Final Fantasy XVI Director Impressed By The PlayStation 5's Performance

General news News PlayStation PlayStation News 04/02/2023

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It sounds like a bit of a PR statement, but Square Enix might like Sony’s November 2020-released console (which has since undergone a price increase, not a price cut!).

You can read the interview on the PlayStation Blog, which is a translation of the original Japanese version. Here, Hiroshi Takai, director of Final Fantasy XVI, sums up how the latest installment in the franchise exploits the capabilities of PlayStation 5 and how it has been optimized for the console: “The two main things that struck me were the size of the memory and the speed of the SSD. I’ve worked with many different hardware over the years, and many have failed to balance the hardware’s capabilities and the memory’s size. However, the PlayStation 5 is different—it comes with enough memory installed to take full advantage of the hardware. As for the SSD, I was blown away by how fast it was as we were building the game. […]

Naturally, we wanted the graphics to be the best they could be, so we focused on the fine details of the character and environmental models, as well as the quality of the lighting and the shadows, to make them shine. It’s resource-intensive to render these models on screen, and the lighting and shadow effects are then layered on top of that. We can only do this thanks to the PlayStation 5’s memory size. Clive, the protagonist of Final Fantasy XVI, can unleash a wide range of attacks, and the animations and effects for them can all fit in the memory, too. And the way that the game seamlessly flows between resource-intensive gameplay to equally intensive cutscenes and back again wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for the speed of the SSD. […] There are certain sections where the player will have to open heavy doors or lift portcullises, and we use the adaptive triggers [on the DualSense] there to put across that feeling of effort and resistance. They’re also used when riding chocobos. The haptic feedback can produce extremely subtle vibrations, which we use to create a heightened feeling of presence in cutscenes. We converted the sound effects used in each scene into haptic data, which let us portray details that we’ve never been able to before, like the movements of the air,” Takai said.

Final Fantasy XVI has just gone gold (production on the physical version has started) and will be released on PlayStation 5 on June 22.

Source: PSL

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