Final Fantasy XVI patch allows you to turn off the motion blur

Good news for anyone with eyeballs

Square-Enix released a patch today for their newest, hottest hit, Final Fantasy XVI. Patch 1.03 is largely just a quality-of-life update with some small tweaks, but it notably allows you to reduce the intensity of motion blur or turn it off entirely. Thank the Gods of Visual Clarity for that.

Motion blur is one of those modern visual effects that some people don’t like. For example, I don’t like motion blur. In racing games, maybe, but essentially not any other time. Along with chromatic aberration and depth-of-field blur, it’s one of those things that developers really should allow you to turn off. It can be stylish, but it can also just look smudgy and ugly.

Also, when I need to take screenshots, if I’m playing a game that uses an intense motion blur, most of my shots wind up unusable. I typically record portions of my gameplay and take screenshots from that, which can often mean scrubbing through frames to find the one that isn’t smeared.

But I digress

Anyway, the patch notes are really short, so here they are:

• Adds the following items to the System tab of the Main Menu:
  • Motion Blur Strength
    Allows the player to adjust the strength of the motion blur effect when the character or camera is in motion. The default setting is the maximum of 5. This can be lowered to reduce the strength of the motion blur effect, or set to 0 to turn it off completely.
  • Player Follow (Movement)
  • Player Follow (Attack)
    Turning these settings off prevents the camera from automatically following the player while moving and attacking respectively.
• Changes the maximum setting of the Camera Sensitivity (Horizontal) and Camera Sensitivity (Vertical) items from 10 to 20.
• Adds three new controller layouts: types D, E, and F.
• Corrects an issue that affected the stability of some menus.
• Corrects some text issues.
• Adds the hashtag #FF16 when sharing screenshots or video clips on Twitter or YouTube.

I haven’t actually played Final Fantasy XVI (haven’t gotten around to it), so this means very little to me. However, more options are always a good thing.

Final Fantasy XVI is currently available for PlayStation 5