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Square Enix Cutting Back on Large-Scale Development
Development for Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2 at one point had over 200 people working on the projects. Square Enix hopes to avoid having teams that large again in the future.
Speaking recently at GDC Taipei, Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2 director Motomu Toriyama admits that communication became a problem with a team so large. Square Enix shifted to having monthly milestones for development of XIII-2 and is looking to outsource additional development in the future.
"Because it's a large-scale project, we had to keep [Final Fantasy XIII] secret, but this led to user testing happening way too late in the process," he said. "We heard a lot of feedback about things we needed to fix, and we decided we would do that with FFXIII-2. ... We decided that we would have a milestone every month, and realized we needed to apply more western technology and production techniques."
"We are also thinking that we will not do large-scale internal development any longer." he added. "We have a lot of great creators in Square Enix, but for larger-scale development we will be doing more distributed and outsourced development to reach our targets on time."
[Source: Gamasutra]
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