Monolith Soft sets up new R&D division, expanding its game engine

As shared in a new interview published today, Xenoblade developer Monolith Soft has not only set up a new R&D division, but is also expanding its game engine.

CCO and director Tetsuya Takahashi has been in charge of overseeing the R&D team for roughly a year. Xenoblade lead programmer Michihiko Inaba is the group’s producer and director.

Speaking about the need for an R&D team with CGWorld, Takashi shared the following (rough translation):

“Even though we launched the R&D team, we had been working on R&D before that. Because Monolith Soft is a developer, we have fewer manpower resources than publishers.

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.”

Inaba later spoke about Monolith Soft’s engine in the same interview. This technology has been used since the Xenoblade Chronicles on Wii. Now it’s being expanded for use in other titles, and the goal is for the R&D team to full manage it.

During the interview, Takahashi responded to a question regarding whether Monolith Soft considered using engines from other companies such as Unreal Engine. Ultimately, this wasn’t an option. Takahashi said that maintaining an in-house engine can be difficult, but for Monolith Soft’s games, they’re easier to customize their needs and can be easier to use.

Monolith Soft just celebrated its 25th anniversary, and you can find a video celebrating the company’s past games here. Job listings also went up a couple of months ago for a “new RPG” – we covered that here.

Thanks to CGWorld for the original interview.