I tried that Forsporken demo.
I’m certainly just speculating and know just as much as most people who aren’t paying exceptionally close attention about how this game is being made, but, man, I can’t help but get the feeling that this is gonna be a not great game, and not in an interesting way.
With understanding it’s basically some kinda high fantasy isekai already, which is not an enthrallingly innovative genre to begin with, I think some of the story concepts seem interesting enough (fantasy magic land with sorceress #gatekeep #gaslight #girlboss matriarch main antagonists). But then I think about how the player character is a non white girl from New York, but, most of the top credited writers appear to be white, and, like, yeah, that isn’t supposed to matter, but it definitely does in light of, like, how the character is written kinda like what middle aged white people imagine the “inner city youth” must speak and act like and how, according to the official website, she’s “used to feeling like an outsider while growing up in New York City” (which, like, what? Is she socially ostracized because she makes annoying quips about everything?). I dunno, it all kind of makes my skin crawl, to be honest, which is the exact opposite feeling that should come from seeing games where the player character and protagonist isn’t a white dude.
However, I’m more just reticent about that aspect of it (and it’s a much larger conversation that I’m going to set aside) because the gameplay was definitely the main reason I found it entirely unengaging. Finding out that the development studio, Luminous Studios, was formed from former staff on Final Fantasy XV, makes a sick sort of sense. It is weird frustrating to me how there seems to be this insistence that Final Fantasy XV and now Forspoken need to re-invent the wheel about how an Action RPG has, like, attacks. Noctis in FFXV needed some convoluted weapon juggling system and some superfluous consumable driven magic system, and now Forspoken has this convoluted spellcasting system that maps two combat abilities to lightly or firmly pressing either of the back shoulder triggers, and by default the right shoulder trigger is for purely offensive spells and the left is for quasi offensive but also more effect based spells, which you switch between on the fly with the front shoulder buttons, and you can also switch between different sets of spells.
It ends up feeling both kind of scattered and redundant, somehow. Like, for instance, of the two main sets of spells, there’s a more Earth magic based one that uses 3 different ranged spells, and fire/melee based moveset that uses 3 different spells that use weapons made out of fire, but at least for the fire spells, the light version of each spell was just the same basic combo on the fire sword? So switching between spells was just switching between different kinds of heavy attacks, with different use cases that were hard to keep track of. In other words it really kind of feels like an overwrought way of, in theory, having systems with flexibility and customizability, but in practice, it feels more like you’re trying to scrabble bits of some kind of 3D action combat moveset together from the recycling bins in the offices of the combat designers. Individual spells might feel fine to execute but being able to respond to different combat situations becomes more about just slowing down to switch to a different spell, and it never felt like any of it cohered into a combat system that felt fluid and engaging. Like, maybe this player character can do more things in total than, say, a player character in a character action game like Devil May Cry even with the alternate weapons and such, but Devil May Cry gives you a lot of core combat mechanics that apply to pretty much every combat encounter in the game and to most if not all of your available weapons, so you have an entry point to every combat encounter, and learn to switch between modifications and movesets to approach different situations. Forspoken’s combat seems to lack this same kind of core, and diffuses a lot of its flexibility and functionality across on-the-fly menu-swapping, which just feels like you have to design the combat system yourself on the fly. There was no reason that one basic melee combo and 3 different kinds of heavy attacks needed to be crammed on to one controller key and split up by a menu selection. God of War Ragnarök crammed a lot more variety and flexibility in the same amount of buttons, for instance.
I mean, maybe part of the problem was the enemy design, too, because they don’t seem to amount to much beyond damage sponges that flit around and launch attacks at you all willy-nilly. For all of the combat system’s apparent complexity, all I really seemed to need to do was run around mopping them up with button mashing the basic firesword swipes. I did not find the system fun to engage with and experimentation tended to just feel frustrating or clunky so I just took the path of least resistance, which made all of its existing problems worse.
Not to mention it’s a garden variety open world, but, I don’t think I need to write paragraphs about that.
I will give it one thing though, which is that you can actually tell the game to make the characters turn off their excruciatingly annoying reactive combat barks and Whedon-esque nattering so that they only do so when it is story critical or at least unique one time exchanges (although some barks aren’t excluded from this for reasons I don’t fully comprehend, the player character kept doing this one “yep” when I was switching between different movesets which was still grating). A lot of games could be improved by this innovative feature becoming more standard. Also the character designs and fashion are top tier, no way around that.
So, I dunno. I kind of get the sense that there was some kind of interesting or at least fairly novel vision that got crammed into an uninteresting game world, propped up with lowest common denominator, compulsion based gameplay hooks, and combat that struggles to justify even its own basic concepts. So, kind of weirdly a lot like Final Fantasy XV! But there are no boys to go on a road trip with, just a sentient cuff bracelet I think trying to bite off some kind of Stephen Merchant in Portal 2 energy, but I wouldn’t even really know how well that was executed because it was so powerfully annoying I turned the quippy dialogue off within minutes.