Athia is a massive open world brimming with places to explore, creatures to fight, and mysteries to unravel. Luminous Productions taps into the power of PlayStation to achieve this, magical flames shooting out of Frey’s hands in battle at the speed at which she moves rapidly across the vast world map.
Now that it’s easier than ever for gamers to get their hands on the PS5 and enter the world of Forspoken, Takeshi Aramaki, Head of Luminous Productions and Director of Forspoken, shares some thoughts on how the Luminous Productions team harnesses the PS5 to bring this adventure to life:
iGamesNews: What were your first impressions when you discovered the power and capabilities of the PS5, from a developer’s perspective?
Takeshi Aramaki: With the latest GPU that supports ray tracing and a high-speed SSD that reads data instantly, I felt this was going to bring significant changes to game development as a whole. Being able to display assets on screen without needing load times would create new gaming experiences. Once we started developing for this, the biggest surprise was how easy it was to develop.
The DualSense wireless controller offers a unique level of immersion thanks to its adaptive haptics and triggers. How did your team approach the implementation of the DualSense controller when developing this PS5 game?
The DualSense is a unique controller, so we wanted to create a game that would allow players to feel and experience it to the fullest. As Forspoken is a game we made for the PS5, we decided to assign L2 and R2 to cast magic so you can feel the return of adaptive triggers. There are over 100 spells in Forspoken, and we’ve tuned the force feedback for each of them so that each spell looks and
Forspoken offers extremely fast fast travel in its fantastical open world. How did the development team harness the power of the PS5 to achieve this?
The SSD makes the PS5 around 100 times faster than the PS4, which in itself is enough, but it also uses Oodle Kraken and Oodle Texture for data compression. On top of that, the PS5 also handles memory allocation and decompression on the hardware side. The CPU processing of this data then became the bottleneck, so we made over 100 adjustments to our Luminous Engine in order to achieve these read speeds.
Forspoken features a dazzling array of magical visual effects and character animations for Frey during travel and crossing. How did the team tap into the power of the PS5 to deliver this rich visual performance?
In Forspoken, we aimed for a visual expression like no other. The GPU handles the shader dedicated to magic visual effects, and the CPU handles the many processing needs for Magic Parkour. The PS5’s capabilities were more than enough for what we wanted to do; in fact, it’s so powerful that it encouraged us to add even more to the visual effects. Also, a lot of memory is usually required to achieve this level of expression, but the PS5 dev tools are so easy to use and allowed us to work faster than before. This gave us plenty of time to optimize the memory and process load needed for Forspoken’s rich visuals.
