Athia is a massive open world filled with places to explore, creatures to battle, and mysteries to unravel. Luminous Productions harnesses the power of PlayStation to make this a reality, from the magical flames that flare from Frey’s hands in battle to her fast movement speed across the vast world map.
Now that players can get their hands on PS5 and step into the world of Forspoken, it’s easier than ever before, Takeshi Aramaki, Head of Luminous Productions and Director of Forspoken shares some insights into how the Luminous Productions team is tapping PS5 to make this adventure a reality:
PlayStation Blog: What was your first impression when you first learned about the power and capabilities of the PS5, from a developer perspective?
Takeshi Aramaki: With the latest GPU with ray tracing support and a high-speed SSD that allows instant data reading, I feel that it will bring significant changes to game development in general. The ability to display content on the screen without loading time creates a new gaming experience. When we actually started developing for it, the biggest surprise was how easy it was to develop.
The DualSense wireless controller offers a unique level of immersion thanks to its tactile and adaptive triggers. How did your team approach the DualSense controller implementation when developing this PS5 game?
DualSense is such a unique controller, so we wanted to create a game that allows players to feel and experience it to the fullest. Since Forspoken is a game we designed for the PS5, we decided to assign L2 and R2 for casting spells so you can feel the feedback from the Adaptive Trigger. There are over 100 spells in Forspoken, and we’ve adjusted the force response for each spell so that each looks like and feel unique. In addition, haptics feedback feels realistic when traveling at high speeds when using Magic Parkour.
Forspoken features incredibly fast moving in its fantasy open world. How did the development team harness the power of PS5 to make this a reality?
The SSD makes the PS5 about 100 times faster than the PS4, so that’s a lot in itself, but it also uses Oodle Kraken and Oodle Texture to compress data. On top of that, the PS5 also handles memory allocation and decompression on the hardware side. The CPU’s processing of that data then became the bottleneck, so we made over 100 adjustments to our Glow Engine to recognize these read rates.
Forspoken has a bunch of magical visual effects and character animations for Frey in transitions and moves. How did the team harness the power of the PS5 to deliver this rich visual performance?
In Forspoken, we aim for a visual expression unlike any other. The GPU handles the dedicated shaders for magical visual effects, and the CPU handles many of the processing needs for Magic Parkour. The PS5’s capabilities are more than enough for what we want to do; in fact, it’s so powerful that it encourages us to add even more to the visual effects. In addition, it often takes a lot of memory to achieve this level of expression, but the PS5 development tools are easy to use and allow us to work faster than before. That gave us plenty of time to optimize the memory and load handling needed for Forspoken’s rich image.
