Final Fantasy 16 on PS4 was scrapped in the middle of development

Producer Naoki Yoshida reveals the original plans

Marco Wutz | Jan 12, 2024

Final Fantasy 16 on PS4 was scrapped in the middle of development /

Naoki Yoshida, the man at Square Enix behind the successful turnaround of Final Fantasy 14 and producer of Final Fantasy 16, said that last year’s installment was originally planned as a “multi-platform release on PlayStation 4 as well.”

He revealed this during an interview with PlayStation’s Shuhei Yoshida, which was uploaded by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Science on YouTube.

Asked if the decision to make Final Fantasy 16 only available on the more powerful hardware was made early in development, the Square Enix producer said: “No, it was around the middle of development, I believe. Originally, we were expecting to have a multi-platform release on PlayStation 4 as well.”

FF16 Phoenix Eikon — The impressive Eikon fights contain some of visual highlights of the game / Square Enix

According to him, technical limitations were the decisive factor: “To some extent, the assets were pushing the PlayStation 4 to its absolute limits, but in the end, the Final Fantasy series has a certain level of graphical fidelity expected of it, and when we tried to eliminate basically all loading on the PS4 version, there were certain parts where we were having to reduce the quality to a point lower than [Final Fantasy] 15.”

“We wanted to create the very best story experience, one that made you feel like you were blasting through it on a roller coaster from start to finish without any loading at all and being amazed by what you’re seeing,” he continued. Obviously, that artistic vision was at odds with the restrictions the PS4’s hardware imposed on the team.

“I just thought it was going to be really hard to do that on PS4,” the producer said. Naoki Yoshida reported that he’d explained all this to higher-ups at Square Enix and asked them for permission to just focus on the PS5 version at first, which was granted.

The developer also revealed that the team spent a little over a year playing the game ahead of release to decide where to put the PS5 DualSense controller’s haptic feedback feature to use.

Final Fantasy 16 DLC Echoes of the Fallen is out now

Published Jan 12, 2024

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg