Dragon Quest XI Staff Discuss Using Unreal Engine

In the latest issue of Weekly Famitsu, Dragon Quest XI: In Search of Departed Time producer Yosuke Saito, game designer Yuji Horii, and director Takeshi Uchikawa laid out various new details about the upcoming role-playing game. A lot of the conversation revolved around the unique challenges of launching on both PlayStation 4 and 3DS. Other topics discussed in the interview include how they would like to showcase the PlayStation 4 technical test of Dragon Quest III,  and the decision to not have voice acting.

Here are some of the most interesting details (summarized via Gematsu)

• Since the hardware specifications of PlayStation 4 and 3DS are completely different, it was easy to draw out the benefits of each hardware.
• Originally, all of the music was supposed to be completely new, but since there was a lot of homage material, they also used music from previous entries in the series.
• The theme of Dragon Quest XI is the “chased hero.” As for what kind of existence the hero is, that will be answered through the story.
• They paid mind “not to create any useless characters.” Since they are really delving properly into the characters, they hope that players take a liking to the entire party.
• Whether or not to include voice acting was a significant debate during development. They wanted to protect the traditional style of Dragon Quest. Voice-over recording would take considerable time, and would make it difficult to change the script later on. Horii was also fixated on seeing the story through to the very end this time. Horii did tuning and changed details of the dialogue until the end of the end.
• In creating Dragon Quest XI in Unreal Engine 4, they first did a technical test. Dragon Quest III‘s continent of Aliahan (although not in its entirety) was chosen as the subject. In other words, they created a PlayStation 4 version of Dragon Quest III. They made models of the hero, his mother, the Warrior, Priest, and Mage, Aliahan castle and the castle town, as well a pointlessly high-quality king, and verified the size of the map. The test version took a significant amount of time and labor, but was exciting and fruitful. Since it was only a technical test, they did not do any optimization. If the opportunity presents itself, they would like to showcase the PlayStation 4 technical test of Dragon Quest III.

There’s a lot of other details revealed over at Gematsu, so definitely give it a read to learn more.

Dragon Quest XI: In Search of Departed Time releases later this week, July 29, 2017, in Japan. A North American release date hasn’t been determined yet.

[Source: Weekly Famitsu via Gematsu]