Final Fantasy XVI is now available (exclusively) on the PS5, and since the game’s launch last week, plenty of players have gotten their hands on it. And with that, some players are also reporting that the game is overheating their consoles – I myself have encountered this issue with my PS5.
I was in a boss fight against Morbol – as shown below – when a prompt for a quick time event popped up. As I was reading the on-screen instructions, an overheat warning came up that ended up shutting down my PS5 abruptly. I have never seen the warning screen up until then, so needless to say, I was quite shocked.
Quite a number of other players have reported similar issues, with some getting the overheat warning in the same Morbol boss fight as I did. My PS5 did not have any major dust build-up either – I quickly disassembled it to make sure of this – and it’s placed vertically with plenty of space around it for optimal air flow.
Granted, I did purchase my PS5 on launch day back in December 2020, though a player reported that a brand new unit got the same overheat warning too while playing Final Fantasy XVI. It’s worth noting that the producer of FFXVI, Yoshida Naoki, is aware of this issue too, and he said that both Square Enix and SIE are “working hard to discover the cause.”
While this issue doesn’t seem to be particularly widespread – my colleague did not get this warning at all throughout his review process – it still looks to affect a fair number of players. Hopefully, this issue will be addressed in the near future.