Same as the previous installment Final Fantasy XVI of Square Enix it will be a temporary PS5 exclusive, for at least six months, and much has been said about how its visual fidelity is only possible on PS5. Director Hiroshi Takai spoke to PlayStation Blog and once again discussed the console and its power.
Takai was asked about his first impressions of the hardware, Takai said:
“The two main things that stood out to me were the size of the memory and the speed of the SSD. I’ve worked with a lot of different hardware over the years, and many have failed to strike the right balance between hardware capabilities and memory size.
However, the PS5 is different: it comes with enough memory installed to take full advantage of the hardware. As for the SSD, while we were building the game, I was just amazed at how fast it was.”
As for how the development team took advantage of the console hardware, he said:
“Naturally, we wanted the graphics to be as good as possible, so we put a lot of focus on the fine details of the character and environment models, as well as the quality of the lighting and shadows, to really make them shine.
It’s really resource intensive to just render these models to the screen, and the lighting and shadow effects are superimposed on top of that. We can only do that thanks to the memory size of the PS5. Clive, the protagonist of FF16, can unleash a wide range of attacks, and the animations and effects for them can also fit in memory.
Of course, going from cutscenes to gameplay and back is only possible thanks to the SSD (which Takai had also praised last year).
“The way the game seamlessly flows between resource-intensive gameplay to equally resource-intensive cutscenes and vice versa wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for the speed of the SSD.”
The console’s DualSense controller is also supported, using the adaptive triggers when opening heavy doors or lifting portcullises, for “that feeling of exertion and resistance.” They are also used when riding chocobos. Haptic feedback can produce extremely subtle vibrations, which we use to create a greater sense of presence in scenes. We converted the sound effects used in each scene into haptic data, allowing us to capture details we’ve never been able to before, like air movements.”
Final Fantasy XVI will be released on June 22 for PS5.
