this week's issue of famitsu has a interview with tetsuya nomura and it's about *gasp* final fantasy versus xiii!
Much of the interview talks about the game's event scenes. Most games have pre-rendered and real time cut scenes. In versus xiii, you'll be able to control the real time cut scenes and they decided to get rid of the non-controllable real time cut scenes in order to keep the player from stopping. In the controllable cut scenes, players can expect more natural expression as opposed to the game-like expression of past games. He also mentions some sort of new system for this area.
Nomura also showed three new screenshots just for the famitsu editors. Yep. That's right. Just for the famitsu editors. Famitsu was impressed and couldn't believe what they were looking at was real time.
One screenshot showed a scene of an italy-like city showing noctis looking up at a behemoth. The second one showed an afternoon shot of noctis on what appeared to be the side of a highway and another version of that shot but at night. The highway sign says "meguro" which is a region of tokyo.
The game looks so good because there is a very small difference between the high and low quality models. Nomurs says that they're the same, with the exception of the high quality versions having greater hair detail in them.
Nomura said that takeshi nozue was able to apply his pre-rendering know how on the game's real time scenes, specifically with regards to lighting technology. Famitsu says that the pictures look like real photographs with nomura saying that players can take pictures in the game with noctis' cell phone.
Nomura said that we'll have to wait a bit to see these pictures that the famitsu editors get to see exclusively for the time being. He also mentions that the areas that were already shown now have the new lighting technology, so we'll have to wait to see those as well.
As for a development update. Nomura siad that because they're trying out a lot of new challenges, the development staff is still focused on the core members. However, they're making preparations to enter full production. They are also recording the game's voices too. Nomura says that there are many scenes where the four male characters are engaged in a realistic conversation, with their voices overlapping. These scenes are being recorded with all four voice actors together in the recording session simultaneously.
As for when we'll hear about versus xiii nest? Nomura said the timing for the next reveal has been set but would not say when. As for the next update, he said that he would like to deliver it along with some good information.