A demo for Final Fantasy 16 is reportedly coming to PC soon, as producer Yoshi-P says work on the port is 'going smoother than we thought it would'
Still no confirmation of a release date, however.
Earlier this month, Final Fantasy 16's director Naoki Yoshida (also known as Yoshi-P" revealed that the PC port of the acclaimed fantasy sequel is in its "final stages" of optimisation. Now, it's been reported that a demo of the RPG is coming to PC soon, with Yoshida stating progress on the port is "going smoother than we thought it would".
Speaking to Destructoid, Yoshida explained that Square Enix's current focus is figuring out what the minimum specs of Final Fantasy 16 will be on PC, to ensure the game is still able to deliver the "seamless" experience Square Enix intended for the sequel's open world action. "We want to have no breaks in the game," Yoshida said. "To replicate that on PC, you're going to need a pretty high-spec PC. So right now, what we're doing is we're testing the game, and our current optimization, on a lot of different systems to see, again, what are going to be those minimum specs for playing the game in a way that is similar to the PS5 experience."
According to Destructoid, Yoshida explained that the planned demo is intended to let players test Final Fantasy 16 on their system ahead of time, thereby ensuring it can handle the game before dropping any cash on it. According to Yoshida, FF16 will feature the kind of customisation settings that "players have come to expect from a PC game" so there should be some scalability to the port. But it is nonetheless likely to be a pretty demanding experience. Yoshida has previously stated players should expect system requirements to be "somewhat high" and that playing the game on an SSD should be considered "a must".
The last twelve months has been a difficult time for big-budget launches and ports on PC. Games like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and The Last of Us: Part 1 arrived in particularly rough shape on PC last year, though more recent releases like Horizon: Forbidden West were considerably more stable on release. Phil Iwaniuk explored the causes of the recent spate of inconsistent ports, concluding that the issue is less to do with hardware differences, and is more about modern game development pipelines. "Developers have to try twice as hard to achieve half the progress that would have been possible 10 years ago" he wrote. "And that's expensive."
You can read the full interview with Yoshida here. Although the PC version of the game is clearly imminent, Yoshida stopped short of offering a firm release date. Given the way the studio is talking, however, I'd be surprised if we didn't get that confirmation within the next few weeks.