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Luminous Engine

Luminous Engine is the engine Square Enix built to replace Crystal Tools for its next generation of games. It ran Final Fantasy XV (2016) and Forspoken (2023), and no later game on it is documented.

History

According to Square Enix’s Julien Merceron, the idea came up during Final Fantasy XIII-2. Square Enix revealed Luminous Studio in 2011 and showed the Agni’s Philosophy tech demo in 2012; at the time its western studios shared code from their CDC and Glacier 2 engines. Final Fantasy XV builds ran on Luminous 1.4 at the Tokyo Game Show 2014 and on 1.5 for the Episode Duscae demo, and the game came out in 2016.

In March 2018 Square Enix founded Luminous Productions to make big-budget games on the engine. The studio released Forspoken in 2023 and merged into Square Enix on 1 May 2023.

Games made with Luminous Engine

3 games, oldest first. Each game links to the article that names its engine.

GameYearDeveloperEngine version
Final Fantasy XV2016Square Enix Business Division 2Luminous Engine
Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition2018Square Enix Business Division 2Luminous Engine
Forspoken2023Luminous ProductionsLuminous Engine

At a glance

Developer
Square Enix; Luminous Productions (2018–2023)
First game
Final Fantasy XV (2016)
Replaced
Crystal Tools
Licence
In-house, Square Enix
Status
No new games since 2023

Sources

Checked .

  1. Luminous Engine — Wikipedia
  2. Luminous Productions — Wikipedia
Image credits