Digital Foundry warns against PC port Final Fantasy VII -apkrig

The situation around the PC version of Final Fantasy VII in the Intergrade edition aroused a negative wave of attention even before its launch. Square Enix decided to follow the pricing policy of games designed for new consoles and the game – together with the expected Forspoken event – awarded a price tag of $ 70, respectively. 80 eur. From the point of view of the Czech player, the port of the game from 2020, although supplemented with new content, will cost 2,119 crowns, which fans naturally do not like and commented quite sharply against Square Enix in comments on social networks. A few days later, however, it turns out that the port itself was not technically successful, and experts from Digital Foundry magazine warn against buying before publishing their detailed analysis.

As I mentioned – I am not covering FFVIIR – yet the stutters that happen as you immediately get in game rendered graphics are just unacceptable.
Anyone testing and playing this game on PC before release should surely realise that your cinematic game should not do that.

– Alexander Battaglia (@Dachsjaeger) December 17, 2021

The problem was pointed out by journalist Alexander Battaglia, who stated on his Twitter that he was not personally analyzing the game, but noticed a serious tearing of the image, which in his opinion exceeded the limit of acceptance. At a distance, it encourages developers to realize that narrative games with a number of animations should not look like this on the first pass, and as you probably expect, combined with a higher price tag, it sparked another wave of very unpleasant discussions. Battaglia’s unacceptable experience was subsequently confirmed by his colleague John Linneman, who added information that the recordings were recorded only in 1080p resolution on a computer with an RTX 3090 graphics card and an Intel Core i9 10900K processor. In the given resolution, this should be rich enough for the maximum level of graphic settings and smooth operation, which, however, did not appear.

If you started Up FFVIIR in its Default Mode, the first level had incredible stutter. Every effect was displayed the first time and was acompannied by a long stutter. It has to be that way, there is no other possibility. The only thing is some do not subjectively perceive it.

– Alexander Battaglia (@Dachsjaeger) December 19, 2021

However, as Battaglia further commented on the problem on Twitter and the Reseter’s discussion portal, he began to come across the experience of other players and journalists who did not notice the tearing, freezing and jumping in Final Fantasy VII on the PC. This forced Battaglia to do more tests, and he concluded that the cache of the necessary data, including shaders, was probably to blame. Probably for this reason, for example, the editors of PC Gamer did not have so many problems with tearing, although they also describe the Final Fantasy VII port as a big problem, for example due to lack of graphical settings, including variable frame rate control.

However, this is not enough as an argument for Battaglio, and in other posts on Twitter he explains that this does not change anything fundamental for him in the steep evaluation of the game. The first pass through the game, ie not a repeated test with the data already loaded, is the one that most players will have, and it is to this experience that the developers should head, according to the journalist.