With Final Fantasy 16 releasing for PS5, when can PC players expect to explore Valisthea and what have the developers said about a PC port?
Final Fantasy 16 is gracing PlayStation 5 and is shaping up to be an epic high-fantasy romp that we can’t wait to get our hands on, but some of us here at RadioTimes.com play exclusively on PCs – so we’re left asking, is FF16 coming to PC, what is our PC release date estimate and what have the developers said?
Other Final Fantasy titles have made their way to PC a while later, so we’ll be looking to the past to predict the future – as well as looking at what the team at Square Enix have said on the matter.
It’s been hard not to get on the hype train with people having a great time with the demo, debating the protagonist’s name and seeing all the characters and who is playing them.
While PlayStation 5 players have their fun and get to rub it in our faces by pre-loading the hotly-anticipated title, we’ll collate everything we know about the FF16 PC release, when our best estimate is for launch and what the developers have said. Read on to join us in our quest to make ourselves feel better!
Is FF16 coming to PC?
The reveal trailer for Final Fantasy 16 on IGN’s YouTube channel explicitly stated at the end, under an asterisk, “also available on PC” – while other trailers have only said FF16 is a six-month timed exclusive to PlayStation, 5 with other versions of the game only being able to be released on other platforms after 31st December 2023.
FF16 Producer Naoki Yoshida stated on the Japanese PlayStation Blog, “I would like to release a PC version at some point” (translated via Google), which is rather telling indeed.
This all points to the fact that it is not a question of ‘if’ but when FF16 will be coming to PC, and they would be remiss not to – as Twisted Voxel reported that SteamSpy put the number of Steam accounts that own Final Fantasy 15 at between one and two million, not an insignificant chunk of the ten million copies sold that the FF15 team celebrated last year on Twitter.
FF16 PC release date estimate
Final Fantasy 16 will release in November 2024 at the earliest, by our best guess. FF15 was initially released on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on 29th November 2016 and released 16 months later on PC on 6th March 2018.
The Final Fantasy 7 Remake came out for PS4 on 10th April 2020, PS5 14 months later on 10th June 2021, and saw a PC release 6 months later on 16th December 2021 – a total of 18 months after the initial launch.
It could well be later than this, as the game seems more sprawling and complex than FF15 was, and is on a new engine developed by Naoki’s Creative Business Unit III – which hasn’t been ported to any system other than PS5 as far as we know, adding to the complexity of such a task.
Naoki confirms as much in the aforementioned PlayStation Blog, saying, “Even if we start optimising the PC version after the PS5 version comes out, we won’t be able to optimise it in half a year, so it won’t come out in a short span of half a year. I would like to release it eventually…” (translated via Google).
As soon as we do have any more info regarding the FF16 PC release date, we will let you know as soon as possible – so be sure to check-in.
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