Since its presentation, Forspoken has become one of the most anticipated games of the moment, something totally understandable since the first videos showed an impressive technical sectionand it was also confirmed that this was going to be the first PC game capable of taking advantage of the technology DirectStorage.
that technology it uses the GPU to perform the decompression tasks of the SSD. This frees the CPU from these tasks, and allows load times to be minimized. The difference it can make is so great compared to the traditional CPU decompression process that load times can be reduced to little more than a second.
The point is that, in the end, a good part of the promises that were made with Forspoken have not been fulfilled. I have had the opportunity to test the demo on my PC, a high-end device, and I can confirm that not only is it not technically up to par, but it also has an improvable story, a boring protagonist and a repetitive gameplay that will tire you in a short time if you are not lovers of the genre.
No, it is not worth paying 80 euros for Forspoken, and in fact I have my doubts about whether I would buy it when it is on sale for less than 30 euros. In this article I am going to explain why, but first we are going to see the specifications of the PC on which I have tried this title:
- Windows 10 Pro 64-bit operating system.
- Ryzen 7 5800X (Zen 3) processor with eight cores and sixteen threads at 3.8GHz-4.7GHz.
- GIGABYTE X570 AORUS Ultra motherboard.
- 32 GB of Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro SL 3200 MHz CL16 RAM (four modules).
- Corsair iCUE H150i Elite Capellix White cooling system with three Corsair ML RGB 120mm fans.
- GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition graphics card with 24GB of GDDR6X.
- Sound BlasterX AE-5 Plus sound card.
- 4 TB PCIE NVMe Corsair MP400 SSD (where we installed the game).
- Corsair MP600 Core 2TB PCIE NVMe SSD.
- 2TB Seagate SHDD with 8GB SSD as cache.
- Corsair AX1000 80 Plus Titanium power supply with 80 Plus Titanium certification.
We are also going to see the Forspoken requirements to discover what we need to move it in optimal conditions. I already anticipate that they are too high for what this game offers on a technical level, and they don’t make sense.
Minimum requirements
- Windows 10 64-bit as the operating system.
- Intel Core i7-3770 (4 cores and 8 threads) or Ryzen 5 1600 (6 cores and 12 threads) processor. There is an equivalence error, the correct thing would be the Ryzen 5 1400 (4 cores and 8 threads).
- 16GB of RAM.
- 6 GB GeForce GTX 1060 or 8 GB Radeon RX 5500 XT graphics card.
- 150 GB of free space on a hard drive, although SSD is recommended.
recommended requirements
- Windows 10 or Windows 11 64-bit as the operating system.
- Intel Core i7-8700K (6 cores and 12 threads) or Ryzen 5 3600 (6 cores and 12 threads) processor.
- 24GB of RAM.
- GeForce RTX 3070 or Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card.
- 150 GB of free space on an SSD.
ideal requirements
- Windows 10 or Windows 11 64-bit as the operating system.
- Intel Core i7-12700 (12 cores and 20 threads) or Ryzen 7 5800X (8 cores and 16 threads) processor.
- 32GB of RAM.
- GeForce RTX 4080 or Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card. There is a serious equivalence error, the correct thing would be a GeForce RTX 3080.
- 150 GB of free space on an NVMe SSD to take advantage of DirectStorage.
Forspoken is not up to par in graphic quality
And they are quite obvious even with a high-end PC that more than ticks all the boxes. The game offers a fairly simple graphical configuration menu, it is compatible with NVIDIA DLSS and with AMD FSRtwo technologies that will allow us to significantly improve performance, and it has Ray tracing applied to shadows.
In my tests I have set the game to 1440p with maximum quality, ray tracing and DLSS in quality mode. As soon as I started the game I noticed little jerks jerksand I have taken the first disappointment to see a very bland setting with improvable texturesvegetation at the height of PS4 titles, excessive lighting and very poorly executed and a geometry that, in some cases, even reaches the level of a PS3 title. Take a look at the wooden spikes in the attached image and the quality of the textures, the result is very poor and not even close to what we expected.
We continue to review the technical finish and now we will talk about the modeling of the protagonist. I think the attached image speaks for itself. we have some pretty crappy modeling that doesn’t even reach the level of what we’ve seen in intergenerational transition games like Resident Evil 2 Remake, and that confirms what had been an open secret, that Forspoken has received a huge graphical downgrade that is noticeable in every way.
The modeling is terrible, and the same happens with the quality of a good part of the geometry, the lighting and the level of detail of the settings, but it is important to stop for a moment to talk about the latter. The stages They are not only very empty, but they hardly have life, they present a much lower density of vegetation to the one that the game showed in its first videos and the texturing and tessellation of the ground leaves much to be desired. There is nowhere to take it, really.
In the image that you will find just above these lines you can see it in more detail. Look at the vegetation and the texturing of the ground, It seems incredible that it is an exclusive game for PS5 and PC, since we have seen generational transition titles that look much better than Forspoken, and what we see has nothing to do with what was shown in the presentation videos of this game.
In the image above the problems I have mentioned above can be seen again, and we have another one that we had not yet named, the rendering distance, which is very poor and has a very low quality level, so much so that objects further away tend to lose parts or magically disappear and appear. Even DLSS in quality mode, which is known for improving the quality of objects further away and removing jaggedness, doesn’t have a positive effect on this title.
Poor performance, serious bugs and generic development
Even with the test equipment used the performance of Forspoken has not been good. The frame rate per second fluctuated between 70 and 100, a very low range considering its poor graphic section and the simplicity of its development. When there are intense combats and many effects appear on the screen, the performance drops significantly, and it shows that the optimization problems are greater than we imagined.
Stuttering and micro-pulling are a constant when playing, and they make we never get to have a truly seamless experience, not even if we always stay above 60 frames per second. As I told you at the beginning of this article, as soon as you start playing Forspoken he welcomes us with micro-pulls, and these are repeated when we move the camera quickly to look at areas of the stage that were not visible (to look behind, for example).
In addition to irregular performance, stuttering and micro-pulling Forspoken presents popping problemssomething incomprehensible considering that it is designed to take full advantage of an NVMe SSD, and I have also identified antialiasing glitches that make many objects appear jagged and even “blink” when we move in any direction.
My conclusion is simple and clear, on a technical level Forspoken is not only not what we were promised, it is a disaster and represents such a big downgrade compared to the original that it seems to have been developed for a totally different generation, and much higher. I know what you’re thinking, that this title I would still be saved if the story was goodand if it had a protagonist with charisma and innovative gameplay, but unfortunately it is not like that either.
The protagonist has no charm, the story is nothing from the other Thursday and the gameplay is quite generic and feels somewhat forced at timesSo much so that when I completed my first half hour of the game I already felt somewhat bored. Even if you are a lover of the genre I do not recommend buying Forspoken, since it has gone from being one of the biggest promises of the year to becoming one of the biggest disappointments. It is not worth the 80 euros it costs, and 51% of Steam users think the same.
