Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida has detailed the differences between the game’s two performance modes on PlayStation 5.
As reported by PSU, Graphics Mode gives players the 2160p performance they would want, but this brings framerate down to 30 FPS. On the other hand, Frame Rate Mode will target the 60 FPS, but the resolution will then drop down to 1440p.
Yoshida actually demonstrated this in the talk he gave at the recent PAX East, fittingly enough called Yes, You Can Pet The Torgal – A Final Fantasy XVI Panel at PAX East 2023. For a very brief moment, while moving in between two scenes for different parts of the demo, Yoshida had his translator3 move to the options screen where you can see the Graphics Option.
This was to demonstrate, from within the game itself, that you can switch between the two graphical modes on the fly. Players don’t have to stick to one or the other; if they want to admire the tall buildings in the scenes where Oswald is simply moving around and talking to NPCs, the player can opt to move to Graphics Mode.
On the other hand, if the player needs that full 60 FPS to meet a sudden battle encounter, they can switch to Frame Rate mode at the drop of the hat.
Yoshida had also noted serendipitously, that the monitor they were using at the PAX East event was not capable of displaying 2160p, but can only go up to 1440p at best.
This implies that Yoshida’s work at optimizing Final Fantasy 16 may be lost for gamers who don’t have monitors or TV that don’t have the ability of outputting to full 4K. For those players, perhaps Frame Rate Mode may be their best bet, to get the best experience on such TVs.
In fact, it is absolutely reasonable to assume most consumers don’t have such a 4K display for this to warrant the amount of that Square Enix’s devs put into it. But as a seeming PlayStation 5 exclusive, the game may simply be designed as a showcase of the hardware.
Could Final Fantasy 16 ever become multiplatform? If Square Enix used PlayStation Native development tools it would be unlikely. However, given that a US senator is asking about exclusivity of Sony games and apparently had Final Fantasy 16 itself in mind, it isn’t completely unlikely.
Final Fantasy 16 will be released on PlayStation 5 on June 22, 2023. It is also expected to be released on Windows.
