Yes!
For years, a common Final Fantasy XIV (and by extension, PS4) “hack” has to been to install an SSD drive in your PS4 just to lessen the load times for hardcore XIV players. Given that the whole process won’t be necessary on PS5, it stands to reason that the in-house SSD will provide some sort of benefit. Square Enix confirmed today that this is indeed the case.
Revealed on the Letter from the Producer LIVE stream, Square Enix says that by the time patch 5.4 comes out (which is titled Futures Rewritten), it will allow the game to not only work on the PS5, but also take advantage of faster load times. Otherwise, the game will mirror a PS4 Pro’s performance on a PS5.
As someone who has played FFXIV on an SSD-ready PC, a PS3 and a base PS4/PS4 Pro, this improvement is a godsend. Even on a Pro, load times between areas (which is very common for high level players, teleporting around at will) can be prohibitively long. That said, producer Yoshi-P did note that a proper PS5 edition has not been fully confirmed yet.
As far as other big 5.4 fixins go, there’s going to be a new trial, an unreal trial, more story (“MSQ”), another raid wing (Eden’s Promise) and the Matoya’s Relict dungeon. Once again Square Enix is ambitiously trying to sate both the hardcore and casual playerbases with these two different approaches.
Letter from the Producer Live [YouTube via Reddit]
