Forspoken

polonyc2 said:
based on reviews, the main issue for me is that the open world is boring and empty...even the environments lack any sort of unique features and basically all look the same with a different color filter...I wonder if the original plans were more ambitious and there was a major downgrade in terms of visuals and scope...traversal seem to be the high point along with some aspects of the combat (particle effects) but even then the enemy variety also seems very lackluster...seems like reviewers wanted to like it more and the blueprints for a decent game are somewhat there but the execution is terrible

oh well at least I have the DirectStorage benchmarks to look forward to
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Seems typical of SE open world games when it comes to huge empty open worlds.
 
Price is already crashing. My all time low alerts have been triggered 3 times in the last 24 hours lol.

Forspoken_price.png
 
This, in general, is the problem with open worlds. If back 3 years ago or whatever they just decided to make a "mostly" linear game with action set pieces and focused on gameplay, this likely would've been a much tighter, much more enjoyable game.
I went through a good chunk of this thread. I don't get the haters. The concept is fine (even if generic, most stories are, it's how it's told more than the "what"). The art is fine. The animations/attacks (in terms of visuals) are fine. Could they be better? Sure we've all seen Cyberpunk, that isn't the point. The point is it's the gameplay that's severely lacking. Terrible shame, that.
 
DLSS 2 support.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/marvels-midnight-suns-dlss-3-game-ready-driver/

Game Ready - This new Game Ready Driver provides the best day-0 gaming experience for the latest new games supporting NVIDIA DLSS 3 technology including Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Hitman 3, and Deliver Us Mars. Additionally, this Game Ready Driver supports the launch of titles supporting NVIDIA DLSS technology including Dead Space and Forspoken.
 
UnknownSouljer said:
This, in general, is the problem with open worlds. If back 3 years ago or whatever they just decided to make a "mostly" linear game with action set pieces and focused on gameplay, this likely would've been a much tighter, much more enjoyable game.
I went through a good chunk of this thread. I don't get the haters. The concept is fine (even if generic, most stories are, it's how it's told more than the "what"). The art is fine. The animations/attacks (in terms of visuals) are fine. Could they be better? Sure we've all seen Cyberpunk, that isn't the point. The point is it's the gameplay that's severely lacking. Terrible shame, that.
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The idea of a non-linear game is an illusion. All games have linear progression. Just because you're allowed to openly explore and do side quests doesn't make the game any less linear. From the Project Athia previews it looks like the game started out as a much tighter and focused game. Somewhere along the way a genius spoke up and said it had to be an open world, probably an executive or producer.
 
Someone said people are going to be disappointed if you have a 3080 or lower with performance even with the newest Nvidia Drivers released a few hours ago.
 
My ecores are getting a workout on the 13700K unpacking the game all 8 of them I knew they would really be maxed out when I just had 4 of them with the 12700K
 
Comixbooks said:
Someone said people are going to be disappointed if you have a 3080 or lower with performance even with the newest Nvidia Drivers released a few hours ago.
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It doesn't matter- I have a 2080Ti, but I know better than to buy any PC game at full price, especially $70.
 
Armenius said:
The idea of a non-linear game is an illusion. All games have linear progression. Just because you're allowed to openly explore and do side quests doesn't make the game any less linear. From the Project Athia previews it looks like the game started out as a much tighter and focused game.
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True.
Armenius said:
Somewhere along the way a genius spoke up and said it had to be an open world, probably an executive or producer.
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Their job is to make money, but these idiots need to learn that's by creating quality content and not filling a game with buzz words. Make a good game, then describe it well; not force a description and then try to form a game around that, while not giving budget/time/resources for it.
 
I'll give the demo a shot. I don't really plan to buy this one, but maybe they'll surprise me. The confidence to release a demo is at least encouraging.
 
20230124113042_1.jpg


Choose story mode game looks better than Watch Dog Legion and Cyberpunk 2077. Not sure about the Open World later on game looks hella good though.
 
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Comixbooks said:
My ecores are getting a workout on the 13700K unpacking the game all 8 of them I knew they would really be maxed out when I just had 4 of them with the 12700K
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Well it's good to know this isn't like a UE4 game that gets locked to 1 or 2 threads. Are you experiencing any stutter?
 
No just flickering but it went away on the edges of the game at the start. The devs responded to a thread taunting the trolls on Steam.
 
When I first started running around (after getting my settings setup), it kept hitching and pausing. Going back and changing the max framerate down to 60 and then back up to 120 smoothed everything out.
If you have issues initially, you might try that or exiting/restarting the game.
 
... Thoughts are that it runs smoothly, no frametime stutters, so that's good. Loading your save game is instant, I am on a 970 Evo Plus gen 3 SSD and it loaded instantly. You cannot skip the intro videos when the game first loads, otherwise you could essentially click the game from Steam and be in your save within a second or two depending on how quick you are to click the continue button. It's a shame Enix harked on about Direct Storage, but then slowed you down by not allowing you to skip the intros, makes no sense.

I don't know why you'd need the latest fastest "gaming" SSDs to leverage Direct Storage when even a gen 3 is loading the game instantly. I checked HWINFO and during load the Direct Storage pulled 1.25GB/sec from the SSD reading the game data.
But what's bad is basically everything else. Story is bland, script is bland, gameplay is bland and janky, mouse movement is not RAW input, you also cannot enable an upscaler if you enable the Ultra-High preset, you have to manually select custom, then the upscalers are selectable.

A few screenshots:


Video in native 3440x1440 60fps:



Now uninstalled, just wanted to test the demo and see what all the Direct Storage fuss is about, that side of things is legit, I'll give them that, everything else is pretty crap really. Ancient games like Horizon Zero Dawn look and run far nicer, does visual effects better too. In motion the RT shadows and reflections don't really aid visual fidelity, what really is needed is an actually decent global illumination, because this engine has zero and that seriously downgrades the visuals to something that resembles old game engine technology because none of the lighting looks right or modern.

TL;DR - It runs smothly, no stutters, loads saves instantly (you cannot skip game intro videos though which slows down loading...). Boring as hell gameplay, bland GFX, stupid dialogue script.
 
robbiekhan said:
I don't know why you'd need the latest fastest "gaming" SSDs to leverage Direct Storage when even a gen 3 is loading the game instantly. I checked HWINFO and during load the Direct Storage pulled 1.25GB/sec from the SSD reading the game data.
But what's bad is basically everything else. Story is bland, script is bland, gameplay is bland and janky, mouse movement is not RAW input, you also cannot enable an upscaler if you enable the Ultra-High preset, you have to manually select custom, then the upscalers are selectable
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I had a feeling there would be zero difference with DirectStorage on an PCIe 3.0 drive versus 4.0...I am curious about Windows 10 vs Windows 11...lightning fast load times in a game that the majority of people don't really want to get into that fast :D ...I hear there are a ton of cutscenes in the game that you can't skip...DirectStorage is great in terms of new tech but Forspoken might not be the best game to show it off

the game sounds awful...just looking at gameplay videos and the world is so barren and empty...the same rocky hills and plains everywhere, empty cities etc...combat and traversal parkour might be fun initially but gets old really fast...and the game is $70 on PC??!!...of course the people who buy every crappy game will say that they paid less on some CD keys website but the game still sucks no matter what the price is...paying $40 for a bad game does not make a bad game good

I'm looking forward to the Digital Foundry and Hardware Unboxed tech analysis
 
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Eh, this game is not for me.

How long before someone removes the limits on the demo"?
 
UnknownSouljer said:
This, in general, is the problem with open worlds. If back 3 years ago or whatever they just decided to make a "mostly" linear game with action set pieces and focused on gameplay, this likely would've been a much tighter, much more enjoyable game.
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Open world games can be great when they are built from scratch with "open world" in mind and have huge budgets to make the world alive, interactive, and full of quality and varied content. That is rare unfortunately. I know if there was a down-vote button I would be way in the negative for this comment, but it was the same with The Witcher 3. Although not a bad game, it would have been way better had they stuck to a more linear world like Witcher 2, just significantly improved. TW1 Enhanced Edition was already great, TW2 was way better, and TW3 could have been absolutely fantastic. The TW series strength was never gameplay. It was the stories, characters, and choices/consequences roleplay. But by going open world, all of those aspects were by necessity (without a far larger budget) diluted and it was just an OK open world game instead of a fantastic "closed world" RPG.
 
polonyc2 said:
I had a feeling there would be zero difference with DirectDtorage on an PCIe 3.0 drive versus 4.0...I am curious about Windows 10 vs Windows 11...lightning fast load times in a game that the majority of people don't really like all that much :D ...I hear there are a ton of cutscenes in the game that you can't skip...DirectStorage is great in terms of new tech but Forspoken might not be the best game to show it off

the game sounds awful...just looking at gameplay videos and the world is so barren and empty...the same rocky hills and plains everywhere, empty cities etc...combat and traversal parkour might be fun initially but gets old really fast...and the game is $70 on PC??!!...of course the people who buy every crappy game will say that they paid less on some CD keys website but the game still sucks no matter what the price is...paying $40 for a bad game does not make a bad game good
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The conspiracy argument is that the unskippable cutscenes are doing loading during them! Who knows though, I don't care enough to play and monitor HWINFO64 whilst a cutscene happens lol.
 
PC-Only said:
Open world games can be great when they are built from scratch with "open world" in mind and have huge budgets to make the world alive, interactive, and full of quality and varied content. That is rare unfortunately. I know if there was a down-vote button I would be way in the negative for this comment, but it was the same with The Witcher 3. Although not a bad game, it would have been way better had they stuck to a more linear world like Witcher 2, just significantly improved. TW1 Enhanced Edition was already great, TW2 was way better, and TW3 could have been absolutely fantastic. The TW series strength was never gameplay. It was the stories, characters, and choices/consequences roleplay. But by going open world, all of those aspects were by necessity (without a far larger budget) diluted and it was just an OK open world game instead of a fantastic "closed world" RPG.
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If you're in the negative, I'd be in the ultra negative: I don't think there is a single story driven game that's open world that is good.
It's one thing if you're playing an MMO and you literally don't care about any story element and in fact skip all dialog/cutscenes (gameplay driven). But an actual story driven open world game? I haven't seen one.
 
robbiekhan said:
... Thoughts are that it runs smoothly, no frametime stutters, so that's good. Loading your save game is instant, I am on a 970 Evo Plus gen 3 SSD and it loaded instantly. You cannot skip the intro videos when the game first loads, otherwise you could essentially click the game from Steam and be in your save within a second or two depending on how quick you are to click the continue button. It's a shame Enix harked on about Direct Storage, but then slowed you down by not allowing you to skip the intros, makes no sense.

I don't know why you'd need the latest fastest "gaming" SSDs to leverage Direct Storage when even a gen 3 is loading the game instantly. I checked HWINFO and during load the Direct Storage pulled 1.25GB/sec from the SSD reading the game data.
But what's bad is basically everything else. Story is bland, script is bland, gameplay is bland and janky, mouse movement is not RAW input, you also cannot enable an upscaler if you enable the Ultra-High preset, you have to manually select custom, then the upscalers are selectable.

A few screenshots:


Video in native 3440x1440 60fps:



Now uninstalled, just wanted to test the demo and see what all the Direct Storage fuss is about, that side of things is legit, I'll give them that, everything else is pretty crap really. Ancient games like Horizon Zero Dawn look and run far nicer, does visual effects better too. In motion the RT shadows and reflections don't really aid visual fidelity, what really is needed is an actually decent global illumination, because this engine has zero and that seriously downgrades the visuals to something that resembles old game engine technology because none of the lighting looks right or modern.

TL;DR - It runs smothly, no stutters, loads saves instantly (you cannot skip game intro videos though which slows down loading...). Boring as hell gameplay, bland GFX, stupid dialogue script.
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Thanks for the info. That really is instantaneous. It takes about half a second to load into the actual game on PS5, at least using the internal SSD, so it's even better on PC. Looks like the PCI-E bandwidth is being completely saturated.
 
Armenius said:
Thanks for the info. That really is instantaneous. It takes about half a second to load into the actual game on PS5, at least using the internal SSD, so it's even better on PC. Looks like the PCI-E bandwidth is being completely saturated.
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Not quite saturated! HWINFO64 showed 1.25 GB/sec when loading the save. That's nowhere near the full bandwidth my SSD has available:

I had a 990 pro which was getting over 7 GB/sec read speeds but really, even at Gen 3 speeds, you are not going to notice any real world difference given Gen 3 is instant anyway.
 

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Demo was pretty fun and the game performed well on my system. Everything maxed out, RT on, motion blur off (because fuck motion blur), DLSS set to Quality and I'm getting right around 60fps at 3440x1440. Setting DLSS to Balanced only brings the FPS up to 65-75ish, the image quality drop isn't bad but I'm fine with performance at Quality. Turning DLSS off makes the game run around 45-50ish when running around the world and getting into random combat.

Combat and world traversal are a lot of fun. If the full game gives more magic styles to play with, I could see the combat remaining fun for quite a while. The incidental dialog between the protag and the bracelet was fine, nothing too offensive. Since there is an option to tone it down or turn it off, it's really not an issue at all. The game is kind of pretty looking at times, the spell effects are great, and the world looks nice and big. The world in the demo is pretty barren and spread apart, but its not remotely the worst I've seen and I appreciate that it isn't just full of Ubisoft style content barf. It seems like they might have been trying to go for more of a Breath of the Wild style world, but what they show in the demo doesn't quite hit the same notes as that game. For all the hate the game is getting the demo is fun and makes me interested in the game, though definitely not at $70. $40 or $50? Yeah, maybe. Probably won't take long to hit that price.

Wag said:
How long before someone removes the limits on the demo"?
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What limits? When you beat all the main demo quests you can go right back in and keep exploring the world and doing any of the activities you didn't do.
 
robbiekhan said:
Thoughts are that it runs smoothly, no frametime stutters, so that's good. Loading your save game is instant, I am on a 970 Evo Plus gen 3 SSD and it loaded instantly...
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the 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe is what I'm using as well...I was thinking about upgrading to a newer PCIe 4.0 NVMe depending on the DirectStorage benchmarks but it looks like 3.0 is fine...I don't even think there's going to be a big difference between DirectStorage NVMe vs SSD...maybe 3-4 seconds...
 
Yeah if your Gen 3 SSD is still good for storage space etc then upgrading just for direct storage is essentially a waste of money. And apparently Forspoken uses Direct storage 1.0 not 1.1, so load times could be faster still in other games. This might explain why I only saw 1.25GB/sec read bandwidth as well.
 
robbiekhan said:
Yeah if your Gen 3 SSD is still good for storage space etc then upgrading just for direct storage is essentially a waste of money. And apparently Forspoken uses Direct storage 1.0 not 1.1, so load times could be faster still in other games. This might explain why I only saw 1.25GB/sec read bandwidth as well.
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Forspoken does use DS 1.0 although the developers have stated that 1.1 could be added in the future...I'm not sure how much faster it can get if the game is already loading instantly
 
polonyc2 said:
Forspoken does use DS 1.0 although the developers have stated that 1.1 could be added in the future...I'm not sure how much faster it can get if the game is already loading instantly
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As long as they are snappy like the PS5 I am happy. We don't need to start benchmarking .1 of a second.
 
robbiekhan said:
Not quite saturated! HWINFO64 showed 1.25 GB/sec when loading the save. That's nowhere near the full bandwidth my SSD has available:

I had a 990 pro which was getting over 7 GB/sec read speeds but really, even at Gen 3 speeds, you are not going to notice any real world difference given Gen 3 is instant anyway.
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Ah, for some reason I was remembering Gen 3 speeds topping out at 1.5 GB/s instead of 3.5GB/s.
polonyc2 said:
Forspoken does use DS 1.0 although the developers have stated that 1.1 could be added in the future...I'm not sure how much faster it can get if the game is already loading instantly
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If they got rid of the animated transition when loading a game it would go further than updating to 1.1, probably. In robbiekhan's video that transition looked like a fixed animation rather than hiding loading. Maybe it was put there for the PS5's sake.
 
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