Game Design is a Tricky Thing
We all know good game design when we see it, but we don’t think too much about, say, the poor members of the design who had to try and meet Peter Molyneux’s ambition and animate 12000 individual leaves on every tree in Fable’s Albion.
Historically, there’s also been an issue with some areas loading incorrectly. Even in recent and well-received games like Final Fantasy VII Remake, there are issues like textures lacking definition until your character gets close enough, or even in some cases entire backgrounds that lack the clear definition we’ve come to expect.
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Project Athia is taking a novel approach to making sure that the game is not only optimized but loads faster. In a new demo showcasing the Luminous Engine we get a glimpse of how this works, with the engine using an intelligent node-based system to automatically lay down houses, rivers, and trees according to the rules. Luckily, each asset looks gorgeous, with the new system even simulating moving shadows and flowing rivers in real time.
Unfortunately, we still don’t know much about Project Athia. We know that it features a woman who gets sucked into a fantasy world and must fight to survive, but it’s heartening to know that Square Enix are using the very latest technology to address problems that have popped up even in their more recent games. We still don’t have any word about the new entries in the Final Fantasy franchise (Although with Tokyo Game Show 2020 around the corner that could change soon), but if the same technology is put into place we can expect some of the cleanest graphics and most detailed environments we’ve ever seen in a Final Fantasy game.
Will you be checking out Project Athia? Let us know down in the comments.