Forspoken (Project Athia) [PS5, PC]

[vspectra]

The devs confirmed HDR was broken in the demo and will be fixed in the final version (demo is from tgs build that was calibrated for show monitors), along with full button remapping option, increase text size, less menu warp effect. Demo was its own separate build with unique fetch quest set up and all story stripped, probably rushed it out and didn't have time for optimization. How many devs even gives us demos of their AAA games nowadays, this one was fairly large xD. Final optimizations will be interesting to see on release build, if they can stabilize the res should look a lot better.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

No need to zoom, these are native resolution snips. Ouch, so much artifacting on the vegetation.





Regards,
SB

 

[vspectra]

No need to zoom, these are native resolution snips. Ouch, so much artifacting on the vegetation.

View attachment 7952
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Regards,
SB

That's just the foliage objects mid-way through disappearing due to the camera getting closer, . It isn't an issue of the vegetation rendering itself which is pretty high quality.

ex.
camera further out

camera closer to plant

 

[Silent_Buddha]

The trees exhibit the same artifacting and they aren't even remotely close to the camera.

If that's their way of fading something in or out, they really need to figure out a better way to do it, IMO.

Regards,
SB

 

[vspectra]

The way fading in and out works is barely even noticeable when playing the game, which is how it should be. This is nitpicking territory.

 

[techuse]

It's not nitpicking this game looks awful.

 

[vspectra]

It's not nitpicking this game looks awful.

This is just poor reading comprehension; complaining about how some objects intentionally disappear out of view as bad graphical "artifacts" is a nitpick, especially when you had to open up a full 4k image up close to even notice. And if this is awful, give me more awful looking games.

 

[BRiT]

You say nitpick, other's say "ugly" or "awful". This is all subjective, so if you love it then great for you, if others hate it then great for them too.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I play games on a 4k screen. Square-Enix released 4k shots. Why in the world wouldn't I look at them at native resolution? If they didn't want people looking at the 4k shots that they released on their 4k screens, then don't release 4k screenshots/bullshots! Yeesh.

And why wouldn't I point out rendering artifacts due to how they chose to render things? Just so Square-Enix don't get their feelings hurt that someone is actually looking at their 4k shots on a 4k screen? There are certainly more elegant and better looking ways to fade out vegetation close to the screen than what they are doing. And that doesn't even address what's happening to vegetation that isn't even close to the camera.

Regards,
SB

 

[techuse]

This is just poor reading comprehension; complaining about how some objects intentionally disappear out of view as bad graphical "artifacts" is a nitpick, especially when you had to open up a full 4k image up close to even notice. And if this is awful, give me more awful looking games.

This game honestly looks worse than mid gen PS4 titles, not to even mention the best that system has to offer.

 

[Karamazov]

let's see how the final release turns out, but for now, that demo does not look better than FFXV, and runs a lot worse !
And it looks worse than the initial trailers.

 

[orangpelupa]

the more im seeing this the more i realized that it was not that it was not a technically impressive game, but its art direction just didnt fit my taste. looks soulless. compared to FFXV that are full of personality and ridiculously majestic looking (hand crafted?) vistas.

but as we have only been seeing one region, it could be that the dev chose the most boring looking region for the demo because it was the only region that was polished enough to be presented as demo?

i wonder whether FFXV modding tools would work for this. if it work, then it could bootstrap mod development for more "artistic" look.

 

[Rootax]

I was never interested in buying this given the main character, but the art direction/ world building is very generic in the demo. World seems dead and not interesting.... Curious to see if the whole game is like this and if so, why square even bothered to make it (I guess they see it at a game made for the west but still).

 

[Frenetic Pony]

Skipping the "personal opinion" bit, all the assets look like they're optimized for a first person game, or with the camera close up to each object, instead of the artists ever checking them into the world to see how they look. The tiling on the materials stand out all over the place, the poly budget looks like it's blown on asset detail while the world artists are stuck optimizing with next to no instance budget, leaving everything looking a bit barren and empty.

The result is a heavily tiled, very empty and sparse looking world full of highly detailed objects it's hard to appreciate in a fast paced, pulled back, third person action title. It's not necessarily a tech fault, so much as a poor art pipeline given the type of game it is.

 

[Remij]

I'm looking forward to it.

 

[orangpelupa]

Skipping the "personal opinion" bit, all the assets look like they're optimized for a first person game, or with the camera close up to each object, instead of the artists ever checking them into the world to see how they look. The tiling on the materials stand out all over the place, the poly budget looks like it's blown on asset detail while the world artists are stuck optimizing with next to no instance budget, leaving everything looking a bit barren and empty.

The result is a heavily tiled, very empty and sparse looking world full of highly detailed objects it's hard to appreciate in a fast paced, pulled back, third person action title. It's not necessarily a tech fault, so much as a poor art pipeline given the type of game it is.

The obvious tiling is also on ffxv, maybe its inherent limitation of their development tools?

Like... It's very hard to hide the tiling via decals, varied tiles, etc?

 

[vspectra]

the more im seeing this the more i realized that it was not that it was not a technically impressive game, but its art direction just didnt fit my taste. looks soulless. compared to FFXV that are full of personality and ridiculously majestic looking (hand crafted?) vistas.

but as we have only been seeing one region, it could be that the dev chose the most boring looking region for the demo because it was the only region that was polished enough to be presented as demo?

i wonder whether FFXV modding tools would work for this. if it work, then it could bootstrap mod development for more "artistic" look.

Art direction in Forspoken is definitely a weird one. I dislike a lot of the drab lighting directions for the environments for most of their latest media and even in the demo.

A lot of the rocky cliffs/mountains also look like they just heavily relied on quickly procedurally making them in houdini for faster development time instead of using photogrammetry or more hand driven art. They look weird and unrealistic.

I looked up the dev team and they only have 170 people at Luminous currently. For comparison Callisto Protocol had 150 people at Striking Distance Studios, which isn't even counting the extra 150 people from the Sony support studio that helped out, and that's for a heavily linear 10 hour game with poor enemy variety and basically only 2 bosses. Forspoken most likely uses some outsourcing too but if it's similar to FFXV, then it'll be around the 300 man-power mark which is the same as Callisto Protocol, despite the much bigger scope Forspoken has. Main story path alone in Forspoken is confirmed to take around 25-30 hours with 4 different biomes/sections of the open world.

 

[Rootax]

While I don't disagree, hours is not always a good metric related to "scope". If it's 30 hours in empty and repeateting worlds, it's doesn't take more work than smaller but more detailled ones. I've not see anything in Forspoken, for now, showing that it's ambitious or anything.

 

[Inuhanyou]

I was never interested in buying this given the main character, but the art direction/ world building is very generic in the demo. World seems dead and not interesting.... Curious to see if the whole game is like this and if so, why square even bothered to make it (I guess they see it at a game made for the west but still).

You mean how she talks a lot?

 

[Rootax]

You mean how she talks a lot?

More the way she talks. in the trailers she's just irritating. Plus, it may be dumb but I need to be able "identify" with the MC in most games, it's really hard with some setup...