Given the title of the game I have no doubt we’re dealing with some kind of destiny plot. What interests me is whether or not Frey either cares or believes in that. I mean is it destiny if you take care of someone else’s problem so that in turn your own is solved?
Forespoken Demo Impressions - Forget it
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
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From what I get from the impression from the game is what I expected with one curve. Its fun pretty ok game that is so inoffensive in a sense any major feelings are from being gaslighted by being chronically online. Now the poor optimzation I was not ready for "Can run Forspoken: memes when. I remember playing the game and not hating but something about the combat gnawed at me and it was then I learned it was using the Luminous Engine. I loved me some FFXV and the boys but the game was in a fight with itself. Like it was pretty and the effects of combat were great but doing combat was a chore press square to do 6 stabs and sweep and pray you actually follow up. Forspoken had this similar issue of combat was too extravagant despite being much less than FFXV
Forspoken will go on the list of games that I may pick up later at a cheaper price.
Forspoken will go on the list of games that I may pick up later at a cheaper price.
That's an interesting question. I guess you could reduce it down to "Are you succeeding because of your own hard work, skill and cunning, as well as your ability to make friends and gain allies?" or "Are you succeeding because god/gods/fate are clearing the path for you and/or giving you a bunch of cool toys/powers that nobody else has access to?" On a basic level, I'd say the former is not but the latter is, though I realize it's more complex then that and no doubt something people can(and surely have) written books about.
If anything from Forspoken survives to get tweaked and refined and used again, its movement/combat system should be it. If nothing else, that was very, very pleasant to use and fun to see executed on screen.
Is there a game who's combat IS parkour? I don't mean you doing a lot of running and climbing while fighting, I mean like, the running and climbing IS the combat, like a kind of gimmick where you need to encircle an enemy quickly to do damage to them or some other thing.
The only thing that springs to mind as even being in the same ballpark is Mirror's Edge. But that was done in first person.
Playing more of the game, I'm starting to think that the game is literally made from scrapes of an abandoned project or something. The combat and movement are really well refined and once you get multiple magic school and it very satisfying to chains magic together, much better than most game where magic feel like being archer except your arrow are fireball or icicle. I just fought one of the optional end game boss and it was great and everytime I'd get my ass kicked I'd go back and try a different strategy.
But large section of the game feel completely unfinished, there's entire area that feel like they just have the basic land layout and nothing else was added, going trough them is painfully boring. The world is also so empty, lore wise there's an explanation, but it doesn't change the fact that once your out of the main hub, you're not seeing another NPC until you come back. The game also seems to be built around the idea that player will ignore most of it, I explore everything in open world game and go out of my way to do everything available, I'm done with the first boss and explored every area in between it and the first hub. When you kill a boss, you get a new magic school, the moment I got it, I was able to unlock every magic in it and I probably already have enough resource to unlock every magic the game has. You can also upgrade your gear and here again I already upgraded some of it to the maximum value, despite being maybe 1/3 of the way trough the game. It seems like there was 0 thought put into resource distribution and no attempt seems to have been made to add some resource sink for player who do most of the content.
Ok full admittion, I got the game over the weekend because my friend wanted to play it and agreed to pay for half the game.
We played all day on Saturday...and ten hours of playtime later we've not unlocked any new magics nor have we fought any bosses.
So here is the thing about the game. The pacing is totally fucked. The intro before you get your first taste of the open world takes about 2 hours to get through. Then you are finally cut free into a small section of the actual world, here you get your first taste of points of interest and side activities, and it's fun actually. The parkour magic is fun if a little janky. The combat itself is...I mean it's hard to quantify because you are locked to a small set of spells for like a really really long time, but what you start off with is ok.
Basically your first school of magic is 3rd person shoot rock throwing magic, but you also have a small set of "sub spells", these sub spells are utility magic's that have long cooldowns. Things like you can summon a plant, that acts like a short duration turret that shoots enemies near it. Or a landmine which explodes for huge damage if an enemy steps on it. There are also a couple defense ones like curing poison (not hp just the poison status), and a rock shield that absorbs an extra hit.
The trick to the combat is that while these sub spells have long cooldowns on their own, they don't share cooldowns. So while you are blasting with your primary rock spells you can rotate through your sub spells to drop traps and plants and whatever to help beat the enemies down.
After you beat the first little mission in the open world the first time, you return to town for another 2 hour section of being in a city doing whatever. Here is where side quests and whatnot happen, but a lot of those are running around town talking to people, at least in the first batch.
Only after all the second town crap is done with do you finally get unleashed into a much bigger segment of open worldness. So you are talking about 5-6 HOURS before freedom is gained. For course this is partly our fault because we did the side quests and watched the cut scenes because we wanted to try to give the game a fair shake. The dialog, and the story is really shallow so that doesn't get any better deeper into the game.
The other issue is that it seems that the second school of magic is locked behind beating the first boss of the game which unlocks a spider-man type of swing spell that will further open you to other areas that are impossible to reach at first. Only because of how long they expect the player to take to get to this second magic set. And i don't even think the 2nd school is the only one i dont have yet.
I wonder if the intention is for the player to master the first school of magic first, because I've earned/found enough skill points that my rock magic is almost completely leveled up to 100%, I literally have only two things left to buy and one of them is a crafting upgrade and has nothing to do with magic.
All this is really annoying because when you do get to run around and the cuff isn't interrupting you with exposition, the open world is fun to run around and the enemies are fine to hit in the face with rocks. There is a decent game under all the crap here, but i really don't know how many people can put up with all the grease before getting to the playable bits.
Rush to the first boss (she's super easy) to unlock the second school of magic, then walk back to the hub and you can grab everything along the way with the grappling hook magic, which is pretty fun.
But yeah a lot of stuff is weird. The first boss is constantly touted as being the strongest of the 4 magic ruler, and yet she's the first one you beat, hard to get hyped about beating the other 3 after that.
There are hard bosses called mutants all over the place, so I'm been making it a point to try and overpower myself so that I can fight them, which has me going around doing all the major things on the map and gathering all the mana possible.
I dunno if it helps because even with upgrading my gear and my abilities, these mutants one shot me still. So I don't understand if there is a gimmick to them that I'm missing or something.
However it all points to how poorly paced the game is, not to mention poorly written. Frey is a shit character, with no motivation whatsoever. And the motivation it tries to provide is weak as hell. But beyond the characters the story is bad, like you say why are we taking on the most powerful hype Tanta 1st? It only serves to make the rest of them easier technically in the lore (though im sure the boss fights will be harder maybe). It's a mess.
But the moment to moment gameplay is decent in the world. The activities are really samey and redundant though. The whole game feels rushed and they just ubisofted a bunch of the same shit throughout the world to fill time. Even the character models look kind of bad, and there is next to no lip syncing at all. The game is very strange because of it, and I'm not sure how to feel anymore as there are fun parts that are surrounded by trash.
Playing on hard, some mutant attack will always 1 shot even now that I'm relatively overpowered for the current one, I think its in the game because the you will survive any attack with 1 hit point (with a cooldown). Part of it is also that some of them are resistant to starting magic, so your just chipping away at their health. Most of the power comes from gathering material so you can upgrade cloak/necklace and gather nail (sigh, yes because the main character is a girl one of the way you can power her up is painting her nails).
And yes, Frey is just not a good character, honestly it almost feel like she was imagined by one person and a completly different person actually wrote her, and that second person hates her and is just low key taking the piss out of her. Another example of terrible writing for those not playing the game, the evil corruption things is called "the break" because when Frey first encounter it she said it "breaks everything" (it doesn't, it corrupt people and animal, Frey is not a smart person), yet everybody else in the world also call it the break, because, hummmm? It's not a case of the world language is magically translated either, the actual in game lore is that English will always come to exist in every magical world because something something language commonality. This is not treated as a joke.
I do like that the fantasy people don't understand her slang and cussing, I do think that is a very cute touch tbh. Which is ever more annoying because there are MOMENTS where this game is really nice. But only moments.
It's easy to hate something that flubs everything. It's far more frustrating when there's hints of something better peeking out from beneath something with significant flaws because then you realize it could have been much better and yet isn't.
Especially when those flaws are not only so incredibly obvious there's no way the creators couldn't have noticed them making it clear they deliberately put those flaws there but would take only a tiny bit of effort on the part of said creators to fix. That's when the laziness becomes most apparent.
They do and don't, like she's always saying fuck and I think it would be really funny if the magical world people didn't use it as a swear word and where just constantly going "By god, right here in the street?!". They could also expand on it, like asking her to explain the slang leading to even more confusion.
I don't think the nail thing is meant to be about her being a girl but more about fashion and being trendy, which don't get me wrong, is still kind of cringe, but it's a different kind of cringe.