Square Enix‘s highly anticipated game, Forspoken, has had a tumultuous development journey, with the story being rebooted midway through. The game has a team of writers attached to it, but according to Gary Whitta, one of the writers, the final version of the story was “nothing like” the original version that he pitched to the studio.
In an interview with Alanah Pearce on her Video Game Writing 101 podcast, Whitta revealed that he was involved in the early stages of the game’s development.
Square Enix approached him several years ago to help them build Forspoken’s world, mythology, and story. While he did some foundational world-building and came up with ideas, he never wrote any dialogue.
Whitta then ran a writer’s room that included several writers and developers who worked on fleshing out the story’s details, including the history of the world and the workings of magic. Whitta claims that the name of the world, Athia, was his idea and remains in the final product.
However, several months into the development, Square Enix decided to scrap the story they had been working on and start with a brand new one. The new story follows a young woman from the real world who is transported to a fantasy realm.
Whitta stated that the story they had been working on was nothing like the final version. He also reveals that Square Enix contacted him to work on the new story of Forspoken, but he declined the offer due to scheduling issues.
Although Whitta was not involved in the rebooted story and is credited in the game under “Original Concept.” Fellow writer Amy Hennig is credited under “Story Concept.” While Whitta appreciates having his name attached to the game, he acknowledges that his involvement was in the early stages of development and that the final product vastly differs from what he worked on.
Forspoken didn’t have an ideal release and faced several issues, the most significant of which was that the majority of significant gaming media outlets claimed that they didn’t receive a review code for Forspoken which raised concerns regarding the quality of the game among the gaming community.
Nevertheless, Forspoken was released and met with mixed reviews where critics appreciated the gameplay, but the story and dialogues did not fit with the gameplay.
Besides that, the PC version of Forspoken was not the best and had various optimization issues, which decreased the quality and fluidity of the game on mid and low-end systems. It even tested the limits of the latest PC hardware, making Forspoken an overall controversial game within the PC gaming community.
What are your thoughts about this news? Would Forspoken’s story and dialogues have been any better if Square Enix and Luminous Productions had gone with the initial pitched story? Share your opinions about this in the comment section below.
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