And that's all well and good, but not entirely what I was aiming at. The engine for FF13 might have been pretty expensive to develop, sure. But now that they have it, what is really stopping them from churning out good games? For FF13-2, they could reuse the engine and probably idk, half of the textures and other assets? The game ended up looking beautiful, but still they managed to botch what "many" think is the most important part of these games: A good and coherent storyline. One that actually makes sense and doesn't sound like someone who painted himself into a corner and had to jump out of a window to salvage the situation. One that doesn't leave 50 loose plot threads that require another god damn sequel to be properly tied up.

I can think of half a dozen ways to continue the FF13 storyline that didn't involve some terribly inconsistent time travel crap. Writing a different, not-unnecessarily-convoluted story isn't something that the PS4 will help you do.

As for the "HD towns would be too hard to do" thing they said in their defence of FF13, I'm not buying it. The game already included several towns, they were just not used as towns. Instead, they were used as "cardboard cutout" backdrops to the constant stream of action that they were jizzing over our faces. I can't see how the assets they used to make the Bodhum area couldn't have been rearranged to create an area where you could walk around freely and talk to people in town, maybe enter a few houses here and there and buy some gear and items.This sounds more like a game design issue, not a "too many assets to create" issue. They chose to not let us walk around freely in the town they had already created.

A "town" in an RPG doesn't necessarily refer to an actual collection of buildings, but more an area where you're not showered with action, an area where you can walk around at your own pace, and an area where you can talk to inhabitants of the world you're trying to save and hopefully learn more about the world you're living in, instead of sticking a feeding tube into your stomach to "flesh out" the world, such as the datalog was a prime example of.

Every time you bumped into something interesting in the world, the characters you played would say nothing at all, not even do a facial expression to show any sort of amazement or wonder. Then you'd get a "DATALOG UPDATED" message where the game has pre-digested what you just saw in the world, and condensed it to a dry piece of text in a menu. That doesn't exactly make me want to care about what I'm seeing. Having NPCs in the world tell you about these things with even as little as a non-voiced text bubble would be better. Again, design choice, not hardware limitation.