Introduction

Forspoken is a story-driven action adventure RPG. In a third-person perspective, you play our hero Frey Holland, a young New Yorker who is transported to a strange new world, a fantasy dimension called Athia. This world is under the tyrannical rule of of the Tantas, who control the realm with dark powers and monsters. Athia is an open-world that has to be skillfully traversed, as Frey completes quests and encounters enemies to be fought off with magic spells and medieval combat. Every encounter earns experience points that can upgrade her abilities.



Forspoken comes from the stable and skilled hands at Square Enix, and their latest game studio, Luminous Productions, which was built from the people who worked on Final Fantasy XV. Fast-paced action RPG players should have that familiar FF feel, with some parkour sprinkled on top. The studio's Luminous Engine is based on what they used in Final Fantasy XV, with new and improved features, optimized for the latest-generation game consoles; and special ray tracing abilities on Windows with DirectX 12. Forspoken is also the first title to support DirectStorage, which promises faster load times and more beautiful worlds.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at the highest settings, with RT disabled. The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

• The first settings screen deals with the usual monitor settings
• The game supports borderless windowed, windowed and fullscreen
• Maximum framerate is 120, 60 or 30. There's no "unlimited" option. The config file is encrypted, so manually removing the limit through editing the config doesn't work either.
• While all resolutions are listed, it seems that only 16:9 is properly supported. On our 16:10 test system, we had black bars on top and bottom. All the time during gameplay, too, not only in cutscenes.

• On the "Graphics" page you'll find a lot of advanced options for fine-tuning
• There's four presets: "low", "standard", "high", "ultra-high", and "custom". For some reason, probably because this is an AMD-sponsored title, all profiles except for ultra will enable AMD's FSR 2 upscaling technology by default.
• Variable-rate-shading promises to improve FPS by rendering certain parts of the image at slightly lower resolution, while the important areas are rendered at max res for best quality.
• Forspoken supports DLSS, FSR and classic upscaling. There's no support for DLSS 3 frame generation or DLAA
• There's a sharpening filter control for DLSS and FSR
• Anti-aliasing options are: "Off", "FXAA", "SMAA" and "Temporal AA"
• Motion Blur can be disabled, Depth of Field, too
• Ray tracing options available are RT shadows, and RT Ambient Occlusion
• Forspoken comes with an integrated benchmark, which is a bit unrealistic, so we used our own test scene.