How Final Fantasy VII Rebirth harnesses immersive PS5 technology
Your adventure beyond Midgar begins in just over a week when Final Fantasy VII Rebirth launches on PS5 February 29. You may have taken your first steps into that wider world already, thanks to the recent demo, or marveled at that expanse via the State of Play dedicated to the game. And what sights there are. Sprawling, densely detailed open areas and cityscapes, redesigned character models, reimagined threats and new enemies, side-quests and mini-games galore. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth packs a lot in.
To understand how this evocative experience is being achieved on PS5, we turned to the action RPG’s creators, which include the majority of Final Fantasy VII Remake’s development team. Looking under the hood with us? Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Director Naoki Hamaguchi, who has been on the FFVII Remake project since the start, to talk us through how the studio brought the world of Gaia to life.
As a developer, what were your first impressions of the technology of the PS5?
With SSDs improving data loading speeds and allowing necessary resources to be loaded instantly, we felt that significant changes were needed in the system design to ensure a smooth gaming experience without any loading times for players. In fact, to take advantage of the high-speed SSDs in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the graphics pipeline and asset streaming system have been revamped from those of the previous title.
What learnings did you take from developing Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade to help you develop Final Fantasy VII Rebirth?
From the beginning, we were conscious of the disc size for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and we made it an absolute requirement for the disc size to be within 150G— even including the world map—while still allowing for cinematic locations to exist as they did in Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade. (Intergrade has a disc size of about 80GB.) For texture compression, experiencing the practical use of Oodle Kraken* and Oodle Texture** in Final Fantasy VII Remake
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