It’s no secret that Square Enix’s magical RPG Forspoken struggled to win over players due to ridiculous system specs, silly aiming mechanics, and a somewhat creepy story. To combat all of the above, the developers released Forspoken’s first “major” update with the goal of making Athia a better place.
Described by Forspoken director Takeshi Aramaki as a “major update”, Forspoken patch 1.10 focuses on some major quality of life changes that hopefully make the experience a little easier.
Forspoken will no longer fry your PC (hopefully)
I remember looking at Forspoken’s system requirements and taking a deep breath. Although my engineering knowledge isn’t up to scratch, one look at these specs told me that my good ol’ Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super was having a rough time trying to play the game.
To save me from spending wads of cash on one of the best graphics cards around, the developers have made some changes to the strain Forspoken puts on your PC, writing that “the (processing) load has been reduced to about 70%”. certain scenes. Whether this load is on the GPU or the CPU is unknown, but hopefully your game will run a little better from now on.
New Forspoken target lock in system
One of Forspoken’s other irritating quirks is Frey’s inability to aim properly. While Luminous was clearly hoping to challenge players by forcing them to line up their spells, I’d be lying if I said I felt like half of my spells were going where I wanted them to go. Actually I wanted them to go away.
To remedy this, Forspoken now has a switchable targeting system. You’ll be able to enable “Target Enemy” in the settings, which means you’ll automatically lock on an enemy when you reload your next spell. This works in conjunction with two other new features, “lock nearby enemies” and “lock enemy offscreen”, which will seamlessly switch your attacks between enemies.
Likewise, you can now activate a construct that prevents Frey’s spells from staggering her, which is especially useful when you’re starting to learn higher-level magic.
Forspoken Update 1.10 Release Notes
Below are the full patch notes for the PC version of Forspoken, courtesy of Square Enix and Luminous Poductions.
Technical issues
- Fixed an issue where the screen flickers unintentionally when using AMD Radeon RX 570 or RX 580. (PC Version)
- Various minor fixes.
Feature updates
- Adjusted explanatory text and default camera position for the Magic Parkour Zip skill tutorial.
- Added an option for players to choose to automatically switch to the last viewed section when accessing a menu.
- Added an option for players to choose to automatically aim the camera at the targeted enemy when locking onto an enemy during charge spells.
- Added an option for players to choose to automatically switch stationary target to a nearby enemy after defeating a stationary enemy.
- Added an option for players to block enemies off screen.
- Added an option for players to choose to avoid being stunned by the effects of Frey’s own spells.
- Adjusted the movements and behaviors of certain enemies when taking damage.
- Adjusted Sulla’s “Sliced” magic to fire in the direction Frey is facing.
graphic adjustments
- Adjusted the lighting in some areas of Cipal.
- Adjusted camera effects that occur when framing bright objects like the sun.
- Adjusted the texture and shading of some objects.
- Adjusted the number of polygons for some background objects.
- Improved the quality of the anti-glare filter.
- Updated menu to show required memory usage.
- Updated opening sequence to cycle through brightness settings before launching the game for the first time.
Various
- Removed the VRS entry from the Graphics section of the menu.
- The shader has been optimized so that Variable Rate Shading (VRS) is available for all hardware.
- Updated DirectX 12 version to 1.606.4 from 1.4.10.
Improvement
- Reduced processing load in some areas. (Load reduced to around 70% in some scenes.)
- Reduced VRAM usage.
- Minor optimization for some features.
If your PC not exploding (hopefully) prompted you to give Forspoken a try, be sure to check out our list of the best Forspoken setups to ensure your adventure in Athia is as good as it can be. We also have a roundup of the best fantasy games if you’re not convinced.