Square Enix’s Naoki Yoshida has said that the PS5’s processing power allows Final Fantasy 16 gameplay to “flow at a breakneck pace” with virtually no loading times. In an interview with the PlayStation Blog, the director said that Sony’s new hardware enables the game to be a “rollercoaster ride” with rich graphics and instant, seamless transition between cutscenes and gameplay.
Final Fantasy 16 offers “deep” gameplay
“The core elements of a Final Fantasy game are a deep story, deep gameplay, cutting-edge graphics and cutting-edge sound… as well as chocobos and moogles, of course,” Yoshida said. “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. 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.”
Yoshida recently revealed that Final Fantasy 16 won’t be an open world game because the developers want to focus on an “independent area-based game design” that allows them to craft a story that they want to tell. That story will apparently be more mature than previous games in the series. Yoshida confirmed as much to GameSpot, explaining that Final Fantasy 16’s mature age rating allows the team more freedom.
“When trying to tell a story with difficult adult themes, these ratings can end up becoming somewhat of a hindrance,” he said. “This time, to make sure that we could tell the story that we wanted in the way that we wanted to, we decided to pursue a mature rating in most of the regions that will be releasing the game.”
Final Fantasy 16 will release in summer 2023.
In other news, DICE has said that it has no plans for anything other than the Battlefield franchise because it wants to be a shooter powerhouse, and Gotham Knights will apparently feature the biggest ever video game version of Gotham City.
