Durante Rides Again: Final Fantasy XIII Locked At 720p

As promised, Square Enix released a PC verison of Final Fantasy XIII yesterday. As they hadn't mentioned, it's locked to run at a 1280x720 resolution. Oh dear. Hey, chillax! Durante, the hacker who whipped together tools to break Dark Souls and Deadly Premonition out of 720p, is on the case. On the very day of FF13's launch, he released a new version of his graphics-jacking doodad GeDoSaTo to rummage around and open up higher resolutions. Bless his heart.

FF13's Steam page has the cheek to say it's "been optimised for PC, featuring full screen support and running at 60FPS." Fullscreen support! What a treat.

Durante's first release of the FF13 plugin supports resolutions up to 3840×2160 right, which is a fair improvement, though only in 16:9 aspect ratios. He does warn that the plugin is still in "pre-alpha", and as such might be a bit wonky. Things don't look quite as sharp as they could, it doesn't up-res depth of field effects, and "probably some stuff somewhere is cut off". But it's here, and it works.

Players are noticing a few other weird bits in FF13. This Steam forum thread notes that its pre-rendered cutscenes are compressed a lot more than the pretty PS3 ones, it lacks graphics options, and the Escape key quits the game outright. Some would rather than Japanese audio were an option too, split off as free DLC, as it makes the initial download a whopping 49GB.

Square Enix plan to release the other parts of the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy, XIII-2 and Lightning Returns, "by spring 2015." Hopefully they'll pay attention to some of these concerns.