Kingdom Hearts III switches to Unreal Engine 4

The dev team behind the upcoming Kingdom Hearts III has decided to scrap Square Enix' internally developed Luminous Engine in favor of Epic's Unreal Engine 4, Gematsu writes.

Game director Tetsuya Nomura has revealed the switch in an interview with Japanese magazine Famitsu, and while he doesn't go into detail about the reasons for the switch, he does credit Epic with helping the transition go smoothly.

"Surely and steadily, and we're progressing on schedule. For various reasons, we've changed the game engine to Unreal Engine 4, because of which we've been facing rendering troubles. But Epic Games has been really cooperative and helpful, so we're progressing just fine."

"Right now, we're doing the scenario writing and world selection. I'm also making the new outfits for Sora and Riku."

Switching engines after development has kicked off usually takes a huge effort (just look at Daikatana and Duke Nukem Forever for examples of worst case scenarios), so it seems like we'll be waiting for Kingdom Hearts III for a while still.