That would depend on what kind of resources they are willing to pump into making it in the first place. It looks the part of a AAA game, but it's obviously not being produced like one. If it were, they'd hold off until it was completed for release. Obviously the more money you throw at it, the faster it gets done. It's not exactly as if they are working with the same technology they had back in '96/'97 either. Engines like UE4 have amazingly powerful tools that can block in huge landscapes in minutes. The tools allow you to literally paint in huge swaths of landscape, or cityscape, that are editable so that you can just drag and drop assets around into the scene in as many instances as you wish. If you've all your assets in place, and you follow a design, one person could build the city of Midgar in days, and it would be free to explore, hardware permitting that is. It's just a matter of building everything, design, then optimising it all so that it runs on a PS4 at acceptable performance. Those are the time consuming parts. When you look at some of the open world games already out there, the size isn't a barrier for developers now because of these modern game engines. There's a new Assassin's Creed or Far Cry game now almost on a biennial basis because they're being built with similar technology. For something like a remake for this, from top to bottom, we'd more than likely be waiting at least that long, but at least you'd get a fully fledged game. Just look at the HL2 episode 2 fiasco. Development could halt between each installment. You wouldn't want that again.
It's one of those things where we can't jump to conclusions on whether or not if this move is best for the game or whether it simply is a cash grab. It is a strange move but to give credit to SE, they didn't waste time in explaining their reasoning behind choosing this path. It's at least consistent with what they've always said in the past, that they don't think they could ever remake FF7 as a full game because of it's scale.
I think the difference between Assassin's Creed and Far Cry games is that their content is designed from scratch to work in a large scale open world, similar mission types, repeatable enemies etc. It means they have a much more streamlined process in to designing and programming their game. When it comes to FF7, the scope of game design is humongous, nothing compared to any game out there now. The amount of narrative if the story above anything else. They've got to model each character, design a large amount of animations, real-time cutscenes. So I believe the issue why they're doing multiple parts is simply because budget wise and financial wise they can't really afford to develop it for a long time and then release it as one release. This may be the only way for this to be possible as Nomura did say that if they made the game as one whole game, they'd have to cut a lot more than they wanted to.
Is it a bad thing? It really depends on many things for me.
- The amount of content in each part. Will there be enough at bare minimum, to be worth paying the price of whatever part it will be. I full expect there to be more content within each part of the game but will it be enough to be worthwhile?
- Can they get the story to fit around separate parts? Will I come to the end of part 1, feel perfectly satisfied that I've enjoyed a full-fledged adventure within that part.
- Will it affect the design of the game? Will the game become more linear as a result or will they tie each part together to allow the player to go back between games.
The actual changing of the combat system doesn't really bother me all that much. The turn-based ATB system was great for the time, but they're wanting to give older players and newer player a fresh experience. If it's good, then that's all I'm actually bothered about. That all remains to be seen.
I think overall, we need to see more info as to whether it was REALLY necessary.
