Kingdom Hearts III is now being made in Unreal Engine 4

It looks like the next Kingdom Hearts game is going to be ungodly pretty, as it’s now been confirmed that it’s being developed using Epic Game’s latest graphical genesis device, the Unreal Engine 4.

Revealed in an interview with the creator, Tetsuya Nomura, it was originally thought that the game was being developed using Square’s in house engine, like it’s currently doing with Final Fantasy XV, however that turned out not to be the case.

While speaking with Famitsu (translation via Kotaku) he said: “Development is steadily proceeding as planned. Due to the impact of changing the game engine to Unreal Engine 4, which we did for various reasons, there is some difficulty rendering images. And with the full support of Epic Games, we’ll be able to progress smoothly.”

It’s a little surprising, considering how pretty Square’s own engine is, but this isn’t the first time it’s outsourced and made use of Epic’s technology. Back when it was developing The Last Remnant, it used the latest Epic engine at the time, Unreal Engine 3, and the results were strong.

Considering the last full Kingdom Hearts game, number two, came out almost 10 years ago, there’s going to be quite a graphical upgrade with this one. I’m quite looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

What about you guys?