If This Thing Runs On Your Computer So Will FFXIV: A Realm Reborn

One of the worries of having a low-mid range PC is the risk that you’ll buy something that strays just outside your machine’s ability to process. It’d be a total waste if you don’t feel like upgrading immediately.

Sure, you could try and see if you skirt by through by using Can You Run It, but even meeting the minimum specifications doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’ll have a proper functioning experience.

Square have released this little tester thing that you can run to see if their upcoming revisit to FFXIV will work alright on your machine. To my knowledge that’s a first, for a company to throw up a little system preparation thing before the release of the real game.

Interestingly it’s not a demo, it’s just a benchmark you can use to test your system out. No word on why they wouldn’t just send out a demo for users to try out.

Perhaps they’re taking the recent advice that game demos are detrimental to sales? From there we’d have to assume that they’d prefer people not to see it first before downloading fully due to a lack of confidence in the project.

That’s speculation, but when FFXIV was first released it didn’t set the world on fire. We’re now in an even worse climate for MMOs in the same vein, even those that are free to play. FFXIV, as a game with a subscription fee, is a hard sell in the modern gaming landscape. It had better be absolutely spectacular to justify itself.