Final Fantasy XV team’s “location hunt” video looks suspiciously like awesome adventure vacation

As the graphics in video games have become increasingly sophisticated, a new and unexpected expense has surfaced for design teams hoping to make their game’s environments as realistic as possible: the so-called “location hunt.”

While in the good ol’ days of pixel graphics, design teams could just look at some photographs or even paintings of real-world locations for inspiration, modern gaming’s open, 3-D worlds demand level and object design so advanced that it becomes a near-necessity for teams to travel to locales that closely resemble the digital worlds they’re hoping to create, getting actual eyes on, say, that volcanic mountain they plan to have the player venture through, or checking out the minute curves and angles of some military hardware they plan on dropping into the game.

Ironically, though, while the “location hunt” is still considered work, outside of the unlucky design team that has to go inside of a volcano for that epic RPG boss fight or something, these excursions can actually end up looking suspiciously like a vacation. Just ask the Final Fantasy XV design team, who recently posted a YouTube video of their location hunt.

Okay, so the FF XV design team’s location hunt actually looks like it involved a lot of fairly uncomfortable stuff, like hanging around in a thunderstorm to get an idea of what real-life lightning looks like, and, for reasons unknown, deliberately letting a snake latch onto and constrict one of the team’s arms. Also, somebody please call PETA, because there’s some footage of the team manipulating the corpse of what appears to be a dead boar.

The video released by Square Enix doesn’t actually reveal the locations of any of the areas the team visited, but it looks like the location hunt never went further than the more exotic regions of Japan itself. There are plenty of wild boar native to Honshu, for example, and the barbecue scene and military hardware demo scene – which look like tons of fun – are clearly shot somewhere near Tokyo.

Still, color us green with envy. The most our editors will pay out for us is to go try the latest McDonald’s pie flavor or something, so an all expense paid adventure vacation around Japan sounds like a dream come true.

Square Enix isn’t the only game developer to routinely send its team out on location hunts, by the way. Rockstar, maker of the Grand Theft Auto games, has famously sent its developers to scope out American cities on “research” excursions, but somehow that doesn’t sound nearly as exciting as plumbing the depths of a bat-infested cave, then hiking a mountain in a thunderstorm, then, uh…cooking some fried eggs.

You know, those digital fried eggs better look damn realistic. Wouldn’t want to shatter anyone’s suspension of disbelief in a Final Fantasy game.

Source: My Game News Flash
Images: YouTube/Square Enix

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