It’s been a busy few weeks for the Final Fantasy series. Major new announcements were recently made with Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 Reunion and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth (with its sequel also already being in the works), while shortly before that, we finally got long-awaited new look at the upcoming Final Fantasy 16 as well. Where the latter of that group is concerned, there’s been a great deal more information of late thanks to a new round of interviews with its developers, from its Eikon battles, combat, and customization to the structure of its world, AI-controlled party members, and more.
As part of that round of interview, producer Naoki Yoshida also briefly discussed the PS5’s hardware and how it is benefitting the development of Final Fantasy 16, which is releasing exclusively for the console. Speaking with the official PlayStation Blog, Yoshida remarked that the PS5’s more powerful hardware will enable not only improved visuals, but also faster load times that will allow for seamless transitions from gameplay to cutscenes and vice versa.
“With the boost in processing power, we can obviously make the graphics even richer than we could before, but it’s the super-fast loading times that really impress me,” Yoshida said. “In Final Fantasy 16, you jump straight from story cutscenes into real-time battles and back again without any loading times, making the gameplay flow at a breakneck pace. It’s only thanks to the power of the PlayStation 5 system that we can make Final Fantasy 16 the roller-coaster ride that it is.”
Yoshida did not touch on whether we can expect the game to utilize the PS5’s capabilities in other ways, such as implementation of the DualSense’s features, 3D audio, or more, but with several months still left until the game launches, it’s likely we’ll be learning more about that soon enough.
Final Fantasy 16 launches for PS5 in Summer 2023. Another trailer for the game is scheduled to drop this Fall- read more on that through here.