Square Enix Knows You Have ‘Open World Fatigue’, Thinks Forspoken Can Be Your Blue Tonic

Open world games are good and everything is fine, but sometimes they are too much.whether you are 100 hours Assassin’s Creed Valhalla And only about 30% pass the game, or chase Far Cry 6 After clearing all the icons from the map, open world games become tiresome these days. Maybe it’s their proliferation — open-world games are pretty much the biggest game genre out there right now — or maybe it’s the ever-shrinking nature of our collective attention spans. Either way, we’re finding it increasingly difficult to take care of.

and Square Enix know this. More specifically, Square Enix’s in-house development studio, Luminous Productions, knows this.come out from behind final fantasy 15 (Let’s face it, this isn’t really an open-world game, is it?) The studio has been keeping a close eye on the ground when it comes to player sentiment toward open-world games. And — even though you might just laugh at it for a bad trailer — Forspoken wants to do something different with the open-world genre to keep you more engaged.

“Obviously, from our side, we’re paying close attention to the perception of open worlds and the general feeling in the industry right now,” Forspoken co-director Takefumi Terada said through a translation by Square Enix. “So we’re aware of how people feel about emotions [the genre]. “

Terada goes on to point out that Forspoken’s main selling point — the magic-enhanced parkour you’ll use to move around — has been deliberately wrangled to make the game’s instant play feel better, and that the world is crafted around your mobility. This makes the most tedious parts of many open world games (from A to B) more alive and exciting in this RPG experiment.

“Because this is a world built around the concept of magic parkour, and being able to get the most out of it, we do think that should help avoid this feeling of tiredness from fatigue, for the player,” Terada told us. “We want players to overcome this [sense of open world fatigue] They already have and really enjoy what Forspoken has to offer because it’s a little bit different. “

While playing the game, I couldn’t help but agree. Yes, there are a lot of markers on the open world map that would otherwise be barren (if not pretty, thanks to the infamously gorgeous but problematic glow engine), but the task you have to accomplish is simple – Seconds and minutes between 20 and over – it really feels great to spray your magic from one marker to another. This isn’t Tony Hawk’s Ultralight Drifter, but it’s not far off. And it does feel good in your hand, which is probably for the best, since Luminous has put a lot of time into making this killer feature.

“I think, in fact, the basic core point that we got in Forspoken was the idea of ​​magic-enhanced parkour,” Terada explained. “The whole world, the open world and its maps, was created based on the feel and speed of playing with parkour and the distance you can cover quickly. So, the whole [in-game world] Athia was created with that in mind – using the sense of speed and distance you get in parkour to decide when to place different content, different points of interest, and all that stuff. “

So while this is an open-world RPG, and you probably won’t stop yourself from comparing yourself to Final Fantasy XV, the entire game’s design has been adapted to you and your character and the actions you’ll have. In the games I’ve experienced firsthand, there’s no fancy “let’s speed up” movement — no rubs, teleports, or anything like that — but there’s a lot of sprinting, sliding, and fast-rising fights over massive cliffs and towers. I’ve been told that in the final game, there will be more moves.

“I think being able to have this experience – sports and parkour – is probably the biggest difference for us [from Final Fantasy 15]. For me personally, this is the biggest difference between the two games. “

If even the promise of being able to slide between objectives, like a warlock oiled on deadlines makes you roll your eyes, don’t worry: there’s also a story mode. As you’d expect, the story mode flattens the difficulty, allowing you to simply enjoy the game’s narrative without worrying about difficulty curves or bottlenecks that could ruin your experience.

“Just to borrow from what Terada said, we do have a very strong narrative in the game that’s just as important as the open world aspect,” said Roosa Jokiaho, film artist at Forspoken. “If you want, you can just focus on the story and go through [without side-tracking too much]. “

So yes, Forspoken is another open world game. Yes, it may require you to travel back and forth across the world, completing quests and completing acquisition quests. But at least you’ll have fun.

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Forspoken is coming to PC and PS4 on January 24, 2023.