Project Athia: The Luminous Engine Ruse | Square Enix's New "Game"

Did you know that Square Enix’s luminous engine first started development in 2011? That’s nine years ago. What was established as something the company could use as a staple for each of their first-party games and was planned even to be liscenced out to third parties when the time came has had a staggering one game coded for it in all that time: Final Fantasy XV...and we all know how turbulent the development of that game was. But it’s not all that the Luminous Engine has brought us, in 2012 we had Agni’s Philosophy, a tech demo designed by the Visual Works division, the arm of Square Enix that was usually responsible for pre-rendered CGI alongside Square’s R&D team. It took them six months to make. Using a single nVidia GTX 680 graphics card with 16 GB RAM, it pushed 10 million polygons per scene, including 300,000 to 400,000 polygons per character. It also used 1.8 GB texture data per scene. Of course, just like the recent Unreal Engine tech demo, this kind of intensive graphical fidelity is unlikely to make it into a fully formed game. 

Later, in 2015 Agni made a return in another tech demo ‘Witch Chapter 0.’ Using 4 Nvidia Titan X graphics cards to render up to 63 million polygons per scene. This time there was hope that the stunning demo was actually in the works as a game, you remember those, right Square Enix, but no. Witch Chapter 0 was just another time Square Enix asked us to be excited about their amazing new tech that would shine in the upcoming Final Fantasy XV. Even some showings of the game were more along the lines of a tech demo, remember when they showed off the model of the frog in the rain, it looked so detailed and cool.

The product of 10 years of intensive game development…

Then FFXV was finally here, it was blurry, muddy, aliased, characters clipped through scenery and enemies and had intensely awkward, drawn-out, over the top animations. It was clear to see that this engine was not what it was presented to be and it would not solve Square Enix’s problems. In the aftermath of Final Fantasy XV Square Enix quickly halted development of games on the Luminous Engine of which 2 were planned that we know of: Kingdom Hearts III and Final Fantasy VII Remake. Tetsuya Nomura stated of the change: “It wasn’t something that we had anything to do with, it was decided higher up. It was a whole year that we had to kind of rewind and restart. As a dev tool, Unreal Engine 4 is kind of an all-in-one – it’s got all of the stuff that is needed in it.” Oh, you mean like how the Luminous engine was described to fans in all these tech demos Square Enix had been showing off until now? As a versatile all in one engine that would facilitate greater creativity from the development teams. The company now had so little faith in the Luminous Engine that they basically started Kingdom Hearts 3 from scratch on Unreal and in 2017 released a rather clunky prototype of what we could expect from that in Kingdom Hearts 0.8 A Fragmentary Passage. 

Once they found their feet, Square Enix found a bit of success with the Unreal Engine. Kingdom Hearts III ironed out the kinks and looked and ran buttery smooth. Dragon Quest XI used the engine and was considered by many to be the best in the series...they were wrong but OK. Then most recently Final Fantasy VII Remake has met with frothing at the mouth praise from most with only a few low res textures to pick at on the technical side. It is clear that in using Unreal Engine, Square Enix was able to quickly and easily turn the rather dire and embarrassing situation with the Luminous Engine back around, if only a little and perhaps start recuperating on all that money and time down the drain with tech demos, Final Fantasy XV’s 10-year development hel and announcements of announcements of announcements. But then...a new console generation arrived and Square Enix had no new games to announce. NANIIIIII!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?

What could Square Enix possibly announce? They couldn’t not announce something. How would people be excited? Please be excited. And they didn’t want to pay the Unreal Engine licence fee again for something that they hadn’t even conceived of yet. Then they remembered, they had an engine of their own. An engine they had all but scrapped that caused years of turmoil for the developers of Final Fantasy XV to the point it remains an unfinished product to this day. One thing they did know though, they could cobble together a bit of pre-rendered footage, slap some cryptic text over it and hamstring the working parts of Final Fantasy XV to make a 50-second trailer showing basically nothing at all. 

And so, Project Athia was born and Luminous Productions was suddenly a thing. “We are developing AAA and new franchise consumer and smartphone games using our internally-developed Luminous Engine, taking on the challenge of defining the cutting edge of game development. Our vision is, to create games unlike anything experienced before, fusing the world's latest technologies with art." Please be excited.

A long-running problem with Square Enix is that they always need to give off the appearance that they’re doing something, whatever that might be. Constantly announcing things well before the appropriate time. Making the same announcements over and over again. Even announcing that they will be announcing something. I think that this is what led to Project Athia, not any desire to make a great groundbreaking game that will blow fans away. Honestly compare this trailer to any other showing on the PS5 showcase and you will see, this is laughable, not even as intriguing as Agni’s Philosophy or Witch. The tiny glimpses of gameplay we saw such as the magical thorn attack enveloping a monster look suspiciously like it could have been from Final Fantasy XV. The rest show simple, linear platforming where the character is magnetised to spots of the geometry that you could find in a PS2 game. What we’re shown are such brief glimpses of all this that it’s hard to tell anything really except for the fact this is clearly an extremely early prototype when compared to most other game trailers we’ve seen here. 

Remember when Kojima Productions set out to create the Fox engine? It was a resounding success and Metal Gear Solid V ran flawlessly with visuals of unprecedented quality on all platforms. It took them around 3 or 4 years to achieve such excellence. For Death Stranding Kojima later decided to use the equally groundbreaking Decima engine which has made huge strides in how models and textures can load in-game. Also using Decima, Horizon Forbidden West, a game that will probably set a new bar for Playstation as Zero Dawn did before it, was announced alongside Project Athia. When Square Enix have been struggling away with the luminous engine since 2011, had grand plans which failed, scrapped years of development because the engine would not easily allow the team to fulfil their vision and to this day have only one barely finished game to show for it. My question to you is, do you really think Square Enix and the Luminous engine can deliver a game that lives up to the potential of the PS5? The next generation of consoles. Judging by this laughable trailer, I think not.