Naoki Yoshida has revealed that Final Fantasy XVI could have shipped on two discs instead of one.
As reported by Noisy Pixel, Yoshida shared this in the latest Final Fantasy XVI broadcast stream. In fact, for most of the development period, Square Enix’s Creative Unit 3 were making the game with the expectation that they would have to ship it on two discs.
Now, we need to remember what Square Enix have claimed before about Final Fantasy XVI. Hiroshi Takai of Creative Unit 3 stated that they were impressed with the PlayStation 5, because of the size and speed of the SSD, which is where the console stores downloaded games. This is a PCIe Gen 4 M.2 NVMe SSD, with approximately 825 GB for games, patches, apps, and more.
And as it turns out, Final Fantasy XVI will be 100 GB on disc. Matching the capability of the PlayStation 5’s SSD to store the game, Creative Unit 3 managed to squeeze Final Fantasy XVI down to that size.
PlayStation 5’s Ultra-HD Blu-Ray discs max out at 100 GB capacity, so Creative Unit 3 really went down the wire when it came to squeezing the game down to that size.
But that’s not all. Naoki revealed that Creative Unit 3 only found out that they could squeeze Final Fantasy XVI in just to fit the size of a PlayStation 5 disc six months ago.
While Square Enix isn’t talking more about how they pulled this off, we do know why they would have the capability to do so. Sony has their own bespoke data compression technology, which can allegedly shrink Playstation 5 games to as much as 60 % of their original size.
Now, Square Enix does seem set to be the first publisher to release a PlayStation 5 game on more than one disc, with their pending release of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. This choice may cost Square Enix and Sony more, but it is ultimately better for the consumer.
Rather than give gamers physical discsv that function as installers and on-disc DRM for games that are installed in the hard drive, Square Enix is giving us the actual game. If it’s easy for Square Enix to make that decision, then other game companies like Ubisoft and Activision should be expected to do the same thing as well.
Final Fantasy XVI will be released exclusively on the PlayStation 5 on June 22, 2023.
