Forspoken uses Luminous Engine, which is a propriety engine of Square Enix previously used in Final Fantasy XV. It has been overhauled for this new game.
In a new creator interview series posted by Luminous Productions, we learn more about the new features of the engine including ray-tracing support in Forspoken.
While ray-tracing is confirmed to be supported in the game, it is not in the form of reflections but instead will be used to offer accurate shadows with the ray-traced shadows and ambient occlusion.
In the new interview, Keiji Matsuda, Lead Graphics Programmer at Luminous Productions, mentions what new technology they have incorporated in Forspoken to make it visually appealing as their next project.
For this project, we incorporaed ray-traced shadows, which allow us to generate shadows that are crisper, cleaner, and of higher quality than shadows created with shadow maps in the past, as well as gorgeous soft shadows.
We completely overhauled the GI system that had been in place originally because it had some quirks and limited express capabiltiies. Our artists contributed a lot of input during the implementation process, which helped us identify differnet issues that needed to be addressed.
The gist of the interview is that they have made a lot of changes in the Luminous Engine coming hot off the heels of Final Fantasy XV. They have improved the level-of-detail scaling and global illumination and incorporated new technology like FSR 2.0 and ray-tracing in it.
Forspoken will be out this October for PS5 and PC.
