Earlier this month, Final Fantasy 16 director Naoki Yoshida (a.k.a. Yoshi P.) revealed that the PC port of the acclaimed fantasy sequel is in the "final stages" of optimization. It is now being reported that a demo of the RPG will soon be available on PC, and Yoshida stated that the progress of the port is "going smoother than we expected."

In an interview with Destructoid, Yoshida said that Square Enix is currently focusing on the minimum specs for the PC version of Final Fantasy 16 in order to provide the "seamless" experience that Square Enix intended for the open world action of the sequel. He explained that they are trying to figure out.

"We want to make the game seamless," Yoshida said.

"To replicate that on a PC would require a very high-spec PC. So what we are doing right now is testing the game and current optimizations on different systems to see what the minimum specs are to play the game in a way that is close to the PS5 experience."

According to Destructoid, Yoshida said that the planned demo will allow players to test Final Fantasy 16 on their own systems ahead of time to make sure their system can handle Final Fantasy 16 before they put money into the game. He explains that this is a good idea. According to Yoshida, FF16 features a customized setting that "players have come to expect from PC games," so there should be some scalability in the port. However, it will still be a very demanding experience. Yoshida has previously stated that players should expect "somewhat higher" system requirements and that playing the game on an SSD should be considered "mandatory"

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The past 12 months have been a difficult time for major PC launches and ports, with games like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and The Last of Us: Part 1 having a particularly rough go of it on PC last year, while Horizon: Forbidden More recent titles like West were fairly consistent upon release, and Phil Iwaniuk explored the causes of the recent spate of inconsistent ports, concluding that the problem lies less in the modern game development pipeline than in hardware differences. Developers have to work twice as hard to achieve half the progress they made a decade ago," he said. And that can be expensive."

The full interview with Yoshida can be read here, and while it is clear that a PC version is imminent, Yoshida declined to give a definite release date. However, given the way the studio talks, we'd be surprised if we don't get some confirmation of that within the next few weeks.