In a recent interview with GameSpot, Kingdom Hearts III Director Tetsuya Nomura was asked why the development process has taken so long. Nomura revealed that the higher-ups at Square Enix decided they wanted to change the game engine a year into development as well as resource-related challenges within the company. Stating..
“There was a decision made to change to an external [engine]…Unreal Engine 4. So we switched over to that. Unfortunately there was a bit of time that needed to be rewinded and started over. So there was a bit of a setback there, but it was a decision that the company had to make, so it was inevitable.”
“We had a plan of the period that it’s going to take for us to create the content at the start of the project, and we laid out, after such and such years, we would need to add more personnel resources. We had submitted it to our headquarters and had it approved, but internal personnel is very limited, and there are various different projects that happen within our company, so unfortunately timing did not work out. So we had to make due with the timing that was appropriate for the company…the company makes the decisions, so unfortunately sometimes it is out of my control.”