World Maps In The ‘90s
When Final Fantasy VII launched in 1997, it was marketed as a real “blockbuster game”, a budget-heavy monster of an RPG with 3D characters, expensive pre-rendered backgrounds and full motion videos rendered on supercomputers, and a whole world to explore. This world, Gaia, was represented through a mixture of the aforementioned 2D pre-rendered backgrounds for major locations and a large, fully 3D “world map” that was traversable by the player. This world map was presented in an abstract, down-scaled form, with the main character Cloud’s 3D model appearing to be a similar size to many of the towns you visited or the vehicles or airship you obtained, running at speeds that could take you across the world in minutes. This was, of course, merely representative of the journey – clearly this traversal was “actually” taking hours or even days, similar to how Cloud’s character model was an abstract representation of the entire party of characters (such as Aerith, Barret and Tifa). Like a lot of people, I spent many years wondering how the 3-game Final Fantasy VII Remake Project was going to handle this.
How Do You Make A Modern World Map?
The Remake Project (Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and a third game with a yet-to-be-revealed title) was always pointedly meant to take the story and world of Final Fantasy VII and rebuild them in grand, “one-to-one” fashion, removing the abstractions or pre-rendered backgrounds and turn-based battle screens in favour of full 3D environments and a real-time-with-pause command-based battle system. But how could they do that with the world map? They couldn’t just remake Gaia one-to-one in its entirety – it’s a planet if a small one, and its “true”, canonical size dwarfs almost any other game environment outside of procedurally-generated ones like Minecraft worlds or the older Elder Scrolls games, or a project like Microsoft Flight Simulator that recreates the real world using satellite data. They ended up using a full 3D environment, largely seamless, and it works quite well for the gameplay and the feeling of going on a journey. You run across open fields, find large towns, enter them with no loading screens… it’s a great system, but once you pay attention to it and look at the world map – as well as the relatively tiny distance of about 14 kilometres from end-to-end – you start to realise that it doesn’t actually make sense spacially, and one of the things that makes this very hard to ignore is the setting of the first game, the city of Midgar.
Hacking The Camera, Breaking The Boundaries
I was inspired to write this article after I watched BestBudGaming’s recent YouTube video FFVII Rebirth – Exploring Midgar Region. Using the new PC version of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, he unlocks the camera and travels to the location of Midgar, which under normal circumstances can only be seen far into the distance, heavily covered by mountains and not really visible with any kind of depth or relative scale. BestBudGaming’s video reveals a city model that is low on detail (while also being more detailed than you might expect), but the real reveal, that he even notes himself, is that the city is only about one-sixth the size that it should be. This isn’t huge news if you’ve looked up the city’s canonical size before – it’s supposed to be about 6 kilometres across, and with the in-game map’s actual proportions, that would have it taking up roughly the same space as the initial continent. The revelation, then, is that this “one-to-one” open world is still abstracted, with the major locations in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth presented in a way that is probably pretty accurate, but with the open sections in between – despite their massive increase in detail and realism compared to the 1997 world map – still acting as scaled-down approximations of the true journey Cloud and his comrades are making. This is perfectly fair – just like in the original game, the realities of game development and making an enjoyable experience render a whole traversable planet unfeasible. But this prevents a problem for the final game.
High Winds Ahead
Naoki Hamaguchi and Yoshinori Kitase, respectively the Creative Director and Producer of Rebirth, have confirmed what anyone who played the original Final Fantasy VII already knew – that a major element of the third and final game in the Remake project will be the Highwind, a massive airship that even made an early appearance in Rebirth at the huge Junon military base. This airship will allow you to freely travel high over Gaia, travelling across the world while looking down on every location – including Midgar, a city that in its current form is entirely too small to stand up to that kind of scrutiny, especially when the heroes return to it later in the game. This would suggest that the impossible scenario I described before – a fully remade planet – is going to be required regardless. So what will they do?
Tribute to Gaia
My prediction at this point is that, yes, they are going to have to create a properly-sized version of the whole planet, with everything, even the 6km-across Midgar, spacially corrected. However, I don’t believe that you’ll be able to seamlessly run across it anymore. I think that for the third game, they’re going to have to transition to a “zone-based” environment rather like Final Fantasy XII, where major locations and their immediate surroundings are represented one-to-one, but the open fields in between aren’t traversable. Unlike FFXII, however, which largely left these in-between environments to the player’s imagination, FFVIIR Part 3 will let you see them from high above as you’re flying the Highwind. You’ll be able to look down and see a low-detail (but still detailed enough for the distance) version of Gaia, similar to the version of Earth shown in Microsoft Flight Simulator, but only touch down when you reach a dedicated story location. I think this is both the only feasible option and also extremely exciting, and I’m looking forward to seeing if I’m right. The alternative would be a purely menu-based system like Final Fantasy X, but given that they’ve already talked about rebuilding the world map, I remain hopeful.
I’m also hopeful for a 2027 release, but let’s stick with one dream at a time.
