Forspoken is finally out now after being revealed during the PlayStation 5 showcase. According to a report, the game has received multiple changes throughout its development.
This report comes from Alex Donaldson who is the founder of the website RPGSite. According to Alex, the game is significantly different from what it was originally pitched on internally and has gone through multiple development changes including after the departure of Luminous Productions studio head Hajime Tabata.
One thing I will say about Forspoken, since I’m not reviewing it & RPG Site hasn’t had code, is – this is a game that for better or worse really changed form multiple times during development, esp. after Tabata left SE.
People have said to me the original pitch/plan is unrecognizable in the product as it is now. This happens to many games mid-dev, but Forspoken basically appears to be a particularly extreme case, where it really went through the wringer in terms of changing and morphing.
What I want to see is if it found an identity in that process or not. To me, outside looking in, it feels like some of the stuff the game has been mocked/criticized for pre-release are symptoms of a title struggling in search of its true identity/vision.
Alex also mentions that this is not Agni’s Philosophy demo that was used as a demonstration for the Luminous Engine used by Square Enix for Final Fantasy XV and Forspoken. While internally the game’s codename was WITCH, Agni’s Philosophy demo was also labeled as WITCH but the two products are entirely unrelated.
Forspoken takes advantage of the next-generation hardware of PS5 to offer fast load times as well as other features like ray-tracing and adaptive triggers. It is also available for PC where it is one of the first games to use Direct Storage to offer near-instant load times.
