Star Ocean 4’s Engine Is The Evolved Infinite Undiscovery Engine
One of Square Enix‘s most significant RPG‘s hitting early next year is Star Ocean: The Last Hope for the Xbox 360. It was one of the most popular demo kiosks at the Tokyo Game Show and is looking to be a hit.
Star Ocean 4 producer, Yoshinori Yamagishi, spoke about the creative and technical evolution of the Star Ocean series.
The game features the same engine as Infinite Undiscovery, but is a completely different engine from Star Ocean 3.
“First of all, the biggest difference from the previous title, Star Ocean 3, is that they have created a totally new original engine for the platform.
Right after finishing Star Ocean 3, tri-Ace started to work on this new engine; the same engine is used for Infinite Undiscovery. In Star Ocean it has been evolving.”
The technology has evolved from Infininte Undiscovery. As you can see the character models, graphics, and frame rate are much better. tri-Ace wants to use this engine on future titles as well.
The engine used in Infinite Undiscovery and Star Ocean 4 actually began development right after Star Ocean 3 was released. The engine keeps evolving, from the graphics board to the CPU and more.
The Star Ocean series was originally created by tri-Ace, not Square Enix. They created the series because “it’s something that tri-Ace wanted to create, and it’s what they have been creating because they wanted to.”
So far, tri-Ace has not created any PlayStation 3 games, but Yamagishi tells us that “I have heard that tri-Ace has already created this engine as a multiplatform engine.”
[Interview: Star Ocean 4’s Creative And Technical Evolution]