Square Enix’s Naoki Yoshida has said that Final Fantasy 16 PS4 version was being considered at one point. The producer revealed this tidbit of information in a lengthy interview with Japan’s Famitsu magazine while talking about crafting Final Fantasy 16’s reveal trailer in 2020, and how fans responded to it. Yoshida only briefly brought up the now-canned PS4 version and didn’t make any further comments about it.
What Yoshida had to say about Final Fantasy 16 PS4
“I was developing [Final Fantasy 16] with a view to releasing it on PlayStation 4, so I was worried that I couldn’t improve the quality [of the trailer],” Yoshida told Famitsu (via Google Translate). “I could have pre-rendered there once, but it would be a waste of development man-hours, and I didn’t want to do that. This is because I wanted to make a trailer by extracting what I could enjoy as a game experience.”
Since Final Fantasy 16 was revealed as a PS5 exclusive, there wasn’t much talk about a PS4 version so this is the first time we’ve heard that it was originally planned. Nevertheless, considering how ambitious Final Fantasy 16 sounds, dropping the last-gen version in favor of a PS5 release is a good thing. In a series of recent interviews, Yoshida talked about the power of the PS5 and how the hardware affords developers the luxury to create a seamless gameplay experience with no loading times between cutscenes and action.
“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 told the PlayStation Blog. “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.”
In other news, we’re pretty confident that God of War Ragnarok’s release date will be announced next week, and DICE has said that it has no plans to work on anything other than the Battlefield franchise.