In the lead-up to release, the team at Square Enix’s Creative Business Unit III studio have made frequent mention of how the extra power and Lightning-fast SSD in the PlayStation 5 has made a lot of Final Fantasy XVI possible from its seamless combat-cutscene-gameplay transitions to huge variety of animations and effects to general visual quality. Now though, it seems the game could have also made an appearance on the PlayStation 4 as well.
In an interview with YouTube channel, Final Fantasy Union, producer Naoki Yoshida revealed that the team had originally planned to release Final Fantasy XVI on both the PS5 and the PS4, but ultimately decided against a last-gen release out of concern it would add one-to-two years of extra development time in order to have it perform acceptably on the older hardware.
The comment comes toward the end of the video below, where Yoshida-san is asked at which point Sony started having a meaningful involvement in the project and whether it relates to development shifting to the PS5. In response, the producer said, “What I can say is that while developing, we originally had a plan to possible release the game on the PlayStation 4. During development, we realised, that to get it to a level that we were going to be proud of we would have needed at least one or two more years of development, to do that. And so I had to make a decision at that time. It’s like, okay, we don’t want to extend it that long. Let’s go PS5 only.”
Keeping development time in check seems to have been a common thread throughout Final Fantasy XVI’s development, with the game having gone gold nearly three months ahead of release and the studio revealing that there will be no “day one patch” because it’s already complete and ready to go from launch day.
