Last Remnant Fell Into Middleware Trap

As reported on 1up, Square Enix CTO, Julien Merceron, admitted the traps they fell into with using the Unreal Engine as middleware for The Last Remnant.

One of the traps with middleware is that some game teams believe that, because they got this middleware, maybe they need less programmers on their team, or maybe they don't need that many skilled programmers. Sometimes middleware is just something that a studio or a game team is going to use because they don't find the right people.

A lot of press was pretty hard on the game for poor performance and framerate, but nothing could have saved the game from the technical mess that was its combat system.  I honestly wasn't distracted by the technical issues.  The randomness of the combat is what killed it for me.  You could never count on what battle choices were going to be available from one round to the next, and most importantly, even though you could see a tactical view of the engagements, you could never count on actions being taken in any particular order.  This completely stripped the game of strategy.  You couldn't make the smart decisions about which group to attack because you didn't know if they were going to be locked in engagement or not by the time their arbitrary turned rolled around.