On February the 22nd 2014 Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn will enter its beta testing phase on PS4 (and those that already bought the PS3 version will get the PS4 version for free), but how will it run and how good will it really look? According to Director and Producer Naoki Yoshida, it’ll run really well and look great, as he shared today in an interview on Game Watch.
Yoshida-san explained that the PS4 version of the game will have a visual fidelity equivalent to the current highest PC setting, and that it’ll run in 1080p resolution at 60 fps, unlike the PS3 version that is limited to 720p and 30 fps. It will also display the same number of characters on screen as the PC version.
It’s worth mentioning that he didn’t mention if the PS4 version will run at 60 FPS stably or will just get there when there isn’t much crowd. A stable 60 FPS framerate would be a quite amazing feat, considering that at the moment you need a rather beefy PC to keep the framerate locked there in the most crowded situations.
That said, he clarified that a DirectX 11 version of the PC client is currently in development, and while the PS4 version will use some of the new DirectX 11 features, it won’t use them all.
In addition to that, he also stated that, since there’s memory to spare, the option to use keyboard and mouse with the PS4 version will be implemented. You can already use them in the PS3 version, but the keyboard and mouse UI isn’t implemented due to memory limitations, making them almost useless. The touch pad of the DualShock 4 has also been already tested to be used for targeting.
Talking about the PS4 beta test Yoshida-san said that it’ll happen on separate servers from the live servers currently used for PS3 and PC, as the team cannot afford to disturb the current players if critical bugs were to occur. The test will happen in stages and players will initially begin with new characters, and then they’ll be given access to their old PS3 characters.
The estimated duration for the PS4 beta test is about a month. If everything goes well, data from the third week onward will carry over to the live servers.
