Final Fantasy 15 Won’t Be 170GB On PC

While it’s great that Final Fantasy 15 is coming to PC, one of the things that isn’t so great was the headlines warning about the game’s install size.

Shortly after Square Enix and director Hajime Tabata announced that FF15 was getting a PC release, people started to panic about the game’s install size. And that wasn’t through any fault of the press: the figure came from a press release put out by Square Enix themselves, which also listed the pricey GTX 1080 Ti as part of the “recommended specs”.

But in a chat with Tabata at Gamescom, the veteran developer confirmed that the listing of the hard drive space was a “miscommunication”, as was the recommended specs that had gone out to press.

“That was a mistake, actually,” Tabata said through a translator. “That was a communications mistake – something got put in a memo that really shouldn’t have. What that is [the specifications that went out to press] based on the specs that we’re running the demo on today.”

“Again, the final specs for the release version haven’t been fixed yet. There’s a very good chance they can change. Someone put that in there and it got reported as the recommended specs, but that’s not the final fixed version. The fact that it became that number is a communication [error].”

Tabata went on to say that the demo machines were running at 4K using GTX 1080 Ti cards, but the minimum specs would go down “at least as far as the same level as the console edition, maybe looking to going even further than that in future”. “But we’ve not fixed the frame rate at 30 frames at all – it’s just on the 1080 Ti, that’s the maximum that one can do [at 4K], so that’s what it’s doing at the moment.”

It’s a good thing, really. The 1080 Ti is still a $1000-plus card, and with Vega 64 not coming close and cryptocurrency miners helpfully driving the price of GPUs up, few gamers would get to enjoy FFXV at those “recommended” specs.

The author travelled to Gamescom as a guest of NVIDIA.