Forspoken hands-on preview: Go with the flow in the latest open world from Square Enix

After numerous delays, Square Enix’s latest open world action adventure, Forspoken, is set to release on 24 January 2023.

It’s been heavily touted as the PlayStation 5’s next major console exclusive release, thanks in part to its technical prowess showcased in its trailers.

Square Enix is banking heavily on the creation of its new IP as it looks to expand its offering of AAA titles. While there are some obvious nods to other big franchises from the publisher – namely Final Fantasy – Forspoken has some interesting ideas of its own, as well as the freedom to move through its fantastical new setting.

We had a chance to interview the development team at Luminous Productions as well as play a few hours of the early section of the game. For our full hands-on preview, keep reading below.

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In Forspoken, a young New Yorker called Frey (played by Ella Balinska) is transported to the world of Athia, a strange and fantastical land plagued by a blight known as the “Break”, which has led to the near-extinction of humanity in their universe. Having been fused with a sentient bangle called “Cuff” (Played by Jonathan Cake), Frey is endowed with magical powers that allow her to cast spells and, crucially, traverse this new environment with great momentum.

Finding the right voice and likeness to carry the promise of a new IP was crucial to the early stages of worldbuilding. So when it came down to casting their lead, Ella Balinska stood out during the development process.

“She just ticked all those boxes, she has a sense of humour, she has determination, she has capability of showing a soft vulnerable side that we wanted Frey to have,” creative producer, Riao Mitsuno, tells us. “All the complexities that the character has – Ella just knocks it out of the park.”

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Throughout much of our playtime in Forspoken, Frey and Cuff engage in short, but frequent bursts of patter as they both wrestle with their codependence. Cuff, a seeming native to the world of Athia, juxtaposes Frey’s brash and guarded personality with a dry sardonic wit.

But even though Ella Balinska’s performance required all aspects from her performance, from likeness to motion capture, it was still important to stage Cake’s vocal performance from the offset, despite a lack of corporeal presence within Athia’s world.

“Cuff is her companion who we want to be with her on this journey and find a voice that can have just as much gravitas in terms of the screen presence even though it’s just an inanimate object.” Mitsuno says. “I think he said it’s the first time he’s played a character that isn’t actually a character but an object, but during performance capture we still had him on stage so that he was there going through the motions, talking and having that one-to-one interaction in the moment.”

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Wandering through those open worlds, the influence of Final Fantasy XV’s own development is readily apparent, despite the obvious differences. Forspoken takes place in a fantasy-medieval setting whereas XV was more reflective of a world similar to our own.

What sets Forspoken’s vistas apart, besides the lack of cars and modern amenities, is its width rather than depth. Final Fantasy XV’s setting of Eos, and Noctis’s journey through it, is largely dictated by the limitations of modern transport, whereas Forspoken’s magically-fuelled means of movement make gliding across open tundras an effortless exercise.

It was building on the success of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XV that led directly to the establishment of Luminous Productions, primarily driven by a desire to create new IP with a renewed focus on open world gameplay, with the experience of creating those experiences on a large scale.

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Studio head, Takeshi Aramaki, explains how transitioning from an established franchise to a new project from the ground up took those lessons to develop a new world from scratch. “In terms of creating a new IP, that was a vision that was really strongly shared by by the CEO (Yosuke Matsuda) as well. Square Enix is a company that has a lot of big IPs, but we wanted to create something new for a new generation as well.”

One area that studio head Takeshi Aramaki wanted to develop on was scenario writing, which allowed Luminous Productions to collaborate with two prominent script writers in that field.

“We took the expertise that we had and we worked with scenario writers outside of Japan, like Garry Whitta and Amy Hennig, to bring together what we hope is something suitable and worthy of creating a new series and IP which is Forspoken.”

One of Forspoken’s main selling points has been its focus on fast traversal, being referred to as “magic parkour”. Traversal would be a given in a title that boasts of how explorable and vast an open-world game could be. After all, making a sandbox large would mean nothing with little in it, but in Forspoken, spreading out these landscapes not only makes for a vista in a technical sense, but also shows how snappy moving from A to B can be, meaning it needed to be optimised for the PS5’s hardware as a console exclusive.

“We wanted to create something that could only be experienced on the PS5. That was our starting point. So from there in terms of technological considerations, if you want to move fast-paced you have to have fast loading times and we had to do a lot of optimising to make that possible,” says co-director of Forspoken, Takefumi Terada.

“When you’re moving through the world at such a fast pace you need to have a big world that you can explore so again, we needed a tool to create the world and do it efficiently.” He adds. “And really, we’ve just been working on expanding and optimising the engine to get the most out of everything.”

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Frey can take huge strides and leap up vertical faces in short bursts before needing to recharge but even as the environment sails past with each bounding step, that sense of scale can be rapidly overcome, even at an early stage.

On frequent use, a cooldown means that it takes time to recharge those great strides to catch our breath, but the promise of Frey’s traversal scaling with experience promises even more ways to alleviate those stopgaps between points of interest, which sporadically intersect across the landscape.

Punctuating those rests are enemy encounters and while Frey’s own magical prowess and combat is a visually striking spectacle complete with particle effects and distinct visual identities. Jumping across smaller enemies, or dashing around more formidable opponents becomes a familiar back and forth that occasionally wrestles with the camera – which is always an issue when speed is the emphasis.

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But even on small hoards, where its rinse and repeat nature is easy to grasp, particular boss fights presented their own difficulty spikes. These created some more memorable encounters that demanded quicker reflexes and finding opportunities to create and close space when warranted.

Like other action-adventures before it, Forspoken’s charm will not only rely on its ability to create a believable, compelling and cohesive open world, but also one that allow players to traverse it as quickly as it can be rendered.

Forspoken will launch on 24 January 2023 and a playable demo is now available on the PlayStation store.

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