bazztek

Square Enix are in fact still using Luminous Engine, they did not abandon the engine! Since 2024 Luminous Engine is now serving as the foundation for what SE is now dubbing their "in-house game engine" which is an evolution of Luminous Engine and inherits the functionality of Luminous Engine. The Engine Development Division was formed after Luminous Productions staff were merged back as regular Square Enix staff in May 2023. Back then the official PR statement from SE was that the Luminous Productions staff will be put to use for their engine development knowhow for Square Enix's AAA development now. They were not "fired" nor "demoted" like the uninformed seem to think, and in fact if anything were promoted as Takeshi Aramaki who was the lead engineer of Luminous Engine and the studio head of Luminous Productions was then assigned to be head of this newly formed Engine Development Division for Square Enix as a whole during the restructure period in 2024, which is filled primarily with other Luminous Engine staff as well who continue R&D on Luminous/SE's In-house game engine. Square Enix is intending to ramp up use of this engine for widespread company use going forward specifically in regards to their AAA games, but also scalable to their mobile output. It will mark an end to SE's use of Unreal Engine in the AAA development space. As such the only games still intended to use Unreal are games that started development on Unreal Engine before the 2024 SE restructure and will be the final Unreal Engine games for SE's AAA output, these games being FF7 Revelation and Kingdom Hearts 4, after which there will be no reason to use those custom offshoot versions of Unreal Engine anymore. DQ12 was stated it had restarted development from scratch as DQ12 Beyond Dreams which occurred sometime after 2024 and such, it is in all likelihood now on this new Luminous/SE in-house game engine now and not on UE5 like DQ12 Flames of Fate was intended to be. Further evidence to support DQ12 now being on this new Luminous/SE's in-house game engine being the grass/vegetation assets visible in the environment being the same grass/vegetation assets that part of Luminous's internal level editor tool and also used in Forspoken, and with the grass shadows and also resembling Forspoken's direct implementation of it, in addition to the animation blending and sense of grounding to the locomotion strongly resembling the style employed Luminous games, and not any of SE's UE output. The entire reason other divisions did not use Luminous outside of Business Division 2/Luminous Productions from 2013-2023 was simply a documentation matter, or rather there not being any, but that has been directly addressed as in February 2025 Takeshi Aramaki did an interview with Microsoft in which he talked about the Engine Development Division creating a new documentation tool with chatbot functionality which he stated has performed above expectations internally. Furthermore there are screenshots provided of the "in-house game engine" from a 2024 CEDEC presentation (conducted by a staff member who was in Luminous Productions) that show it is in fact Luminous Engine with the same UI as Luminous, even down to the same dummy test area that was used for FFXV still being used and the label "LuminousTemplate" visible on the UI they posted in this 2024 CEDEC presentation. The entire purpose of the Engine Development Division is to provide support on a company level to every Creative Studio equally, no longer confined only to one development team, and this support is specifically engine related. One of the biggest reasons SE restructured the company in 2024 was to reform their AAA development pipeline for new AAA games, and them now focussing on having a dedicated company wide in-house game engine is one of the major steps towards achieving that. The upsides of making this switch are immense, not only faster game turn around (FFXV and Forspoken both took less time to make on Luminous from scratch than any of SE's AAA UE4 games), much more stronger control over in game visual and fine tuning on a game by game basis due to direct access to the engine divisionn, also no longer having to pay Epic Games any fees for engine use. The support for this new Luminous/in-house game engine is company wide now so no longer has the main drawback that was preventing its widespread internal use before. FF17 will in all likelihood be made on this engine too.