
Most towns in games, usually include the addition of buildings and NPCs. If you are on a development team working with a specific budget for content, you will need to reduce the speed the player can traverse the area if you want to increase the density of the polygons. This is the primary reason for slowing the player down. The faster you can travel through an area, the less densely populated it can be. In Final Fantasy XVI, this is manifest through making the player dismount their chocobo or by noticeably slowing them down.
In an open world racing game, like Forza Horizon, they mask these slowdowns by adding more turns on the roads. If you are on a long, straight road you can travel up to max speed (200+ mph). If you stopped to look around, you would see that there is probably less vegetation and set dressing on the sides of the road. In contrast, if you’re driving through a windy mountain pass, there is likely many trees and vegetation nearby, since the game engine has more time to load in and render additional content.
No Mini-Map
While exploring the world of Final Fantasy XVI, did you ever look for a mini-map to help you know when and where to turn in order to reach your destination? Mini-maps have become a common staple in games with large environments. Some games will include a mini-map or at least a way to set waypoints that will guide you to your destination, like the recent Star Wars: Jedi Survivor.
From a development perspective, there are a few potential reasons for the game omitting a mini-map. The first is simply a design decision. Some designers look at the type of game they are making and choose not to include a mini-map if it wouldn’t make sense for the character to know where they are in real-time. In many cases, the decision not to use a mini-map is technical.
CPU Cost
Mini-maps can be extremely expensive to update and render on the UI depending on the capabilities of the game engine and how they are constructed. The lazy way to update a mini-map is to update the player’s position and orientation along with all other nearby trackable objects every frame. This can reek havoc on the game’s frame rate.
To offset the performance cost, many teams will setup the mini-map to update every x number of frames depending on what kind of hit the game’s performance can take. More flexible code bases will adjust the number of frames between updates based on the performance of the previous frame. For example, if the target frame rate for a game is 30 frames per second (33.3 milliseconds) and the previous frame completed under budget, they may be able to squeeze in an additional update to the map. On the other hand, if the previous frame was over budget, they may need to delay updating the map until later, but within a set threshold.
Another optimization method is to reduce the number of dynamic objects on the map. Often pick-ups, dropped items, enemies, and objectives all show up and clutter the mini-map.
GPU Cost
Drawing the user interface elements is another factor. Every game engine has a different way to prioritize and render elements on the UI. It is easy to add elements to most UI systems, but an element as complex as a mini-map can be detrimental to the game’s performance if done wrong. I worked on an open world game where the first iteration of the mini-map took 40 milliseconds to update and render. That’s 120% of the frame budget for a 30 fps game or 240% of the budget for a game targeting 60 fps.
Simply choosing not to include a mini-map saves the development team the grind needed to make it run efficiently just before shipping the game.
Lack of Armor Visuals
Many role playing games, including some Final Fantasy games, modify the player’s visuals based on the armor they choose to wear. Final Fantasy 16 only allows the player to choose a belt, bracers, and accessories. None of which alter the player’s appearance. Why did the developers choose to do this?
Development Costs
Designing variations of armor and allowing the player to mix and match pieces is expensive to do. The cost is split between concepting the armor types, building the assets, making sure they don’t clip into the models and animate correctly, and ensuring they don’t kill the frame rate. Additional armor options also increases the complexity of the inventory and gear menus.
Story Telling
Final Fantasy is a story-driven game. As such, when given a choice, the developers likely chose what was best for the story over game play. By limiting the player outfits to one per time period, they simplified the work needed on the team to progress the story in cutscenes. We’ll go more into detail on this in the next section.
Types of Cinematic
Game developers have multiple ways of moving the story along and engaging players. Primarily these are done through a combination of the following:
- Pre-Rendered Cinematics
- In-Game Cutscenes
- Still Images
- Conversations with NPCs
- Banter or Dialog
Each of these methods varies in the quality of the visuals as well as the cost to develop them. Most games will deploy a few of these. The development team for Final Fantasy 16, decided to use all 5.
Pre-Rendered Cinematics
Game teams will choose to use pre-rendered cinematics when they want to have full control over the visuals and flow of the story being told. Choosing this path, gives the creatives freedom to progress the story without worrying about the limitations of the game engine. Since the game essentially plays back a video, it is significantly cheaper at runtime to use this method.
The cost of building these is significantly more expensive monetarily and in terms of time spent. It’s not uncommon for game teams to spend $100,000 – $1,000,000 per minute for these. Making changes late in development can set the team back weeks or even months. Occasionally last minute changes to a story will result in scrapping a pre-rendered scene for one of the other options.
In-Game Cutscenes
Moving the story along by using the game’s assets is one of the most common methods. Utilizing this method ensures that the player’s character that shows up in the story matches the one they have been playing. This is especially important in games where the player may have visually different weapons, armor, or items equipped. When the character in the story reflects the one you have been playing, it can feel more immersive.
Some game teams are able to pull off a combination of pre-rendered videos with slight modifications using in-game content, like weapon swaps.
Still Images
Using a series of still, 2D images with dialog in the background is one of the cheapest ways to move a story along without incurring the cost of the previous methods. The simplest of these include a slide show of images with text narration. On the high end, games will include 2D images with moderate animations and voice narration. Final Fantasy 16 uses the latter when Vivien gives you updates on the world.
Conversations with NPCs
Engaging in conversation with characters in the world is one of the most common methods utilized by RPGs. They usually involve talking with one or more NPCs or party members. The cheapest versions of these include text dialog with no branching options. These range up to fully voiced conversations with multiple branches based on choices the player makes. Final Fantasy XVI mostly stays in the middle ground. They have flat conversations that are fully voiced.
Banter or Dialog
This is the easiest and cheapest method. While playing the game, you will hear one or more characters make comments about where they are or what is happening around them. The cost and turn around time on these is significantly lower than any other method. If done right, the player receives useful information. When done wrong, you hear the same lines of dialog repeated over-and-over again.
Quantity of Cutscenes
Every video game has its own focus. Many games focus on moment-to-moment game play and spend little time developing a story. On the other hand, Final Fantasy games are heavily focused on the story. This is why Final Fantasy XVI has well over 10 hours of pre-rendered or in-game cinematics. The developers intentionally want to tell a story and involve the players, but the story is most important. This is also why there are very few choices that can be made by the player to modify details. All player choices are ignored and do not change the outcome of the story which explains the final shot in the post-credits scene.
That’s it for the Final Fantasy XVI Dev Insights. If you had any other questions while you played the game, feel free to post them below, and I will try to answer them to the best of my ability.
Please post any questions or comments below. Thanks.