‘It just wouldn’t work on PS4’: Forspoken dev explains why RPG had to come to PS5

prophetic is one of the most anticipated games of the year, and while it’s coming to PC, all eyes will be on game console 5 The game version is more important than anything else. Why?Because it’s one of the few non-Sony first-party titles to be considered a new-gen exclusive; a game that has the potential to show off its majesty ps5 Hardware can do it.

I’ve been beating the “Forspoken is good, actually” drum for a while now. After getting hands-on with the game earlier this year, I was invited back a few weeks ago to play a more advanced version of the game, and it looks better than ever. The game has experienced something of a renaissance in the public eye, making up for the dreaded meme of the marketing video that rallied all disgruntled gamers against the studio back in August.

There’s a reason for that; Luminous Studios is doing their best to show you why this is a PS5-only game, why this is a true next-gen RPG experience, and why you should really be serious about what it’s trying to do scoffed.

“From the very early stages of game design, we’ve been thinking about doing things that could only be done on PS5,” said Luminous Productions studio head and Forspoken director Takeshi Aramaki through a translator. “Since day one, we’ve been focused on going to full power. So I don’t think there’s any chance of having Forspoken on PS4 at all, whether it’s the engine, the graphics, or anything we’ve done in terms of gameplay.”

Luminous Productions was so pleased with Forspoken’s status as a tech showpiece that it even pushed the demo live to PSN, using the Game Awards as a launch pad to show the world how the game would play – and what it would look like. This is a team that feels confident in their work, and rightly so – there are plenty of PS5-specific bells and whistles tucked into Forspoken.

“The color of the light bar in the DualSense controller changes depending on the type of magic you’re using, and the haptic feedback you feel in the triggers is also unique to the different types of magic. Those different lighting effects were also something we added at the last minute !” Aramaki laughs.

As a result of Luminous utilizing the DualSensel, you get a lot of feedback from the game to tell you if you’re playing well or not. Forspoken wants you to be agile, fast, active and fluid. You’re tricked into switching between the hundreds of spells at your disposal and going from encounter to encounter in order to take down your enemies with your magically-enhanced parkour. Having a tablet in your hand gives you as much information to help you as there are graphics on the screen—it feels great.

“For PS5, haptic feedback is something we really wanted to explore — we thought it was a really interesting feature, and we wanted to see what it could do,” Aramaki said. “This also applies to the visuals; we wanted to create something very readable for the spells, which hadn’t really been done before. So we also wanted to get those spells into people’s hands so they could feel the right way them, and seeing them as they cast them.”

Aramaki and other developers explained in my interview that every spell in the game has been “finely tuned” to feel right and reflect what’s happening onscreen. According to Aramaki, Luminous is “very confident” in how this all ends up feeling, and the team can’t wait to see how people react to the DualSense programming, especially once the game is officially released.

“Overall, it creates more immersion,” adds Raio Mitsuno, the game’s creative producer. “In the game, Frey wears a cuff on her right arm. She has magic on her fingertips. And you, the player, get the color through the controller to match the magic you use, and you can also talk to Cuff through the DualSense. So it kind of mirrors what Frey is going through; the one-on-one immersion between the player and our protagonist.”

That’s why this game is a standout on PS5, and why it couldn’t make it to PS4 in terms of underlying technology. But Forspoken is also coming to PC…but that version comes with some caveats.

“In terms of platforms, the game will launch for PS5 and PC,” noted Takefumi Terada, the game’s co-director. “But it was created from the beginning with the capabilities of the PS5 in mind, so it’s really optimized for that platform.”

Terada noted that having to rely on PC gamers’ hard drives created a bottleneck for developers, so knowing the PS5’s built-in SSD could allow developers to really take advantage of loading speeds and make Forspoken feel as fast and smooth as the design team wanted it to.

So there you have it; if you want to play the best version of Forspoken, you should give it a try on PS5. This is a game designed to showcase Sony’s groundbreaking next-gen technology, and when you play it and see the magic and parkour in action, you can really tell this is a team that cares about technology.

Terada told me at the end of this interview that he hopes that one day Forspoken will become a new IP that is as respected and loved as Final Fantasy. So let’s hope this story starts out as the team hopes and finds its audience among the loyal nerds who love games that play to their console platform’s strengths.