Posted Mon Aug 12, 2013 at 08:30 AM PDT by Brian Hoss
GRIN's 'Fortress' spent most of its short life devoid of 'Final Fantasy' influences.
In another of NeoGAF's vaporware repositories, details have emerged revealing plans behind a sequel for 'Final Fantasy XII.' Developed under the name 'Fortress,' Square Enix directed the game's developer GRIN to make "a huge open world RPG."
Sadly, the Swedish-based developer GRIN, who was coming off of the less-than-stellar 'Bionic Commando' re-make, was unable to secure project funding, likely with an impasse with Square Enix, and was forced to close. What is compelling now is to see how Square Enix directed a 'Final Fantasy' sequel/spin-off from a far.
From Tony Holmsten, Concept Artist at GRIN during the project period, "The only thing i can say to us , concept artists, defence is that, we did not even know what game/brand it was until the very last two months or something before grin went bankrupt (I have no idea what grin's decision behind this was). So we had been working several months without any proper art direction just doing something "fantasy:ish". And in the end they finally told us what we were doing, and said "Now we have to remake everything, and make it look more like... " It was a complete disaster, a shame, it could have been good."
One anonymous programmer offers one of the larger insights to the vision of the project, " The core game was about you and a small group of loyal soldiers defending the fortress against a army invading from the sea. They had ships and monsters in endless supply and you had to keep your troops morale high and move around the fortress and defend key areas of it as the enemy attacked. Between attacks you could travel inland and explore some form of ancient temples or something.
"My task was to create a system that would support a huge amount of characters fighting in and around the fortress. Besides the need for the player to be able to jump in and affect all battles a system to script events in the combat was also needed. All without making them look like bad background actors in a movie. The goal for the game was to keep around 2200 characters in the combat, 2000 attackers and 200 defenders."
Ultimately, fans of 'Final Fantasy XII' seem to have lost out on intriguing continuation of that game's world. Perhaps one day, Sqaure Enix will see fit to make something like 'Fortess.'
Source: NeoGAF via Eurogamer
Author: Brian Hoss
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