I’ve made it VERY clear over the years that I’m a big fan of Monolith Soft because of what they did with the Xenoblade Chronicles saga, especially with its last two entries and the “definitive edition” of the original on Nintendo Switch has been nothing short of magical. I still cry thinking about certain moments from Xenoblade Chronicles 3, and I won’t ever shy away from saying that. However, our eyes must now be on the future, and apparently, the company knows exactly what it wants to do.
CCO and director Tetsuya Takahashi had a chat with CG World, and in that chat, he noted that the team would grow its R&D department, with a focus on building up tech within its game engine to improve titles for the future. The director also highlighted the true need of doing this kind of expansion:
“Publishers can easily hire dedicated personnel and take on R&D as a company asset, but in our case, since title development is our main focus, we didn’t have much manpower to invest in the future. When we were developing Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (2017), we only had a few dozen in-house programmers, and we were overwhelmed with development alone. We were not in a position to organize an R&D team.
That situation continued for a while, but then we started developing titles with Nintendo that tens of millions of customers around the world could enjoy, and as the scale of development became larger, the level of demands for development also increased.”
So it’s growing to meet demands, and Monolith Soft knows that there are high expectations on it for its next game, especially since XC3 was a Game of the Year contender for 2022 and won multiple accolades during award season. We wish them well in whatever they make next.
