Monolith Soft, the studio behind it Xenoblade Chronicles series, is expanding its internal engine for use on future titles thanks to its newly founded R&D department (thanks, Automaton).
This is what the company’s chief creative officer Tetsuya Takahashi and lead developer Michihiko Inaba say in a recent interview with a Japanese magazine CGworldhe spoke about the company’s plans for the future as it plans to tackle larger development projects.
According to Inaba, the engine currently in development is based on the one the company created for 2010’s Xenoblade Chronicles, with the goal of one day being fully managed by an in-house R&D team. For now, several different development teams are working on engine modeling and effects technologies before everything is translated into a finished product.
Despite the difficulty of maintaining the engine in-house, Takahashi believes it will all pay off: “Currently we don’t have the ability to use engines made by other companies,” he told CGworld, “This is because the in-house engines are easier to adapt to our needs and easier is to use them”.
According to Takahashi, Monolith Soft had wanted an in-house R&D department for years, though it had too few employees to make it happen without detracting from the development team. That was until the company began working with Nintendo, “as the scope of development grew, the level of development requirements also grew.”
These increasing demands lead to an increase in manpower and, in turn, space for the research and development team. The new division (led by Inaba) aims to streamline the development process, support tool development, and research/develop new technologies, all of which seem like good choices as the company looks to future titles.
As for the future of the company, we’ll just have to wait and see. We were blown away by Xenoblade Chronicles 3 when it arrived on Switch in 2022, so we’re hoping that the team has something in store for ‘Switch 2’ (although that’s yet to be confirmed, of course). Then all eyes are on this fancy new engine, eh?
