Forspoken Demo

Figured I'd start this thread since I fired it up last night for about 90 min.

Its...a mixed bag.

To start off with something good, the game looks rather pretty and the effects are poppin. I opted to run it in performance mode to get that 60fps and it still looks pretty enough for me. The raytracing and other improvements are noticeable, however 30fps is a no go for me when possible. I don't want to say the world feels empty but it feels...sparse.

The combat is easily the highlight. Its a pretty involved system which threw me off at first. It takes a bit for things to sink in. You have a lot of stuff to switch between and it doesn't always feel intuitive. And you'll likely acquire more skills in the future. Your basically spending most of your time figuring out enemy weaknesses so you can attack accordingly. You also have a defensive set of skills that you can utilize to help you attack, as well as create some status effects. Messing around with the different powers is pretty fun. The abilities are actually separate wheels that are tied to a certain power that you have to manually switch between. Each one has a set of offensive and defensive skills. I like this as it gives each power more variety so you're not just spamming the same move for different powers. I remember playing the Valkyrie Elysium demo and something about the combat in general reminded me a little of it, but its been awhile.

I only did a few activities but it was mostly introducing some new enemies in your standard fight this mob scenario. I did a bigger one where you just had to defend villagers from mobs for 4 minutes. Nothing special. I'm sure it gets better in this respect.

So, traversal. This is where I get a lot more down on the game. The world just isn't that much fun to glide through and the climbing is awkward. There are also a lot of grapple points you can use to get up to areas and they work fine. Maybe you get some other skills as you progress which I hope is the case.

I don't remember anything I read or heard from the story at this point and the dialogue is mostly as annoying as you remember.

I'm gonna play some more tonight and see how I feel. I do really like the combat. I'll likely be back with further thoughts.

Cheers, for now.

This is a game I really want to turn out well, because we don't get a lot of heavily mage focused arpgs. Combat looks cool, but like you said, everything else doesn't. World seems sparse and needlessly big. Like early in development they were going for sprawling RPG, but then spent all their money working on the spell effects and systems, and didn't have the resources left to populate the world. I'll check it out if magic is fun to use, and hope this does well enough to get a more focussed sequel.

I have it installed and am pretty excited to check it out this weekend for the same reason @judaspete mentioned. I'll report my feelings on the demo once I do.

But tbh, I'm most excited to see how the spells look while not being horribly compressed by YouTube and other video players. Seems like a lot of particle effects are constantly popping off and it hasn't looked great in the previews I've seen.

I only got to try it for 10 minutes during my lunch break, but I didn’t like the controls pretty much right away. That said, 10 minutes wasn’t much so maybe when it opens up more it’ll be a bit more fun.

Oh, boy. I think this might be a very unfortunate failure. Poking around the edges of the demo, it's clear that someone cared very much about what they were building. There's tons of Very Serious Lore entries that I don't see myself reading and all of the gear is very lovingly crafted. If nothing else, it's well made.

That said, it's a bad sign that I still don't have any idea what this game is supposed to be even after playing some of the demo. It's a bunch of disparate ideas from a bunch of games that I'm not sure fit together all that well. There's a little Bayonetta/DMC in there. Some Final Fantasy. The tower mechanic is kind of sort of out of Assassin's Creed. The parkour is very Prototype. None of it is particularly offensive or bad, but it doesn't feel in any way coherent, either.

The world is very pretty and very empty. It really comes across as a "video game ass video game" open world rather than any specific place, which is unfortunate. It's just not very interesting or compelling to actually explore because it all looks the same. It's got the Death Stranding problem of a lot of very well-modeled very pretty models that aren't put together in a realistic way.

The voice acting is also strange. It's not necessarily that the sword and character are too chatty, although they are. And it's not that the voice acting is bad, because the vocal quality is pretty good. But it's like the voice lines don't really line up with the gameplay, if that makes sense? I had several instances of the main character saying something like "That was awesome!" when I hadn't done anything that was particularly awesome, and other lines that felt like they weren't getting the level of energy that was appropriate for what was happening on screen.

I think the UI is terrible. A "this genuinely interferes with gameplay" bad. The health bar is super-tiny in the corner. The aiming reticle completely gets lost in the background. The screen where you learn or upgrade spells is an incomprehensible disaster. The icons for various spells are not very distinct and hard to tell apart. Just a lot of stuff that looks and feels very bad to navigate.

I dunno. I'm not digging it and I'm feeling sort of bad for the team that made it. They clearly put a lot of work into it, but it hasn't gotten the best marketing and I think they committed to a lot of ideas that just aren't very fun.

Coming off God of War to this was rough! Played about 15 mins and it didn’t grab me so mission failed as a demo for me. The world looked sparse and the enemies were bog standard and uninteresting. Controls were clunky, and the environment didn’t lend itself well to the parkour elements. I’ll be giving it a miss based on this.

Feels like this is kind of a bad demo. Forspoken feels like it's had everything go wrong for it from day 1. This demo was a chance to try and turn things around, but it feels like all they've done is seal their fate.

There's no way players are going to give this game a fair shake, right? The ad campaign has been cringe inducing at best, and the demo feels and looks terrible. The HDR is busted, the tutorial doesn't actually explain anything, and the chatty protag comes while people are still pushing back against Forbidden West and Ragnarok's talkative characters. I almost feel like they shouldn't have bothered.

Man, this game is WEIRD in a way that I really, really like. The entire time playing the demo, I kept getting flashbacks to playing Folklore on the PS3, and I don't completely understand why. The explanation I've settled with is that they're both vibrant fantasy (lack of a better term) Japanese action rpgs that feel like they fell out of space. And they're both early generation games that do cool and unique stuff but will probably never get sequels.

No disrespect to Gary Whitta/Amy Hennig/etc, but this feels like someone wrote a network teen fantasy drama but turned it into a systems-heavy open world action game instead.

The lack of polish around so much of it is... more interesting than off-putting to me? The parts of the gameplay and acting where it feels weird or the edges feel rough just make me more intrigued. I don't know. This is a game that seems like it's taking some big risks and deciding to be very weird in a time when games with larger budgets often don't. I will probably buy this just to see where it goes, because I get the feeling it'll go some wild places from both a gameplay and a story perspective.

Finished the demo last night. I didn't have much left to do but I decided to wander and see what I encountered, and It wasn't much. Its honestly more basic than I anticipated. This could obviously be a very small slice of the full game but I wouldn't be surprised if its mostly this with different landscapes. The general consensus seems pretty down on the whole thing from what I can gather. Not looking good for day 1 purchases.

I wont reiterate what I said above but instead I'll just say that if somehow the combat gets better, and manages to carry the game till the end, I may pick this up on a steep discount or grab it on Plus Extra if that happens eventually. I had a similar reaction to Outriders.

I finished the demo and found myself liking it. For one, it reminds me of two games: Infamous series and Kya: Dark Lineage. Infamous because of the gameplay and Kya because of the snarky female protagonist and the fact she is from the city of NY who gets teleported into a mysterious world just like the female protagonist in that game. If someone told me this was a sequel to Kya, I would believe it. I like the banter between Frey and her magic cloak, or I think its her magic cloak. And once I got used to the gameplay and knowing how to switch and select different spells, I found myself liking the combat.

There are negatives and it's mainly the performance. The two graphic intense display modes, quality (4K) and Ray-tracing run at a shuddering 30fps, it doesn't look or feel good at all. I found myself admittedly changing to performance mode. And while that is much better gameplay wise, you can tell something is missing in the presentation in that mode, even though the game still mostly looks good. The lighting effects also seems to be off, causing what seems like some white out in areas.

If they can fix the performance issues before launch next year, this game might be sleepy hit. Much like Kya was, unfortunately. But from what I saw, and many people wanting to quickly dismiss this game, I want to root for it. After all, its always fun to root for the underdog.

Really didn’t like it. Combat felt flat, the world felt too big, the small bits of writing were more of the same stuff from that bad trailer. I’ve got so many games for the next few months, definitely not making time for give a second chance to something I really actively disliked playing.

So, I think I enjoyed this demo? Seems I might be in the minority, but I found the combat pretty fun once I got used to the controls. I agree with @therealturk that the UI is atrocious, and the tutorial only half explains most of the mechanics, but those are both things I can look past when I am actually sitting down and playing the game.

I think this game will end up being something I play, and even like, but I won't be buying it at launch for pretty much the same reasons everyone else wrote.

@therealturk: Sadly, like hollywood, the games companies will throw it up to the fact the main protagonist is a person not of the "norm" as in a generic plain everyman...

It seems likely it's more that they had the talent and just were told to make a game and werent super inspired but just had to do it. like a filler in a cartoon that's otherwise good, where you notice oh...the people animating really arent good at making stuff on the fly and the person they base the material off of is the inspired one...

This demo reminds of the FFXV one that was bundled with FF0 (I think it may be the same team even) In that the ui doesn't seem great and everything feels kind of clunky. The traversal, the combat, It all feels unpolished. That game was improved dramatically when it released in my opinion so hopefully this game will be too, It does look pretty though.

I don't see the writing getting any better though. I get the sense that midway through developement they did a Borderlands or a reverse Fuse, however you'd like characterize it, in that they felt the game was kind of bland and decided to spruce it up so it appeals to the kids.

I really enjoyed this. Mix of infamous and prototype to me, two game series that I don't feel were perfect either. It's got some framerate issues on ps5, hopefully it's better on launch, I had a really tough time seeing enemies but I haven't messed with turning off console hdr to see if that would fix it as people complain it's busted?

The combat has a lot of flash and movement to it, tons of abilities ala spells for you to cast and it looks like she'll end up with easily 3-4x the amount the demo starts you off with. Even just playing this demo you can unlock a lot more support spells already.

The world seems to be a playground to cast magic in and do combat. I feel combat felt better every time I went back to the demo, I played like 2+ hours over 3-4 sessions. I was a little more instep with the controls because there is a -lot- going on there. I don't expect the story to be much or the open world to be anything but vomit icons on a map.

It's far far from perfect. What the hell is with the UI anyway, but there are a ton of accessibility and gameplay options, like turning the chatter between cuff/frey up or down as you want, even down to basically off except in forced important story scenarios. Looking through those settings makes it feel like they really cared to make the game what you want. Too many to list honestly.

If the game is a by the numbers open world icon hunt with a bland story but the combat and movement stays to the demo level or gets better, plus obviously a ton more character customization and spells, I'm in basically day 1. I felt like I'd be in the minority but that it wouldn't be as small as it seems. I will say, I hope it freaking runs well on pc because that's where I want to play it and things like ff7remake ran bad but ff15 ran well.

Didnt like the combat, the world and its emptiness and icons everywhere, or the constant vocals about mundane things.

To improve the combat they should’ve implemented it lime Mass Effect where you can map spells and stop time of you want to use one that isnt mapped. The whole L1/R1 thing to change spells is terrible.

@rebel_scum: While I don't think you can map spells, there is a setting that lets you stop time when you are changing them. There's actually quite an extensive amount of options to tweak the game. Not that it fixes a lot of the problems but it helps.

@rebel_scum: You can both change it to completely stop time, as well as a setting to swap support spells to spells not on cooldown, as well as left/right on the d-pad swapping whole sets(from the fire to earth set for example). Don't believe there is a way to change your current offensive spell without the wheel.

The controller is very busy and there are a lot of good settings to tweak.

listening to the DLC episode talking about this.. Christian said it's what would seem like catnip to him but neither he nor guest like it..