Nearly seven years after the previous mainline installment, Final Fantasy XVI is just around three weeks away from its debut on PlayStation 5. However, the existence of a PC version is pretty much confirmed. The only question is when it’ll happen.
The first indication that Sony had struck a timed exclusivity deal came with a disclaimer found in a PlayStation Brazil trailer released in March 2021. A year and a half later, in November 2022, another promotional trailer published by PlayStation quantified that exclusivity timeframe in six months.
However, Final Fantasy XVI producer Naoki Yoshida clarified three months ago that the game isn’t shipping right away on PC. That’s just when the contract would allow Square Enix to release the game on the platform, but it’ll need to be optimized for it first, and it’s going to take longer than that. The developers noted several times that Final Fantasy XVI was designed around the hardware of the PlayStation 5, with director Hiroshi Takai going as far as saying that the game would still be in development if it wasn’t for the memory and SSD available in the console.
Still, in a new comment made during an interview with the Japanese website ASCII, Yoshida-san referenced the PC version once again.
We also plan to work on the development of the PC version carefully after the release.
This is an automatic translation provided by Google, so it’s hard to read too much into specific wording. That said, ‘carefully’ could either generally point to the development taking its time or to the studio’s goal to release a properly optimized version of Final Fantasy XVI.
Final Fantasy XV launched a year and a half later on PC, though at least it offered many technical features that were cutting-edge at the time, such as HDR10 and Dolby Atmos support, up to 8K resolution support, DLSS 1.0 support, and several NVIDIA GameWorks effects (Flow, HairWorks, Hybrid Frustum Traced Shadows, Turf, and Voxel Ambient Occlusion).
On the other hand, the Final Fantasy VII Remake also launched a year and a half after the original PS4 release, although its PC port was rather basic and underwhelming.
Still, neither game can truly be taken as a concrete example of how long it’ll take to port Final Fantasy XVI to PC. The game uses a brand new engine developed by Square Enix’s Creative Business Unit III rather than the Luminous Engine seen in Final Fantasy XV (and Forspoken) or the Unreal Engine seen in Final Fantasy VII Remake.
If you have a PS5 console, Final Fantasy XVI launches on June 22nd. Stay tuned for our review.
