As the one-year anniversary of Final Fantasy XVI’s release approaches, the game seems to be approaching the end of support. The Rising Tide, the second and final piece of DLC for the game, releases in April, and the PC port is in the final stages of optimization. The assumption would be that after both of those are complete, the game would ride off into the sunset. Producer Naoki Yoshida seems to have other ideas, though, and they include porting the game to platforms beyond PC.
Talking with Noisy Pixel during PAX East, Yoshida revealed that fans might not need to bid farewell to FF16 just yet. When asked if it’s tough for him and the team to say goodbye to the game’s characters with the release of the final DLC, Yoshida responded by saying, “It’s not over in the sense that we have the PC version. Once the PC version is released, we’re thinking about hopefully moving to other platforms as well.”
While Yoshida didn’t specify exactly what “other platforms” the team is looking to port FF16 to, the technical requirements to run the game narrow the options. The most obvious candidate for a port would be the Xbox Series X|S. Yoshida’s work on Square Enix’s RPG franchise has already made its way over to Xbox this year with the release of Final Fantasy 14 on the platform. As a big-budget single-player entry in the series, FF16 has more in common with something like FF7 Remake than with FF14, and Remake is apparently never coming to Xbox, but that seems like a special case.
Another possibility is that FF16 could be ported to a console we don’t know about yet. With rumors continuing to swirl around the inevitable successor to the Nintendo Switch, there’s always a chance a port of FF16 could come to the console. However, rumored specs for the Switch 2 put it more in line with PS4 and Xbox One, so FF16 would still have to be heavily optimized (and likely compromised) for the platform. But until Yoshida and the team share more concrete details, Xbox and Nintendo gamers will have to stay hopeful. PC players can be satisfied knowing they’ll get their hands on the game soon enough, and PS5 players will be able to say goodbye to Clive and friends when The Rising Tide releases on April 18.
