Final Fantasy XV: 5 Awesome Things (And 5 That Suck)

3. The Frame Rate Is Atrocious At Times

Forever the bane of any developer's existence, balancing a solid frame rate with the action on screen is only going to get harder the more impressively-rendered battles they try to put in front of us. In XV's case things hold together fairly well when you're running around the map, however when you dive into battle either by warping across an expanse to close the distance or you time unleashing a particularly colourful attack just as a teammate does, it'll slow way, way down occasionally into single digit territory. A particularly egregious part that seems to happen for everyone comes at the close of the first Behemoth fight, as your party attempts to evade its clutches by darting through a cave's underpass. You can feel the game literally chugging along at this point, as it turns into a four-six page flipbook where you enter the cave in-motion, see stills of the animation in progress and emerge on the other side. It's bad, and yes it's a demo so allowances are plentiful, but from there on out the entire thing starts to chug far more than before. Obviously it's something they're going to need to watch out for in development, but it'll get in the way of fans right now who were looking forward to Metal Gear Solid 2'ing this thing and playing for nights on end.