We Spoke To Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s Game Director About Bringing The Game To PC And Optimising for Steam Deck

Ahead of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s arrival on PC this week, we got the chance to speak with the game’s Director, Naoki Hamaguchi, about improvements coming with the PC version, challenges faced and optimising the game for handheld devices.

What were the main improvements your team aimed to incorporate into the PC version, compared to the PS5 version of the game?

We prioritised two main areas when improving the PC version.

1. Achieving a level of graphical quality aimed at high-end PCs, with higher texture resolution and modelling LOD etc. than even what is possible on PS5 Pro.
2. Achieving an even higher quality of lighting on a wide range of PC spec by reviewing and re-working the in-game lighting.

The PC version was developed with particular care taken towards these two areas. After we first released footage of the PC version running, fans created videos showing it running side by side with the PS5 one and spread excitement about the quality, so I was very happy to see that they resonated with what we had aimed to achieve here.

Are there any improvements coming to the game that will take advantage of the recently announced Nvidia 50-series/AMD cards?

We were unable to utilise any of the unique hardware features of the very latest generation GPUs, but the PC version of FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH does support 4K resolutions with frame rates of 60fps and higher, so we believe that even without these, players can expect an even richer gaming experience on higher end PCs.

What’s been the biggest challenge bringing the game to PC?

For the PC version, we needed to ensure that we were offering a stable gameplay experience on a wide variety of different PC specs and felt that it was important to create a system that could adjust the graphical output quality on the game side to match the PC spec in a flexible way. Accordingly, the rendering settings for FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH are set up in a way that lets them adjust the balance between graphical quality and the processing burden. To go into specifics, FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE kept modelling LOD (level of detail) gradations limited, with fairly few different grades, but by contrast, REBIRTH manages LOD using over 10 different grades, allowing for the system to adjust automatically based on the graphical processing burden and memory usage limits, which keeps the frame rate stable.

Developing this was hard work, but ultimately it allowed us to achieve a stable gameplay experience for all players, flexibly adapting the graphical quality to match their PC specs.

Has the team looked into optimising the game to work with the various PC handhelds available on the market?

There is a high demand for the Steam Deck among PC gamers, and we had optimisation for it in mind from the moment we decided to port the game to PC. However, the difficulty in optimising a game originally developed for PS5 for Steam Deck is quite high and the development team continued to work on it right up to the release, but on 16/01/2025, we finally announced that REBIRTH is Steam Deck verified by Valve. I really am very grateful to the team for all their efforts in achieving this.

What’s your favourite new feature coming to the game on PC?

There are lots of mini games in REBIRTH, but the piano playing game deserves a mention, because you can assign different keys to each of the notes and thus make the control layout close to a real piano or keyboard. With the controls making it easier to perform music, I look forward to seeing even more people sharing their performances on SNS etc. than we had with the PS5 release.

You can read our review of the PC version of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth here.