Conclusion

Forspoken is a classic open-world action RPG. As hero you traverse various areas and battle monsters using your newfound magical abilities. The story of Forspoken is interesting, with a bit of plot twist, but overall it's nothing we haven't seen before. You are able to develop your character by investing skill points into various spells and abilities. New equipment can be found, too, but loot is not a core focus of the game. Check out some of the reviews if you like to learn more, but be prepared for the price—the game costs $80, which seems way out of line for what's offered here.

We were promised "next-gen" graphics every time Square Enix showed off their game. If you take a look at our screenshots I think you have to agree with me "that's it?". Many parts of the game look worse than Witcher 3, which is eight years old now. While there are some areas that look "good," only few look "very good." The quality of characters, especially in the real-time rendered cutscenes is excellent though, just the lip sync needs more work. Under the hood, Forspoken uses a revamped "Luminous" engine, which has powered Final Fantasy XV before. The engine is designed to make game development easy and efficient, by integrating NVIDIA Omniverse and allowing remote editing of the various assets. In terms of upscaling tech, Forspoken includes AMD FSR 2, which is expected for an AMD sponsored title, but we're also getting NVIDIA DLSS 2.4.12 and a classic upscaling algorithm. What's missing is support for DLSS 3 Frame Generation, and support for DLAA would be nice, too.

Forspoken is the first game with support for DirectStorage. The technology promises a shortcut path between storage and GPU, so that textures and geometry can be loaded more smoothly, without putting too much load on the CPU. In Forspoken "it just works," there's no settings that you have to enable. We'll be looking at this in a separate review, soon.

In terms of hardware requirements, Forspoken is very demanding. In order to reach 60 FPS at the 1080p Full HD resolution you need a GeForce RTX 3070, or a Radeon RX 6700 XT—that's with ray tracing disabled. For 1440p gaming, an RTX 3080 or Radeon RX 6800 XT is required to achieve 60 FPS and beyond. If you're gaming at 4K then you'll need an RTX 4080 or RX 7900 XTX. If you're playing the integrated benchmark then things will look different—we used our own actual in-game test scene for this review, which represents a demanding but not worst-case scenario. Generally, AMD Radeon graphics cards do a little bit worse than their counterparts from NVIDIA, but the differences are not huge. Still, it's surprising that in this AMD-sponsored title, the competition seems to have an edge. What's even more surprising is that AMD hasn't released a game-ready driver for Forspoken yet for Radeon RX 6000 Series cards. The RX 7900 XT and XTX have received a beta driver, but that only works on the new RDNA 3 cards.

Enabling ray tracing comes with a surprisingly small performance hit, around 15-20%, but the ray tracing effects aren't that impressive anyway. On the other hand, looking at our quality comparisons I can support the inclusion of RT, especially the shadows look much better. With RT, at 1080p you'll need a RTX 3070 or RX 6800 XT. For 1440p60 a RTX 3090 or RX 7900 XT is required, and 4K60 with RT is only smooth on the RTX 4090. Given the visual fidelity offered, RT on or off, I'd say these hardware requirements are crazy and the developer should have spent more time optimizing their game for the PC platform.