Final Fantasy 16 will mark a technological departure for Square Enix, with its team recently revealing they made an unexpected engine choice early on in the game's development. This bit of insight into the upcoming title arrived as part of Square Enix's latest marketing push that saw some of its key officials reveal plenty of new information about their next AAA RPG, including the fact that the Final Fantasy 16 cutscenes are longer than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.
When it comes to the Final Fantasy series, Square Enix hasn't been overly committed to a particular engine in recent history. Over the last 10 years, the company released a Crystal Tools engine-powered Final Fantasy 14, as well as Final Fantasy 15—which leveraged the in-house Luminous Engine later used in Forspoken—and two Unreal Engine 4 games in the form of Final Fantasy 7 Remake and a remaster of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7.
This pattern is now confirmed to be continuing with Final Fantasy 16, as Square Enix revealed the upcoming RPG uses neither Unreal nor Luminous Engine in a recent interview with YouTuber Skill Up. The company refused to elaborate on the matter, presumably as it's planning to talk more about the game's technologies closer to its release. This info came from the same interview during which Final Fantasy 16 producer denounced the term "JRPG" which is often attached to Square Enix's games.
The follow-up to Final Fantasy 15 will hit the market almost seven years after its predecessor, assuming no further delays take place. And while development cycles have naturally gotten longer over the years as modern games became more complex to create, the now-plausible possibility that Final Fantasy 16 uses a new in-house engine would still go a long way toward explaining the longest ever gap between two mainline installments in the iconic franchise.
Square Enix's choice of an engine could also heavily impact Final Fantasy 16 porting times, though that's not to say the AAA RPG is expected to move beyond the PS5 in the near future. While its producer Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida is on record as saying he'd like to bring the game to more systems eventually, he also recently confirmed that fans will have to wait a long time for a Final Fantasy 16 PC port. Not least because Sony has a timed exclusivity deal with Square Enix, although the need to prioritize the PS5 during development might not necessarily complicate porting given the architectural similarities between Sony's latest console and modern PCs.
Final Fantasy 16 launches June 22 for PlayStation 5.