

Now, more than ten years later, this convergence of technology and world building come together in a shipping game: Forspoken. A second demo, known as Witch Chapter 0, was created and shown three years later, focusing on the same lead character while expanding its technology. The demo was called Agni's Philosophy and it was our first taste of the Luminous Engine which would go on to power the gorgeous Final Fantasy 15. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.In 2012, Square-Enix unveiled a tech demo designed to showcase what the then next-generation of consoles might be able to deliver from a visual perspective. Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls. I’m just not sure how this is gonna go here.įollow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. There are sparks of magic here, pun intended, but I can’t say this demo got my hyped for the full release, which is out in just a few days, meaning the idea of the demo sort of failed at baseline. I’m curious how things get deeper and more interesting from here, or if they do.

In general, however, the world feels a bit lifeless, and the map was more or less just a dozen enemy clusters each standing around a singular chest waiting to be unlocked once you killed them all. I unlocked a magic jump that felt a lot clunkier, however, as I tried to scale cliff faces with awkward hops and boosts, but perhaps you can upgrade it to suck less over time. I liked ground-based traversal with “magic parkour” making me feel like I could get places pretty quickly.

It may be too early to fully judge the open world here. And while some encounters were fun, others did not seem particularly fleshed out, including the final boss the game presents to you, which was some sort of alligator creature that I found I could simply whack with a magic fire sword from the side while spamming cooldown support spells and it couldn’t really do anything to counter me and just sort of floundered around. However, the combat system where you can only have two spells active at a time, and every time you want to switch you have a bring up a little quickwheel menu feels kind of exhausting. I like the idea of a game that requires you essentially to only use magic rather than being able to spec into melee or archery or whatever, and it seems like there will be a large amount of magic to wield here. I sort of enjoyed combat, as at least the visuals of the spell effects are cool. Everything else is not as bad as the dialogue, but nothing is particular good either.
