The Final Fantasy 7 Remake's version of Midgar looked so, so good when Square Enix showed off a chunk of it at E3 2019 - the kind of place you could spend hours in, exploring every single city street. Good news, I guess, because the entire first chapter of the episodic game will take place solely within the sprawling dystopia's city limits.
The original Final Fantasy 7 only spent its early hours within Midgar before booting players out into the wider world. It was one of those formative 'Oh crap, look at the size of this game' moments, like when you emerge into Hyrule Field for the first time in Ocarina of Time.
GameSpot attended an interview with FF7 Remake producer Yoshinori Kitase where he was frank about the way his team is approaching the massive task in front of them, and what it means for each individual installment in this segmented remake.
"We can't reveal that many details about this, but just to give you a bit of background on it, before we actually started working on this, we knew obviously it was going to be a large amount of content," Kitase said via a translator. "To do the whole story was going to be huge. And then when we actually did start planning out the plot for the first game, it hit us again that this is going to be a huge amount of content.
"At that point, we decided we're going to focus this game on Midgar and what happened in Midgar. And unfortunately, we can't say anything more about the future games after that, because we don't know ourselves, really. We really are still fleshing out that process and fleshing out what we're going to do for the second game in the project, and what kind of story is going to be in that, so we really can't tell you."
Square Enix has confirmed that the first part of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake will be a full-sized game of its own, which means it's building out what was originally a few hours of content into dozens. Even if it hits all the same story beats, that will give the developers ample room to fill out the world. It also means that, if each part of FF7's original story is similarly expanded, we'll probably be ready for the final showdown with Sephiroth sometime by the mid-22nd century.
Check out our list of E3 2019 games for more favorites from the biggest show in gaming. Or watch our latest Release Radar video for a rundown of everything games and entertainment this week.
