>Chief visual and technical officer Glenn Entis mentions how important motion graphics are in a game for the player to feel a realistic game.

In his eyes, a game character can have many polygons to be detailed and photorealistic, but without good animations, they will feel dead and inhuman. He then takes the next generation of Final Fantasy as an example for this.

In Final Fantasy, the modelling fidelity was really better than the motion fidelity. In other words, when you looked at the models, they signalled an expectation to the audience that the motion couldn’t deliver upon.lockquote>

Now, we can all hate him and EA games for this, but if you recheck the trailer we have frame by frame, you can see that he’s right. Our heroine has a very sharp and frozen face, almost unaffected by her actions and surroundings. There are scenes where she will look directly at her target and show anger, but in some short fast scenes, she has an unfocused and weird look on her face.

Frame 1
Frame 2
Frame 3

On Playstation 2, during the cut-scenes, characters have a much higher polygon rate on their faces to express motions in a better way. Are we satisfied with that on the next generation of Final Fantasy? As we know, the white engine is still in its first round of development. Will we see more expressions not only in cut-scenes, but also in battle, when they walk or when they stand point blank on the ground? Admit it, most characters on PS2 don’t care about their environment and look straight into some fascinating dot in the air. We want more this time!

Source: ps3.qj.net

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Well at least we’re starting to get a little more information from the producers now. Toriyama and Nomura have been taken away from their work and interviewed by Dengeki PS3 (a spin-off magazine from Dengeki for the PS3 launch in Japan). We aren’t sure whether or not this is the same interview we have in the scans in the post below but we’re sure glad its English.

Toriyama talks about the transition from FFXIII on the PS2 to moving development onto the PS3. Apparently there are few similarities in the game as it has been completely overhauled for the Next-Gen system with a new battle system and gameplay style. He says working on a new system will mean a lot more work similar to the change from the Playstation to the PS2.

“We’re probably at the point where we could make a PS3 title. However, we’re currently researching how to fully tap the specs.”lockquote>
Could this mean the 3% completion rumour is true? Whatever the percentage is it looks like we have a long time to wait.

On the Versus side of things it seems like real time footage is a long way off. The White Engine is still being finished off and apparently its going to be used with a lot more games than we thought. Nomura says that there will be different versions of the White Engine, “tuned” to their specifications for each game which could mean games coming out quicker in the future.

Click here for the full article

Thanks to our forum member Desi for finding this information for us.

Source: IGN

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We got the interview scans of Mr. Nomura and Mr. Toriyama.
As expected, its all in japanese (d’oh),

Good News:>
Some (recent?) images tell us new numbers on progress of FFXIII and Versus.
Bad News:
They are lower then the last numbers.
FFXIII progress goes from 13% to 3% and Versus goes from 1.3% to 1%.

If we find the name on the magazine it comes from, we will update this article. It could be false numbers. (heck, everything could be false)

Progress Scan Extract

Source: FF-xiii.net, FFinsider.net