Forspoken PC Patch Tackles Performance, More Updates Planned

Square Enix issued a new patch for Forspoken on PC, addressing technical issues and performance problems that have PC users complaining. The patch, which brings the game up to version 1.03 on PC, addresses a number of bugs that were affecting PC performance, as well as expanding controller and mouse support from the current defaults. Additionally, Luminous Productions Studio Head Takeshi Aramaki issued a statement promising future improvements and updates for the game.

The patch notes for Forspoken on PC are visible here, via the game’s Steam page. The most notable fixes are to incidences of crashes and screen flickering when using specific GPUs. The notes only refer to “certain Intel GPUs”, but reports from PC users suggest the issues were most prevalent among users of Intel Arc GPUs. Intel launched the Arc line in early 2022 to compete with Nvidia’s GeForce and ATI’s Radeon graphics cards in the PC gaming space. The game also received fixes to its support for players using mouse-and-keyboard controls, specifically those with five-button mice. A bug caused the disappearance of the “side button” configuration when using those types of mice in-game.

Forspoken on PC also received improvements to help make it easier to play on the Steam Deck portable hardware. When set to the deck-friendly resolution of 1280 x 800, Forspoken‘s UI should display at a more readable size. To improve the game’s performance on PC in general, graphical settings were also updated to lower the number of characters displayed at low Model Detail Level settings. On PC Forspoken has fairly extravagant system requirements, with recommended specs asking for 24 GB of RAM and a GPU equivalent to the Nvidia RTX 3070.

Luminous Productions Studio Head and Forspoken Director Takeshi Aramaki also posted a message to fans via the official Forspoken Twitter account. The message dealt with the studio’s future plans for the game.

A message from @LumiPro_EN’s Takeshi Aramaki on upcoming updates for #Forspoken pic.twitter.com/BH0zC9edEb

— Forspoken (@Forspoken) February 8, 2023

In the message, Aramaki thanked fans for their feedback and comments about their experiences playing Forspoken. He said that based on the feedback, the team will prioritize addressing several issues through future updates:

• Overall improvements to performance
• Improvements to graphical quality
• Improvements to “operability and ease of use” (in Japanese this term is typically used to refer to “controls”, but can encompass more nebulous considerations, like “game feel” or “feedback”)
• Improvements and additions to in-game content (things like activities)

Aramaki said that the team plans to announce more details about their plans soon, and asked for fans to wait a little longer.

Forspoken is available on the PC and PS5.