Almost seven years after the release of the previous main part, the Final Fantasy XVI will debut on the PlayStation 5 in just three weeks. The version for the PC will also be, the only question is when.
The first sign that Sony concluded a time exclusivity deal was the rejection of the liability contained in the PlayStation Brazil trailer, released in March 2021. A year and a half later, in November 2022, another advertising trailer published by the PlayStation determined an exclusivity of six months.
However, the producer of Final Fantasy XVI Yoshida, three months ago, specified that the game would not be released immediately on a PC. Just under the terms of the contract, Square Enix can release the game on this platform, but first it will need to be optimized for it, and this will take more time. The developers several times noted that the Final Fantasy XVI was created taking into account the filling of PlayStation 5, and the director Hiroshi even said that the game would still be in development, if not for the memory and SSD, available in the console.
Nevertheless, in a new comment made during an interview with the Japanese site Ascii, Mr. Yoshida again mentioned the version for the PC.
"Thoroughly" It may mean either that the development is in no hurry, or the goal of the studio is to release the correctly optimized version of Final Fantasy XVI.
Final Fantasy XV entered the PC for a year and a half later, but at least she offered many technical capabilities at that time, such as HDR10 and Dolby Atmos support, resolution support up to 8K, DLSS 1.0 and several effects of NVIDIA GameWorks (Flow, HairWorks, Hybrid Frustum Traced Shadows, Turf and Voxel Ambient OcClusion).
On the other hand, the Final Fantasy VII remake also reached a year and a half after the release on the PS4, although its port on the PC was quite simple and not impressive.
Nevertheless, none of these games can serve as a specific example of how much time will take to transfer the Final Fantasy XVI to PC. The game uses a completely new engine, developed by Creative Business Unit III, Square Enix, not Luminous Engine, as in Final Fantasy XV (and Forspoken), or Unreal Engine, as in the Final Fantasy VII remake.