‘Final Fantasy XV’ for Windows could use up to 170GB of storage

Why it matters to you

If you’re looking forward to the PC version of Final Fantasy XV, you had better make sure that there’s plenty of space available on your hard drive.

Square Enix has confirmed plans to make Final Fantasy XV available for the PC in 2018. Early technical specs for the game state that it will require a pretty enormous amount of storage, as it’s recommended that 170GB be set aside on the system’s hard drive.

Even with storage space only utilized during the installation process taken into account, this is a significant increase over the console version of the game, which weighs in at 64.79GB on the Xbox One. It’s possible that the extra allocation is linked to plans to add mod support to the game for its PC debut.

The game’s director, Hajime Tabata, revealed plans for mod support in a recent interview with Rock Paper Shotgun. “We definitely want to do it,” he pledged. “We haven’t actually managed to get our full modding policy or discussions on that finished but at the moment we do really want to do it. We’ll have the full details around autumn time.”

It’s easy to see how mod support would be a big enough addition to convince fans to purchase the game once again on PC. Square Enix has already made a range of tweaks to the game via post-launch updates, such as a major patch that edited the game’s story, but it will certainly be interesting to see what kind of mods the community comes up with.

It’s reasonable to expect that Tabata is talking about Steam Workshop support, given that Final Fantasy XV is set to make its way to Valve’s marketplace, according to a report from Gear Nuke. However, he went on to acknowledge that this feature might not make it in time for launch, and there’s a chance that it might not end up making the cut at all.

Still, the enormous storage requirement for Final Fantasy XV on PC demonstrates just how much space today’s most graphically ambitious video games take up. Back in its day, Final Fantasy VII was considered massive, as it required several discs and was famously too big for Nintendo’s cartridge-based hardware — but its Steam re-release takes up little more than 1GB.

Final Fantasy XV is expected to be released for the PC in early 2018.