The Power of “Deepened Immersion”
Perhaps the most exciting facet to all of this is what Square is already claiming the FLARE platform will be capable of. A big talking point throughout the information revealed thus far is immersion – we’re talking “Real-time Hollywood-Quality” visuals here. Though it’s easy to brush that off as a reckless cluster of hype-inducing buzzwords, it’s not all that far fetched if you really think about it. This is a product that won’t be entering beta for a full two years, and likely won’t have games publicly available for at least a year after that.
Think about PS3 games three years ago – something like Red Dead Redemption comes to mind. A brilliant game, no doubt, and it was quite pretty for its day too. Now go ahead and pop the disc in for a second look. Yeah – It’s no GTA V, is it? Videogame visuals advance faster than we think they do, and in this case it’s just a matter of developers improving their technology on the same hardware over time. Imagine what a premier developer like Rockstar could do with effectively unlimited graphical resources, exponential scalability, and the ever-evolving power of Square’s almighty processing swarm? Maybe achieving “The extremes of realism and fantasy” isn’t such an exaggeration after all.
Will FLARE pan out the way we all want it to? It’s difficult to say. Ubisoft is already on board with the project despite its own Arcus technology still marinating behind the scenes, a decision Square Enix chairman Yoichi Wada attributes to the two companies “sharing the same vision.” With the current console generation wrapping up at about the seven year mark, it’s difficult to imagine concepts like FLARE not being fully mainstream by the time the newest boxes reach the end of their predicted ten year life. If ten years from now games look like Hollywood, their worlds are as big as real life, and the number of crates that I can feasibly explode without slowdown has reached infinity – well, at that point, what on earth could another new console possibly stand to offer?
That, I imagine, is exactly Square’s point. And as a believer in the Square Enix of old, I couldn’t be more eager to watch them try and prove it.
