Final Fantasy 16 Patch 1.31 Out Now on PS5, Brings Big Damage Buffs for Clive, Better Side Quests, and Much More

"Made adjustments to when Torgal can be petted and lowered time before re-petting."

This is the most important change. That dog is adorable.

Great changes needed for Wings of Light and Blind Justice but it sucks they didn't do anything for Odin's feat and its single combo. Like they couldn't have added in at least an R1, R2 combo? Well we at least have both Clive's Leviathan eikon and other unknown ability that is supposedly similar to Dante's SDT which I'm excited for.

I'm going to have to replay this. Again.

Pretty pumped for this to be the first game I play on PS5 Pro later this year. Good to see so many improvements!

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Aight... I'm jumping back in. Just got my Portal so a couple hours starting tonight sounds splendid!

This is really good timing for me. I'm just trophy chasing in DD2 at this point.

Much needed photo mode improvements!!!

More cutscenes for side quests? I'm going to have to play it again at some point aren't I? 3rd playthrough here we go!

Any chance of patching in a stable frame and stable resolution?

Look like a fighting game’s patch notes hahaha!

Is the lesson here that we should wait a full year before diving in to a Square Enix title? This is a game-altering collection of changes.

Seeing this, I'm even MORE hesitant to pick up Rebirth. FFXVI has so much better combat than the FF7 RE-x titles, and seeing that they've continued to refine XVI this long after release makes me want to wait to buy Rebirth until it gets a similar treatment. Just being able to remap controls would be huge.

@IntrepidWombat I think waiting to play games — especially big releases that will very likely receive major updates — is becoming more and more of an obvious decision. You're ultimately getting a better game that costs less.

The only downside to waiting is... well, waiting! Sometimes it feels good to be part of the 'conversation' when a new game launches. And time isn't a luxury that everyone has, of course.

But if you're prepared to wait, it really does feel like the wise choice — now more than ever.

Seems like always, the best time to play a game is not at release.

Unfortunate to not see any performance update in that list. But being able to pet Torgal more often almost makes up for it. 🤷‍♀️

Great list to an already great game. Makes me want to start up a new FF playthrough.

@IntrepidWombat ya you've definitely got a point about waiting before buying games. But 16s combat is awful in comparison to ff7 rebirth. 16s Looks flashy but is shallow and gets extremely repetitive

I smell a complete edition coming soon.

Anyways, great excuse to replay the game.

In have to finish the second playthrough to get the plat. The damage buff should help that be not too much of a grind.

@Blaze215 Different strokes, I suppose. I played the demo of Rebirth and thought it was clunky. The player attacks have no weight, and I got real tired of being attacked from off screen. FFXVI wasn't great or anything (shame when Nier: Automata offers an amazing blueprint of how an action RPG can play), but it was at least competent.

Madness that the changelog for the latest entry of a big RPG series reads like a changelog for Street Fighter. (LOL, @Nei , I saw your post after I wrote mine!)

Adjustments to when you can pet the dog is new meta tho.

@Bettyswollocks @JackiePriest @Jayslow So much this. I'm playing in performance mode and I swear average fps is 40-45 with dips below 30 frequently, hitting 60 every so often. When that happens I switch to graphics mode to see if it's really pretty much the same, and nope, that's even worse by a mile. Seems like 20-30 unstable. I'll never understand why they were going to use UE and then switched to Luminous again. OTOH, it sounds like Rebirth on UE isn't much better. When I last tried XIV using UE on PS5 with 4k on it was a choppy mess, but retrying XIV on XB at 4k with the new beta dynamic res it's waaaaay smoother than XVI's performance mode to the point that it makes it difficult to go back and forth. Though Yoshi-P, not content with smooth framerates, is about to break that with a gfx overhaul beautifying XIV which will probably tank fps to match XVI...Just leave it...it's fine...

@IntrepidWombat @ShogunRok @Lup Seriously, something has to give with the game industry. They raise prices. They want everyone to buy at launch. Then they release broken games that takes them a year plus to actually fix and in the process the fix a ton of QoL flaws in the game, and then add the missing content. Almost a year later and they're adding missing quest content?! I really don't understand why anyone would buy a new game less than a year after it launches anymore. You pay twice as much, get only 75% of the content at best, and get a worse QoL experience.

If the industry insists on releasing games this way they really need to take a page from the past and instead of charging more at launch, they should be charging less. Buy a game near launch, pay $55. Pre-order, pay $45. Buy it a year later, pay $80.

It's like a restaurant charging $40 for a dinner entree if you buy it at 4:00PM, and they serve it raw, but if you come in during the dinner rush it's only $20 and they'll actually cook it.

@Blaze215 Agreed and it barely gave me any challenge after I mastered the art of dodging and mashing.
There's very little strategy involved in this game compared to earlier titles and no super bosses to get frustrated about.

However I did enjoy the game for what it is, even if it didn't tickle my itch to play a Final Fantasy game.

I did enjoy Final Fantasy VII Rebirth a lot more even though I would enjoy it even more if it was less of an action RPG.
Some of that was surely thanks to my nostalgia for the FF7 characters and universe. But to be honest, it is the better game out of the two in nearly every way.

Can't wait for this one to drop. Just got a steam deck and it's flawless on there!

These are great improvements, shame I've Platinum this beauty of a game and sold it on for someone else to enjoy! 😢🤣 I'll rebuy at some point and smash out the dlc!

@NEStalgia Rebirth's performance mode is WAY smoother than XVI. The only issue was that at launch the performance mode looked pretty blurry. This has since been fixed, now you can choose between two modes, one soft and one sharp.

You get a lower resolution in performance mode, but after the patch it's totally worth it and it's a quite enjoyable experience for me. Perhaps not rock solid 60, but miles better than the stuttery mess of a "performance" mode that XVI has.

I actually prefer playing FFXVI at 30 fps, because it's at least more stable. I am very sensitive to large frame-rate fluctuations so the performance mode in XVI is nearly unplayable for me.
30fps is something I can get used to.

It's like if you have a bright screen and a dim screen. I prefer the bright screen, but if the bright screen brightness randomly flickers as if something is wrong with it, then I rather get used to the dim screen that keeps the same brightness all the time.

Interesting... Still need to play the outlier that is Stranger of Paradise, but would be keen to pick this up after. Hopefully, a complete edition by then- and once I'm done, I imagine rebirth will be plenty affordable.

@DaniPooo Yeah I must say I agree with your assessment of both games. Every fight in 16 boiled down to mash abilities to get stagger. Once staggered use the most damaging abilities, rinse repeat. 7s definitely has more depth with things like elemental and status affects and the much more customisation with materia, not to mention multiple characters with different unique abilities

@DaniPooo Interesting take. Is XVI really so choppy, or more inconsistent compared to Rebirth? I only played the demos of both, felt like 16 was simpler/easier combat (maybe just as a fan of action heavy games?) but Rebirth was harder to see what was going on onscreen. Would you say it's smoothed out since?

5th Run, here I come 😅

@J2theEzzo Rebirth definitely has a smoother frame-rate in performance mode. However I am not sure about stuff going on on-screen. It could be a bit more particle effects and magic spells flying around as I feel like the party members use their abilities a bit more frequently than in XVI.

Quite a few issues with Rebirth was ironed out with the last patch so I really enjoy the performance mode now.

However Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is more of an RPG than XVI and there's more depth to combat than you get in XVI.
For me that's a good thing, but if you're not into that sort of thing then Rebirth might not be for you.

However you should really play Final Fantasy VII - Remake before you play Rebirth, it's a trilogy and I don't think you'll appreciate the story as much if you start in the middle.

Love this game. I dream about a FFVII remake with this battle system and not the one it shipped with. The best Final Fantasy in years, and a solid example of why you need a PS5

@DaniPooo That's at least good to hear because XVI is horrible performance. I kind of disagree on 30fps mode though, It may swing less wildly than performance mode, but any time performance mode bothers me and I switch to graphics mode it's even worse. I tried, I thought a stable 30 may be more bearable than the sloppy 25-60, but I feel like graphics mode is below 30 more often than it's at 30 and feels like slo-mo.

@NEStalgia It takes a moment to get used to, but once you get used to it then it's not a problem.

Unstable 25-60 every time I pan the camera, press a button or poke my nose is something I never get used to though

@DaniPooo No, the complexity suits me fine, really! I've played (and platted) remake, and am a big fan of the OG 7. Truth be told, all the whisper nonsense really put me off playing the sequel, but if it plays "better" than 16, I'll stick it out.
Think it was probably all the particle effects and enemies attacking from offscreen that just threw me off a bit, but I'm always prepared to learn and get better.

@DaniPooo I will begrudgingly give it a try again. I don't think I can do it. Neither option is good. But I think on my display the 20-30 is still actually worse than 25-60 lol.

@NEStalgia Well they did mention in an interview that the next patch should add "some" improvements to the performance mode but unfortunately not fix it completely. I will likewise give the performance mode another shot after the patch

I plan to finish it soon (Back to the Origin). But side quests were true hell, not willing to replay them anymore. Maybe I return to FF16 in ten years or so, but right now I must admit I love it, I appreciate its simplicity, but I'm also looking forward finishing it and put aside.

Looking forward to enjoying so many QOL updates in Final Fantasy Mode! The ability to warp to quest givers upon completion is second only to being able to pet Torgal more frequently.

Wow, I’m surprised about the buffs. I felt like the difficulty was just about right. Although many of the enemy encounters did feel quite “spongy”, perhaps they are responding to those complaints. But the hunt board encounters and boss battles were the right level of intensity and satisfaction when you finally prevailed. Those will probably be quite a bit easier now.

Overall, with the side quest completion warping and the buffs it looks like they are trying to streamline the game and improve the flow, which I think is good. I loved the game but it was probably too long.

The more torgal petting the better

I have played through FF16 twice and will not rule out a third go. This is the only PlayStation game that I have enjoyed enough to get the Platinum trophy, and so far all of the additional trophies for the first DLC.

I'm still playing through the game. Interested if I'll actually notice any of these changes.

Lame we never got more playable characters and team combos, or being allowed to summon in select places freely. Guess pc version will address 2 of those.

@DaniPooo I haven't seen what the patch does or doesn't do yet but I was playing with the settings yesterday, in he big open area near Martha's. Performance mode is just so bad in that area. It's inconsistent and chopping, meanwhile, the graphics get so soft and blurry nothing in the distance has any definition and looks like a PS3 game. Of course XV and Forspoken have the same problem on this darned engine.

Graphics mode still feels awful there. But if you max the blur, which IIRC was the default, it almost becomes bearable. It's still more sluggish than performance mode, but performance is so inconsistent in open areas, while it's fine in closed areas. And the gfx seriously look awful in that area in performance. When you have to change between gfx/performance mode depending on the area of the game you're in to balance the awfulness, they really used the wrong engine. And if a game needs blur at max out of the box, it's really the wrong engine.

It would be nice if the patch helped, but Luminous has been plagued by these problems even on maxed out PCs for a decade, and they scrapped the entire team after Forspoken failed, so I doubt it can ever get much better. It's like Bethesda's Creation engine. The suck comes built in. There's nothing anyone can do about it. Why oh why did they change from UE back to this monstrosity? For what amounts to an action-fighting game instead of an RPG of all things!

@Th3solution I don't know about it being too long, depends I guess on how you look at it.

I would say that at times it feels too slow, like the battles take too long to finish. But in terms of story, I feel like the game is quite short for a Final Fantasy game. It's not as short as Final Fantasy XV but it's not a lengthy Final Fantasy game.

It's just that the battles can get kinda slow and boring after a while.

Adding Expansions and buffing damage throughput should certainly help a bit to balance that in the right direction.

Too late. I've played and enjoyed this title already.
There are far too many great games on my 'to play' list for me to replay.
Unfortunately this is the way I feel for DLC too. The game has been and gone, I have no desire to relearn it and jump back in, and as a result I rarely bother with DLC for any game, no matter how much I enjoyed it on release.

@NEStalgia Yeah none of the options are really optimal, I just prefer to get used to the slow but somewhat more stable 30fps over the highly unstable 60fps that you get in performance mode.

Again, I am much more happy with the performance they achieved in Rebirth (Thank you Unreal Engine). Over there I am actually playing in performance mode.
I obviously prefer a stable 60 over 30. But I can't stand that kind of unstable framerates it totally ruins the experience for me, it makes me not even wanna play.

So I beat 16 in the 30fps graphics mode.

I also have not tried the new patch yet but I am planning to give it a spin later this evening.

Was waiting for this to start Echoes and then Rising Tide.

@DaniPooo Yeah, that’s fair. Maybe it’s not the length per se, but the pacing. Although I think I logged 80 hrs and that’s about the limit for me on almost any game before I start to get restless to move on.

I think my main issue with the pacing was how the final chapters tried to tie everything together on all the side characters all at once. So there’s this big crescendo toward the climax that then gets stalled by doing 10 different side quest wrap ups on on the NPCs. They specific storylines were nice to see and get closure on a lot of the characters, but I wish they wouldn’t have dumped them all in that one chapter because it made it feel like it was dragging. I would have like to have that content spaced out over a couple earlier chapters that had less side quests in them. By the time I wrapped up everyone’s stories and got to the last final boss and closing main story points, I felt like it had lost a little momentum.

Still loved the game though!

@BugCatcherGarl There are some dips in frame rate in graphics mode but it is rare(Unlike Dragon's Dogma 2).

This title isn’t for me but have fun everyone!

I’ve been waiting for the DLC to drop (soon) and more patches to come before doing my “hard mode” run. When things die down in the summer for big releases, I may pop this disc back in. Absolutely loved the game and it sounds like the combat is becoming even better. Sign me up

@Jayslow I'm corn-fused, you playing FF16 with a keyboard on the PS5. I'm sure it's just a joke that went over my head. I'm not that tall.

@Nepp67 DD2 is definitely a slog. It's in the genre I usually adore but I don't get the hype. I'm not taking away from the millions who enjoy it but it just didn't click for me.

I’ve got a theory you get used to framerate after a while. It was like watching a flip book for the first couple of days, but now it looks fine. I think my brain took a while to sync to the framerate (same thing happened with Bloodborne). I’ve ended up loving this game after not expecting much (I miss the party, there’s way too many cutscenes but they’re usually pretty good, and the combat is still too button-mashy but there is a bit of finesse to it where the Eikons are concerned)

@tselliot was just a joke that with long patch notes, and the only thing a lot of us are waiting for is a 60 fps patch, that Everytime there's a FF16 patch just quickly search to see if this is the patch that gives us 60fps. It isn't, so the waiting game continues.

@tselliot Don't get me wrong Dragon's Dogma 2 is fun and reminds me of Death Stranding which I very much enjoyed where you are journeying across the map and you can't use fast travel whenever you like. But I can't deny that the frame rate needs to be improved still which will prove pretty difficult for Capcom I think.

@ShogunRok

I think you 100% nailed it on the head brother. With games in the states costing $69 plus and releasing a broken mess. It does make since to wait for a price drop and patches. Spot on man.

@DrVenture69 That is true. If you play something long enough, your brain will get used to it.
I was playing monster hunter world and the game is slow and i played for many hours and wouldn't notice anymore. Once i went to play a regular action game everything seemed way too fast and i had to get used to it again.
Like seriously... slow games are not good for the head and low fps isn't either.

With that said... the fps in ffxvi is fine. People exaggerate. I never even noticed an issue. If it's like sub 30fps it's a problem though.

@Nem , absolutely. It was the same with Jedi Survivor, I ended up just putting it in Graphics mode, and it was fine. LotF feels so much better though

Interesting though a little frustrating as I beat it and the main complaint I had was sidequests and some QOL things around them and glad they are better but... I'm not going to go back to it to find out!

No 40fps mode? Would be perfect for this game, it feels like Insomniac are the only devs to bother with it.