Square Enix Launches Forspoken Demo for PC

[Tsing]

Reviewers haven't been totally kind on Forspoken, but PC players can now test out Luminous Productions' new fantasy RPG for themselves and see whether it's worth their money or not. Square Enix has confirmed that a PC demo for Forspoken is now available via Steam, the Epic Games Store, and Microsoft Store. According to the publisher, the demo allows players to test out the game's combat system against a variety enemies, and it should also serve as a good way for PC gamers to check how their hardware copes against what's been described as a true next-gen title.

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[MadMummy76]

I've finished the demo, I'm pretty sure this was ready long ago they just kept it under wraps because they thought it would harm pre-orders rather than help it. It literally says the demo is not representative of the final game because that's still in development. It also references the release date as if its in the future.

Either way the gameplay is pretty boring with very repetitive and easy combat that you can simply bypass by running past enemies. Still the actual combat is better than I expected. Except for the boss encounter that was just spamming the attack until your trigger finger falls off.

The graphics still looks like an asset flip, meaning dull, drab, objects don't feel like they belong in the scenery, if we can call it scenery. The same textures repeating as far as your eyes can see, the world feels completely empty and artificial, not natural at all. The level design looks like something one can put together in under an hour from stock assets in an editor. Nothing is weathered, the magic effects fall off the screen like they don't belong.

High res textures and fancy RT effects don't automatically make good visuals.

The protagonist speaks like a gang banger, randomly dropping F bombs and other profanities.

It's still much better than outriders though 4/10 maybe.

 

[Brian_B]

I think I agree with MadMummy. Better than Outriders, but that's a low bar.

It reminded me a lot of AC - openish world with lots of quest markers all over, which just isn't quite my cup of tea. The combat felt a bit clunky, but workable. Not a fan of parkour stuff, and it isn't horrible in this game, but enough of it that I could tell it wasn't really going to be for me.

Graphics/style - to each their own. The gold vein looking handholds that stick out like a sore thumb everywhere were distracting (I think they are for parkouring on to get vertical?). Nothing looked too spectacular in the environment, it wasn't bad for the most part but nothing stood out as outstanding. Spell effects looked pretty good though, but being in the middle of combat makes it hard to appreciate them. Movement effects with "Spell Parkour" was underwhelming -- may as well be called "Sprint" like in most any other game.

Performance-wise... I was able to get it to run at about 80 (+/-) FPS on my 3080 on DLSS Performance 4K, adjusting a few things, no RT. The Average FPS held pretty well but there was extremely noticeable microstutter that was driving me nuts, and a lot of environmental objects that pop in very distractingly (rocks, plants, etc).

I've heard around the horn that RT doesn't even make any significant difference in the visuals, some have guessed the demo just doesn't have updated code for them, but I don't know. I'll probably turn it on just to see what it does, but it's never really blew my socks off in anything to date.

Oddly enough - 3080 Core utilization hovered around 90%, VRAM use around 98%, but my 5900X 12-core CPU was hovering around 70%

Didn't play with DirectStorage, the option wasn't in my face and I lost interest to care about digging around to find it to play with it too much. I had the game installed on a 4.0 NVMe drive - I didn't notice anything special about loading times one way or another.

 

[MadMummy76]

I just slapped the graphics to ultra, turned off motion blur and set DLSS to quality, that was it. I didn't actually measure FPS but it looked playable on my 2080Ti at 3840x1600. My bar is lower than most I'm usually fine with 45 fps.