Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition – Release Date, Benchmark and overview
Happy (belated) 2018 everyone! I owe you an apology for the lack of updates in December, sadly real life got in the middle between the Holidays and personal commitments. However, yesterday morning I woke up with a bunch of incredible news regarding the Windows Edition of Final Fantasy XV, such as the awaited release date, official requirements and general informations. I thought that would be quite a nice way to start a new year on the blog, especially considering I’ve been fairly obsessed with this RPG for quite some time now! 😀
I already posted an article in October including all the official announcements, hence you should check that one first to have a more complete view of what we can expect from this port in terms of gameplay and modding.
I fired up my Discord App and noticed a friend of mine shared a video posted by the official FFXV Twitter account and I could already feel the hype increasing as soon as I realized it was the official release date trailer.
One of the things many people will be thrilled about is the NVIDIA Ansel support. As you may already know, Ansel is a photo mode incorporated into the most recent PC games in order to take high quality screenshots using the free camera option, field of fiew and filters. Considering FFXV has a sort of photo mode (very limited) that we all enjoy on console, Ansel should allow us to finally have more freedom and make epic images also during battles. Besides, chances are some Cinematic Tools will be developed by one of our talented programmers in the gaming community and that will be a good way for AMD users to enjoy a good photo shooting even without the required GPU.
The Windows Edition is coming out on March 6th and the standard version will include every additional content released so far with add-ons and Season Pass DLCs for $49,99.
The game can be preordered from the very first day of February from the official site, also getting more exclusive packages like items, outfits and decals for the Regalia. A Benchmark will be downloadable to test your rig and know in advance how the game will run according to your graphics settings and physical memory.
Coolio. Now, how about the PC requirements?
Yeah, I hear ya. This is what you were waiting for, isn’t it? The official FFXV page finally has the expected specs listed for minimum, recommended and 4K HDR, also posted in a dedicated section on the Nvidia site. Will your machine support all this? Let’s check it out together:
As we already anticipated, even if we don’t own the most powerful GTX card on the market we should be able to run the game as long as we have at least 4GB of memory at our disposal. However, a relatively powerful processor is totally needed even for the minimum requirements and the HDD space indicated is over 100GB as rumored initially. Ouch, what a beast!
In order to properly play in 4K though, we can only use the high-end GTX 1080ti 11GB and a compatible 4K monitor (obviously) to render the textures at a higher resolution.
Some of us can also be pleased to see Windows 7 was not forgotten, since not everyone is particularly fond of Win10 for some incompatibility issues occuring from time to time.
Note: The GTX 760 is actually described as a 2GB card on the GeForce site. I am not exactly sure how the game can still run smoothly on it if we consider the recommended memory is 6GB, but I suppose in that case people wouldn’t be able to increase the settings above the lowest ones. It doesn’t make too much sense to me since one of the best aspects of the game is the visual indeed, but I suppose we can only wait for the benchmark in order to see how it runs with our own eyes.
Despite the original release date in 2016, Square Enix said that even if a complete PC and console version (Royal Edition) are about to come out at the same time, the whole lore behind this title is not yet reaching its closure. In fact, A second Season Pass will include three new episodes this year, one already announced as Episode Ardyn, which will allow us to know Mr. Izunia from a different perspective. Considering the incredible success brought to them just recently by Episode Ignis, we can only expect amazing things in terms of story and gameplay. Final Fantasy XV is a huge world full of possibilities and apparently they introduced the “Butterfly Effect” concept lately, where one simple action determines the outcome of a situation and depending on your choice things can go terribly wrong or incredibly well.
The additional upcoming content will include:
• An expanded map for Insomnia City Ruins with new side quests and enemies
• A controllable Royal Vessel Boat allowing the player to explore the area between Cape Caem and Altissia, plus fishing aboard (this may be a good opportunity to easily recreate the older group glitch eventually, unless the modding features will allow that with a few simple clicks)
• A more powerful Armiger thanks to a specific accessory scattered somewhere in the world
• First person camera mode
• New Trophies
In other words, if you’re still a newcomer you are just in time to enjoy the game in its fullest soon and even receive new updates and DLCs for quite some time. Welcome to EOS!
If you’re still skeptical after Final Fantasy: The Evil Within (and since I usually think outside the box I’ll most likely go against everyone else saying I actually enjoyed it) don’t be, because you’re going to live a totally different and epic experience!
