Final Fantasy XVI Is Heading to PC on September 17th, How Will it Run on the Steam Deck? Demo Tested

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It's finally happening, after a wait of over a year, Final Fantasy XVI is heading to the PC platform, including Steam. While this is great news, games like these are often pretty heavy on system requirements, and Final Fantasy XVI does look beautiful, there's no lack of special effects and particles firing off here, so how does it run on the Steam Deck? Fortunately, Square Enix also released a demo to coincide with the announcement, so we can get an idea of how it might run.

You can check out the Final Fantasy XVI PC Announcement trailer below:

I'm sure Final Fantasy needs no introduction to you all. While the game is a self-contained story, like many Final Fantasy games, it still retains the JRPG classics. It features real-time combat, requiring you to string combos, dodge attacks, and occasionally do the odd quick-time-event during a cutscene.

Final Fantasy XVI follows Clive Rosfield, who, after suffering a terrible loss, vows revenge on a mighty Eikon, great creatures who dominate the world. It's up to you to discover what lies at the bottom of a tale of treachery and an ever-increasing risk of all-out war between the nations in the region of Valisthea.

Steam Deck Performance of the Demo

But how does Final Fantasy XVI run on Steam Deck? I played through the demo to find out, and the answer is, unfortunately, not great.

I set the game as low as it could go, 1280x720 resolution with FSR3 Ultra Performance mode, and then the Low setting for all the qualities. With these settings, we can get around 30 FPS for some of the time, however, many cutscenes that use a lot of particles or depth of field quickly drop to around 20, and sometimes the teens. During combat, we can also see dips into the mid-20s at times.

Not to mention, the game can start looking pretty rough on these settings, cutscenes especially get very pixelated and blurry.

This, of course, is just a demo, but if anything, we're likely to see performance worsen in the full game, when we have the full breadth of the world to explore, and doubtless there will be more intensive areas to be found.

We could hope for some optimization here, but I think we might have to accept that FFXVI might be one game we need to run on a beefier system, or at least cloud-stream it to our Steam Decks. But we'll keep an eye on this one for sure.

As for the game itself, I haven't played the PS5 version, and I thoroughly enjoyed the demo, it plays great, the combat is fluid and engaging, and the storyline looks very intriguing, the demo definitely leaves you wanting more.

Final Fantasy XVI will launch on Steam on September 17th, it will cost $49.99, and it does have a demo available right now, with save data able to be transferred to the full game when it releases. The demo is around 90 minutes in length I'd say. It does, of course, have full controller support.

Will you be playing Final Fantasy XVI when it comes to PC next month? Let us know in the comments below!

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