The director on Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has revealed what players can expect from the game’s sprawling open-world, revealing the team have taken the world map from the original PSOne version and wrapped it all up in a ‘one-to-one real scale,’ which means players can enjoy ‘one seamless map’ in the upcoming RPG.
Speaking with Press-Start, Naoki Hamaguchi was asked whether everything is interconnected or if players will travel to different regions at any one time on a regular map system. In response, he revealed that everything is ‘included in the same space’ for a seamless experience.
That’s a great question, that’s something I really wanted people to ask me. What we’ve done is we’ve taken the world map from the original Final Fantasy VII, but we’ve created it all in a one-to-one real scale. So all of the dungeons, all of the cities, everything in that world is now included in the same space. One seamless map.
To add a little bit more detail, because that’s how the world is constructed, but a little bit more about how you’ll actually be exploring that world – I think when you look at open world games with really big seamless worlds like that, is there’s only two ways that games let you explore those worlds.
The first one is they throw you into the map and basically from the beginning you can go anywhere, do anything in any order and you’re just free to approach it in any order you want. And in the second kind of game you start in a fairly wide, expansive area and you can explore within that but then as the story progresses as you get more abilities to access different areas [which] will open up and the world just grows and grows until you’ve got the full world in the end, and obviously then you can go back to previously-explored areas and you’ll find maybe new quests, new content which has appeared because of the story progression.
And Rebirth is actually the second type, so when you open up the game there is still a fairly large area to explore at the beginning but then as you continue your quest it expands further and further, you get more regions you can go to and then you at any time you want you can go back to the regions you’ve been to before, because it’s a seamless map, and you can find new quests and new bits of story which have appeared in there as you go along. So that’s generally how not just the world is but how you’ll be exploring it.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is scheduled for release on February 29, 2024 for PS5.
[Source – Press Start]