A look at Final Fantasy XV's PC Demo

Many of you have heard that Final Fantasy XV is coming to PC soon on March 6th, 2018. We recently posted about the demo that was made available a few days ago. We took a short hands on look to see how the game shapes up on the PC. You can view the gameplay below which covers the base story line from start to finish available in the demo.

The footage captured was at 1080p and ran mostly at 60 FPS with about average settings. I did encounter a few dips here and there while also testing out some of the features. The first thing I noticed was the wide range of customization you have with the game’s graphics which is greatly appreciated. However, in order to change these effects in game, you first need to set the “Custom” setting at the main menu, otherwise you need to go back to the main menu to adjust the presets. With that taken care of, you’re free to adjust any settings on the fly as you see fit.

The game does include an in-game FPS meter that tracks a few other stats as well like clock speeds, although it is a bit intrusive and there’s no way to give you a less detailed version; it’s either on or off. Still, a nice feature to have to monitor your gameplay’s performance.

The game doesn’t support windowed fullscreen which means you’ll have to deal with the game popping out of full screen if you tab out or try to switch to a secondary monitor and have to fiddle with turning the setting off and on again to get the game back into fullscreen proper. This is a bit annoying, and I hope to see a windowed fullscreen version available at release.

Mouse and keyboard support is of course supported in the PC version, but so is traditional gamepad support. I plugged in my Dualshock 4 controller over USB and was able to get it working in game without any major hassle. The in-game button prompts also reflect the controller you pick as well which is a nice feature. Playing in first person with controller doesn’t feel very intuitive, but I can imagine with a mouse you would have more control. However, due to the frantic nature of the game, first person isn’t something I can see myself getting into just yet.

If you are looking to try mouse and keyboard, you’ll be happy to know that all of the game’s functions can be mapped to any part of the controller. You can even rebind the interact key separate from the attack key to avoid the annoying problems of picking up items and jumping by accident that many players experienced on console.

One nice feature the game supports is NVIDIA’s Ansel, a screenshot tool which lets you position the game’s camera wherever you want and apply different effects like depth of field or other filters.

It did struggle to work sometimes, and something I noticed was moving the camera angle reset the roll as well which made positioning a shot very cumbersome. Luckily, Prompto has your back with the in-game camera features, but it is nice to have different options.

One of the biggest glaring issues I saw out of the game was in Galdin Quay. The lighting under the rooftop of the restaurant was too dark to see very well unlike in the console versions.

This became worse when I came back from doing the quest for Dino when the area became almost impossible to see anything. Prompto decided in my gameplay that this would be a perfect time to take a photo of Noctis and Ignis with… interesting results.

Minor issues aside, it seems the PC version is shaped up to be a great experience for old and new players alike with the Royal Edition adding a bunch of new content to the game, as well as allowing players who don’t subscribe to the console’s multiplayer subscription services to play Comrades on PC with their friends.

The demo clocks in at around 21 GB which is pretty hefty for a demo, but if you have the space and are looking to see how the game performs on your PC, why not give it a try? It’s available on both Steam and the Windows Store.

Final Fantasy XV on PC launches on March 6th 2018.


About the Author

James Stine Huge Final Fantasy fan ever since I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time. Programmer and Administrator for Nova Crystallis. If something's broken, you can blame me.

Comments