The developers of Final Fantasy 7 Remake have launched a series of interviews that, much like the Final Fantasy 7 Remake project, will release in multiple parts at separate times. The first interview aired today, and within it, Remake's Director, Tetsuya Nomura, addressed the development of Midgar and what new things players can expect to see from the city.
Confirmation came some time ago that Midgar would be the only area that Remake players could explore in the first upcoming game. Because of this, Square Enix spent the majority of its time fleshing out the city and making more individual parts of it accessible to players.
Nomura explains during his part of the interview that he watched old walkthroughs and commentaries about the game and discovered that Midgar usually took players around ten hours to get out of the first time around. During his viewings, Nomura notices that he and his development team allowed players to explore a lot of the slums but not so much the upper city. He recognizes that players get to explore a little bit of it later on in the game, but he wanted it more involved in the earlier on as well. In other words, players can look forward to exploring new areas in the upper city when FF7 Remake releases.
Nomura also noted how players wanted to explore specific locations found along Midgar's set path but weren't able to. Now that Square Enix is enlarging Midgar, Nomura figured, "it would be good to open up some of the locations, so players could explore more of those places that they wanted to see when they played the original."
He goes on to explain that certain buildings and facilities are now open to players. However, he doesn't specify which locations these are, giving the impression that they're optional areas and not necessarily vital to moving along the main story. Nomura also emphasizes that Final Fantasy 7 Remake will not be an open-world experience. Players "can't go everywhere in the city," but the areas they can explore have increased in both size and number.
Environment director Takako Miyake adds to this saying that Remake's Midgar "isn't just wider, but denser," and that the overall theme was to make it feel like a real-life city. To achieve this goal, the development team added in parts of the city that were initially "left to the player's imagination," and gave them lots of realistic details to make them feel like believable locations.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake will launch on April 10, 2020 for the PlayStation 4.