Forspoken PC Port Has Some Major Problems

Forspoken's recent release has faced significant criticism from PC gamers who are disappointed with the game's very poor performance on high-end hardware. Meanwhile, Forspoken has also received largely mixed reviews from gamers and critics who aren't very impressed with other aspects such as gameplay, graphics, and dialogue.

Square Enix and Luminous Productions' Forspoken was highly anticipated as one of the first major AAA titles to release in 2023. First revealed as "Project Athia" in 2020, Forspoken has been the subject of speculation and hype for several years resulting in understandably high expectations for the big-budget open-world adventure game. The core concept of the game is interesting, with a young modern-day New Yorker struggling to adapt after being sent into a magical fantasy world. It's a fun "what if" scenario that many people have probably pondered, but according to reviews, the execution has fallen a bit flat.

The PC port of Forspoken has been bombarded with negative reviews on Steam, with over 47% of user reviews currently being negative. While many of these negative reviews cite gameplay issues or subjective problems with characters and dialogue, a large number of reviewers are having trouble getting the game to run smoothly even on particularly powerful machines. Systems with graphics cards like the RTX 3070 are struggling to run the game on 1440p, meanwhile, other players have encountered numerous crashes, and some note a distinct difference between the fidelity shown in gameplay trailers and what players actually see in-game.

Understandably, gamers are frustrated with the experience after paying out the new $70 price point along with making room for Forspoken's chunky 90 GB file size. The game's system requirements are already quite high, and the presence of the controversial Denuvo DRM is another point of contention since it has a reputation for negatively affecting game performance which punishes gamers who pay for legitimate copies of games. It's possible that future patches can alleviate some of these problems, but it's going to be very difficult for Forspoken to recover from a poor first impression.

Sadly, this isn't the first time a Square Enix release has had issues with a PC port. Nier Automata was considered to be a rather poor PC port, although it was improved significantly over the years thanks to some crucial updates. Hopefully, Forspoken's PC port won't take as long to bring up to par.

Forspoken is available now for PC and PS5.