Final Fantasy XVI recently passed the coveted Gold stage, which means that the game is printed on physical discs to be given to retailers before their imminent launch. Fans of the franchise rejoiced, as it was assurance (even if not proof) that the long-awaited action RPG would not go beyond the June 22 release date. In fact, Final Fantasy XVI was one of the first titles to announce it, nearly three months ahead of the scheduled release date.
Final Fantasy XVI would still be in development without the PS5’s memory and SSD
According to a statement from the Final Fantasy XVI director Hiroshi Takaipublished in the latest issue of Play Magazine, this wouldn’t have been possible without the PlayStation 5’s particularly fast memory and solid-state drive.
« If we didn’t have the memory and transfer speed of the PlayStation 5, we would still be in development today. »
The architecture of the PS5 has often been praised. Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, for example, said that she was much more efficient than that of PCs when it was launched. He also praised Mark Cerny, Sony’s system architect, for focusing the entire architecture on what’s been called the storage revolution. Many others voiced similar opinions, though we’ve never heard of a game developer explicitly saying that their game’s development time has been reduced thanks to the architecture of the PS5.
In the same interview with PLAY magazine, Naoki Yoshida, producer of Final Fantasy XVIconfirmed the positive sentiment towards Sony’s console, adding that the almost total absence of loading time obtained by the developers of Square Enix in the game was due to the architecture of the PS5.
Virtually the entire game, from start to finish, will have no load times. And being able to do that and make it work is something that we might only do with the PlayStation 5.
As a reminder, Final Fantasy XVI does not offer an open world, Yoshida himself having declared that the development of the game would have taken much longer. Thus, loading and interruptions between areas will be present in the game, but they will be so brief that the immersion of the player will not be affected, as we have seen in other games designed only for the PlayStation 5, such as Forspoken.
Final Fantasy XVI, a PlayStation 5 exclusive (a PC version will probably see the light of day, but not too soon), will also take advantage of the unique characteristics of the DualSense controller. Regarding this, game director Hiroshi Takai recently said:
« In some sections, the player will have to open heavy doors or lift portcullises, and we’re using adaptive triggers to create that feeling of effort and resistance. We also use them to ride chocobos. Haptic feedback can produce extremely subtle vibrations, which we use to create a heightened sense of presence in cutscenes. We’ve converted the sound effects used in each scene into haptic data, allowing us to represent details we’ve never been able to do before, like air movement.«
