PS5 Creators: How Final Fantasy XVI harnesses PS5’s power

blog.playstation.com:

Set to be released for PlayStation 5 on June 22, Final Fantasy XVI is the next mainline installment of the Final Fantasy series, which follows Clive Rosfield, the protagonist, as he harnesses the power of multiple summons to overcome his tragic destiny. The game is the first full-fledged action RPG in the Final Fantasy series and features high-speed battles in which players switch between the powers of various Eikons, as well as large-scale Eikon vs. Eikon battles.

We spoke with the main director, Hiroshi Takai, about how the game harnesses PS5’s power and how it was optimized and developed for PS5.

As a developer, what were your first impressions of the power and technology of the PS5?

Hiroshi Takai: The two main things that struck me were the size of the memory and the speed of the SSD. I’ve worked with a lot of different hardware over the years, and many have failed to strike the right balance between the capabilities of the hardware and the size of the memory. However, the PS5 is different—it comes with enough memory installed to take full advantage of the hardware. As for the SSD, as we were building the game, I was simply blown away by how fast it was.

The Final Fantasy franchise is known for the quality of its graphics. Final Fantasy XVI was developed as a PS5 game first and foremost, so how did you take advantage of the power of the hardware when it came to the graphics and the gameplay?

Naturally, we wanted the graphics to be the best that they could be, so we put a lot of focus on the fine details of the character and environmental models, as well as the quality of the lighting and the shadows, to really make them shine. It’s really resource-intensive just to render these models on screen, and the lighting