GameSpot Interview w/ Tetsuya Nomura

Meilin Lee · Jul 17, 2017

GameSpot got a chance to talk with 'Kingdom Hearts' series director, Tetsuya Nomura, during D23 to talk about certain aspects of 'Kingdom Hearts III'. One of those things was the development time, which for many fans, felt a bit too long, in which Nomura states:

A lot of people have been mentioning and making it sound like ‘Oh, Nomura’s taking too much time,’ and it hurts. There was a decision made to change to an external [engine]...Unreal Engine 4. So we switched over to that. Unfortunately there was a bit of time that needed to be rewinded and started over. So there was a bit of a setback there, but it was a decision that the company had to make, so it was inevitable. We had a plan of the period that it’s going to take for us to create the content at the start of the project, and we laid out, after such and such years, we would need to add more personnel resources. We had submitted it to our headquarters and had it approved, but internal personnel is very limited, and there are various different projects that happen within our company, so unfortunately timing did not work out. So we had to make due with the timing that was appropriate for the company...the company makes the decisions, so unfortunately sometimes it is out of my control. I wanted to emphasize that it wasn’t a problem on our development teams. It just happened that way, and there were some decisions that the company had to make, and it just didn’t work out for certain timings that we were hoping to hit. It’s kind of out of my hands. I mean, yes, time has passed. But it’s out of my hands.
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Nomura then talks about wanting to reveal all Disney worlds in KH3 prior to the game's release (something that has been done for every previous game in the series), saying:

I don’t think we’ll be keeping any worlds secret until the game is released. I think we will be introducing them leading up to launch. Nowadays games can add content on after the fact through DLC content, so there’s no need to hide any worlds.
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Nomura also gets to talk about potential DLC, stating:

Nothing is set in stone, and I’m afraid we can’t go into details, but I have told the team: Just be prepared to be able to accommodate for something like that. We can’t suddenly develop a system where we’re accommodating for downloadable content. So it’s not confirming or denying either way, but just so that the development team will be prepared, I have informed them of making the preparations.
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Finally, Nomura mentions how the worlds will have more to them than in previous entries, saying:

I feel like I’ve packed in much more fun than I had in my previous Kingdom Hearts titles. Kingdom Hearts 3 is going to be our first full HD game in our current console generation. It does involve a lot of bandwidth and resources in order to create in full HD, so our directive was to have as many elements [as possible] of gameplay included in one single world, rather than having multiple different little worlds with few elements. We wanted to pack in as many gameplay elements and fun into a single world. If we are able to accomplish everything that we did plan out for, I’m pretty confident that people will enjoy and be fully satisfied with the end product.
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Day~Dream · Jul 17, 2017

- "I feel like I’ve packed in much more fun than I had in my previous Kingdom Hearts titles. Kingdom Hearts 3 is going to be our first full HD game in our current console generation. It does involve a lot of bandwidth and resources in order to create in full HD, so our directive was to have as many elements [as possible] of gameplay included in one single world, rather than having multiple different little worlds with few elements. We wanted to pack in as many gameplay elements and fun into a single world. If we are able to accomplish everything that we did plan out for, I’m pretty confident that people will enjoy and be fully satisfied with the end product."

Does this mean that there won't be as many worlds in KH3 as previous titles, but there will be more to do in the worlds? I personally wouldn't mind either way.

Meilin Lee · Jul 17, 2017

Day~Dream said: ↑

- "I feel like I’ve packed in much more fun than I had in my previous Kingdom Hearts titles. Kingdom Hearts 3 is going to be our first full HD game in our current console generation. It does involve a lot of bandwidth and resources in order to create in full HD, so our directive was to have as many elements [as possible] of gameplay included in one single world, rather than having multiple different little worlds with few elements. We wanted to pack in as many gameplay elements and fun into a single world. If we are able to accomplish everything that we did plan out for, I’m pretty confident that people will enjoy and be fully satisfied with the end product."

Does this mean that there won't be as many worlds in KH3 as previous titles, but there will be more to do in the worlds? I personally wouldn't mind either way.
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It's hard to tell from the way he words it, but his main point is that he wants more content in each world, regardless of how many worlds end up being in the game.

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GameSpot Interview w/ Tetsuya Nomura

Meilin Lee RPG (Red Panda Girl)

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