The recent releases of the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters have at last given a new audience the opportunity to play the original six Final Fantasy games on modern consoles. But while the games are currently available on PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, Square Enix would really love to get them working on a third platform, and no, I'm not talking about the Xbox. I'm talking about Final Fantasy 14.
Speaking at a press conference at Final Fantasy Fan Fest 2023, director and producer Naoki Yoshida (known as Yoshi-P) said that he's been interested for some time in the idea of FF14 players being able to play the Pixel Remasters either through the Gold Saucer amusement park in game, or through player housing.
However, the feature has proven extremely challenging to implement, due to the Pixel Remasters already running on "middleware," effectively a software program middleman that lets an operating system do something it isn't normally able to do.
"So because it's running on a middleware, if you want to implement that into 14, you'd have to build another system that can play back the middleware inside the game," Yoshi-P said, according to a quote picked up by Gamesradar. "So it's like you're building a system of a game to play a system of a game and it's just this weird configuration."
That said, Yoshi-P is still very interested in the idea, and put out the call for a "super programmer" to step up and help Square Enix out.
Funnily enough, if Square Enix ever did get this feature working, it would actually equate to a release of the Pixel Remasters on Xbox given that FF14 was announced for Xbox at Fan Fest this past weekend, and is planned for release in spring of next year after an open beta period.
Fan Fest 2023 was a busy one, with plenty of announcements including the new Dawntrail expansion, a tease of future Square Enix x Xbox collaborations to come, a mysterious T-shirt, and an unfortunate rebuke of Blitzball fans.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
