Hello everyone, my name is Ryota Nozoe, Senior Visual Effects Artist at Forspoken.
This expansive new action-RPG puts you in control of Frey Holland, a young woman transported to the mysterious world of Athia! This land may be beautiful, but it’s also dangerous – a phenomenon called “the Scrapyard” has corrupted people and creatures… and turned them into hideous monsters.
Luckily, Frey is able to call upon a wide array of magical spells to defend herself, from harnessing the elements to manipulating nature itself. You can see the thrilling fight up close in our latest in-depth video:
As you can see, the magic is varied and visually spectacular! Read on, and I’ll tell you a bit about how we got there:
Defining the “look” of Forspoken magic
We’ve put a lot of time and thought into how we view spells in Forspoken.
First and foremost, we wanted to prevent things like fire or rocks from suddenly appearing out of nowhere. While that would certainly have been fine and wouldn’t have caused any problems, it felt overly expected and boring – especially for a game so heavily focused on magic.
We decided that each spell would share a common rule – it would start with magical energy and evolve into natural phenomena like the fire and rocks mentioned above. Then, when the spell is cast, it reverts to magical energy before fading away.
We also wanted to avoid using auras or summoning circles when Frey was using spells – that would lack originality. Early in development, we decided that the magical energy in Forspoken would be represented by geometric patterns.
This informed the visual design of all the magic in the game and allowed us to maintain a consistent visual style throughout the game.
Every spell in the game was the result of a team of visual artists, game designers, and programmers all working closely together. To give you an example, here are three spells you can use in the game – and what helped bring them to life!
Burst shot
Burst Fire fires explosive chunks of rock that deal area damage.
It’s an earth-based explosive spell that deals area damage, so we thought it would be appropriate and magical to summon a large boulder that protrudes rapidly in four directions.
This is the first spell Frey gets – and the first we’ve worked on – so we made sure it was pretty straightforward!
Because Burst Shot was the first spell we completed, it became a guideline for all Forspoken magic. While we were doing this, we used it to perfect the common rule of geometric patterns turning into rocks and back to geometric patterns before disappearing.
So while it may not be the most visually impressive spell, it is certainly special because it served as the starting point for all the others in the game!
Cataract
The cataract spins a watery vortex that sucks in enemies, damaging them. If you hold down the button, you can send water pillars to attack enemies, and if you hold it even longer, you can send more ice water pillars to freeze enemies!
During development, we came up with the idea of converging water currents and causing a big explosion of ice. We challenged ourselves to visually express how water turns to ice – only if we could achieve this, the spell would be complete.
Of course, that was easier said than done! For example, it’s a spell that has different levels – at level two, it’s just a water blast, and at level three, the water blast turns into ice. Getting that water blast and freezing it was extremely difficult – we basically had to develop it into two separate spells, which meant double work!
It’s worth it, because we were able to find a way to express this concept of water turning into ice. We were also very picky when it came to developing the shaders we used for these substances – I think cataract is one of those spells that looks beautiful even at a glance.
Genesis
Genesis summons barbed branches, which shoot out in front of you and skewer enemies over a wide area. If you hold down the button, it hits harder and on an even area, and if you hold the buttons down even longer, it also hits and poisons your enemies!
The “genesis” of this spell actually comes from a spell we experienced during the early stages of development. Early on, we decided that Frey would be able to manipulate nature, and I thought it would be fitting and visually impactful if she could conjure up a large tree from the ground!
The original design saw the tree grow and attack enemies, but as we progressed through development we reworked the design to better match the game’s systems.
We were testing this spell even though we were still in pre-production. It’s a pretty outlandish concept – a tree grows from the ground and flowers bloom, then an even taller tree impales everything in sight!
It took an awful lot of trial and error to show that plants were created on such a scale. Showing trees growing from the ground was particularly difficult. We tried a lot of different methods and had to start over several times.
Then once we thought we were done with it, it became a tiered spell, so we had to figure out how to differentiate between levels 1 and 3, which was pretty taxing!
I’m delighted with how it turned out though – I think we were able to achieve something wonderful!
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As you can see, we’ve worked hard to make fighting in Forspoken look great and fun to play. We can’t wait for you to see all the amazing spells we’ve created, but you’ll have to wait for the game to release!
Forspoken releases January 24, 2023 on PlayStation 5 and is available for pre order now.
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