![]() During Forspoken’s many parkour sequences, the controller vibrates with varying intensity at every step, almost like you can feel Frey’s footsteps emanate through the controller’s powder-snow-colored plastic. When Frey wields her fire sword, you can feel the right trigger tense as she winds up a swing, then loosen when she releases it, then tense again when the weapon connects with an enemy. To date, few big-budget games have fully taken advantage of the PS5’s DualSense gamepad and its impressive haptic capabilities. I’m less impressed by incremental improvements in graphics than I am by advancements in other areas - stuff like blisteringly fast loading speeds or unique controller features. Once you’ve achieved the goal of photorealism, as so many big-budget games have these days, you can’t really get more photorealistic. (Both of those times were calculated based on an average of five separate loading tests.) Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is the only game I can think of that hits the same benchmarks.įor the past few years, we’ve been in an era of diminishing returns in terms of visual fidelity. You can fast travel to any unlocked location in the game’s world in, I kid you not, 1.68 seconds. In Forspoken, on PS5 at least, you can cold boot - the time it takes to go from starting up a game to getting full control of your character - in less than 12 seconds. Image: Luminous Productions/Square Enix via Polygon Forspoken is one of the few games I’ve played that makes good on those remarks. In March 2020, PS5 lead system architect Mark Cerny claimed the then-forthcoming console could essentially eliminate loading times. Still, I’ve seen some minor blemishes - blurry hair, clipped objects, and other hiccups that don’t impact gameplay but are nonetheless unmissable.īut better fidelity isn’t the improvement promised by this console generation. I’ve been playing on PS5 and have mostly stuck with the performance-focused setting, since Forspoken’s combat and movement all but require a stable 60 fps to understand what’s happening on screen. Like many modern games, Forspoken allows you to choose between two visual modes: quality (which caps the frame rate at 30 frames per second to provide sharper graphics) or performance (which allows for higher frame rates at the expense of visual fidelity). (You’re, uh, better off not asking.) Forspoken is a technically demanding game: Particle effects clutter the screen at all times and its open-world map is so vast you can’t view the whole thing at once, even if you zoom all the way out.Īs Grayson Morley noted in his review for Polygon, yes, Forspoken has some performance issues. Out Tuesday on PS5 and Windows PC, Forspoken casts you as Frey Holland, a young New Yorker whisked off to a high fantasy world by a talking golden bracelet. ![]() But the result of all that computational horsepower is this: Square Enix’s action-RPG is among a small class of PlayStation 5 games that truly feel like PlayStation 5 games. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.Much has been spoken about Forspoken’s potential performance issues, what with its massive file size and the fact that, on PC, it demands more RAM than a Dodge. Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls. We’ll see how it goes in January.įollow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Again, hopefully the rest of the game is not as bad as this voiced-over clip, but something about how the game has handled its lead and concept (a modern woman is suddenly thrust into a world of spells and monsters) does not seem to be landing, even if gameplay continues to look rather excellent. This is not an ideal situation for actress Ella Balinska, who is being saddled with what appears like it’s not going to be the best of scripts as the lead of this game, shortly after her turn on a different sort of video game project, the critic-and-audience lambasted Resident Evil series on Netflix. But rather like it’s a parody of the worst kind of action dialogue in media at the moment. Not just like, someone’s writing a clunky script that gets mistranslated in localization. There’s a common notion that most Square Enix games just do not have great writing in general, but this feels like a different kind of bad. The superpowered magic-wielding combat actually seems pretty fantastic, and no amount of bad scripting will probably turn me away from playing, but it’s not great to have to deal with. ![]() It’s frustrating to hear dialogue this bad from Forspoken, given that everything I’ve actually seen from gameplay continues to look absolutely stunning. ![]()
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