Final Fantasy developer to pursue 'more distributed and outsourced development'

Square Enix has openly admitted to the numerous struggles it had when developing Final Fantasy XIII. The project had taken four years, the result of a large, mismanaged team. "With a large-scale development team, we didn't use our time well," Motomu Toriyama, director of FF13, admitted. While the company was able to turn around a direct sequel relatively quickly, it appears Square Enix is looking to change its development structure quite significantly.

"We are also thinking that we will not do large-scale internal development any longer." he said. "We have a lot of great creators in Square Enix, but for larger-scale development we will be doing more distributed and outsourced development to reach our targets on time."

Speaking at GDC Taipei (via Gamasutra) Toriyama believes that adapting "more Western technology and production techniques" will help streamline the development process at the Japanese behemoth. Evidence of the company's willingness to outsource can be seen in Agni's Philosophy, a next-gen Final Fantasy tech demo the company showed off at E3. While much of the development was handled internally, some of the art assets were farmed out to Crystal Dynamics, the team currently working on Tomb Raider.