I got the feeling this was already posted, but couldn’t find it after a quick search
Dragon Quest VIII, possibly the most popular of the Dragon Quest series was recently released on iOS and Android, and runs on the Unity engine
The trailer here:
I find this really interesting because DQVIII would have obviously been developed in Square Enix’ own proprietary engine. I’m really interested in knowing what the reasons were behind them choosing Unity for this release. I would assume the primary reason is that it would have taken them more work to make their engine mobile-ready rather than reimplementing the game in Unity.
I’m really curious to know what the process was like for them in porting the game over. Would they have had to recreate entire levels by hand, importing their raw 3D models into the engine and placing them in the correct places carefully mimicking the original game? Would they have had to rewrite TONS of code to work in Unity? Or would they have written some kind of tool to at least automatically do certain things like object placement and basic syntax changes?
They did mention the reason for choosing Unity was (obviously) ease of cross-platform deployment, and they had problems converting C++ into C#, and had to reduce the game size down a lot, but it doesn’t talk much about the actual conversion process
Yes absolutely, Dragon Quest is a AAA title for sure. Though they did redesign a lot of the controls and interface for mobile, I’d still consider it to be AAA.
Not that the whole ‘AAA’ label is really all that important
I’ve loved dragon quest since playing the first one on nintendo every saturday mornings. Then I got all the original japanese manga imported (anyone here remember nikaku animart… man, those were the days…). I lost track of the games after dragon quest 4. Then emulators came out a few years later and it was back to square one
I have to say though that these games have not progressed much technology wise. peraps it’s just the mobile version but man that is looking a bit… dated. It’s great to see it on Unity though… maybe they’ll end up building DQ9 in Unity from the beginning next time!
For me it isn’t important seither. Just a lot oft people lately seemed to ask for that kind of thing. And a completely remade Dragonquest is quite something.
Also I just found out that the Larry Adventure remake was made with Unity as well. That start up dialoge is such a telltale sign.
