Naoki Yoshida has laid it all out for PC gamers anticipating the release of Final Fantasy XVI.
PCGamesN machine translated a recent Famitsu interview with Yoshida. Here’s what Yoshida had to say about playing Final Fantasy XVI on PC:
“Details will be announced in due course. However, I would like you to prepare an SSD. Even if we did our best to adjust the GPU, in Final Fantasy XVI, a game where loading speed is critical, the HDD would be a pain.
Of course, we will do our best to optimize as much as possible, but we cannot overcome the hardware barrier alone, so please consider that an SSD is a must. We will announce the exact recommended specifications on another occasion.”
While we have to consider the full nuance of this statement could be lost in translation, it’s a pretty straightforward message. Yoshida expects that Creative Business Unit III will not be able to make Final Fantasy XVI fully optimized on hard disc drives on PC.
This is something fans should have been able to anticipate from the start. When Square Enix emphasized how they utilized the speed of the PlayStation 5’s SSD to make Final Fantasy XVI, they were not saying that just to hype the game up. They really meant it.
What PC gamers who don’t have SSDs should hope for, apparently, is that Square Enix strikes that balance between compromising PC performance on HDD, and managing load times. Are modern gamers willing to deal with PlayStation 3 level load times on their PC to play Final Fantasy XVI? Or are they more willing to deal with PlayStation 3 level graphics?
Now, we won’t dismiss gamers who aren’t upgrading very important upgrade to PCs. Not only are gamers being made to take advantage of SSDs, operating systems themselves are already optimized to them. Of course, if you’re playing this game on a handheld PC gaming device like the ROG Ally or Lenovo Legion Go, you will already be playing it on an SSD.
These concerns are for gamers who can’t upgrade their computers. We have to acknowledge that there will still be gamers who won’t be able to do this, either because they can’t afford it, or their families won’t agree to it, parts unavailability where they live, or other extraneous reasons.
For those gamers, they will have to reckon that Yoshida’s statement is not a guarantee that Final Fantasy XVI will be a good experience, or even be playable, on PC without an SSD. It’s certainly not what they wanted to hear, but it’s better that Square Enix made it clear now.
