Square Enix has a lot of big promises about Final Fantasy XVI’s upcoming PC port.
As revealed in an interview by gaming website MMORPG, Naoki Yoshida explained how they are adapting the title from the original PlayStation 5 version. Quoting MMORPG’s translation of Yoshida:
“As for you having better performance on a PC than PS5, If you have a very high end PC, you probably will get better graphical fidelity and better performance. But if you have a lower end PC, you’re not going to be able to compete with the PS5.
Right now our engineers are working on that optimization and figuring out what the limits are. We’ve seen some hardware getting that framerate up over 100 (fps) in places, but again, it’s going to depend on the hardware that you have. We’re doing a lot of testing on that now. But the better the hardware you have, the better you’re gonna see.”
Yoshida also explained that Square Enix has decided to release a PC demo. The demo will allow new players to test the game on their hardware, including what settings they can fiddle with to get the best performance.
Square Enix cannot account for every variable that could come into PC gaming for Final Fantasy XVI. So the idea is, anyone interested in playing this on the PC can do the testing for themselves. Yoshida expects that some gamers may decide to upgrade their hardware if they find that their current build cannot adequately run the game to their satisfaction.
Square Enix also wants to extend Final Fantasy XVI’s compatibility as much as they can. So, Yoshida promises there will be a lot of sliders so that gamers can adjust the many graphical settings that they can fiddle with to tweak, not only the game’s performance, but its appearance, to the consumer’s liking.
Lastly, Yoshida says that Square Enix already knows when they plan to release the demo and the game, but they’ve decided not to share that information for now. The demo is coming very soon, and the game itself will release shortly after that.
Actually, Creative Business Unit 3 is in the final phases of PC optimization. They are testing PC and mouse compatibility, and other factors that they didn’t have to worry about on the PlayStation 5. So they are working on that compatibility to the extent that they can on their end as well.
Lastly, Yoshida reminds us to make sure our PCs have SSDs. This will definitely be one of those cases where if you refuse to run this title on an SSD, your PC will just become a potato. But maybe there will be workarounds to this, as it did turn out Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart was playable on an HDD after all.
