Forspoken Ended Up Being 'Nothing Like' Gary Whitta's Original Pitch | Push Square
Forspoken just kind of came and went, didn't it? After so much buildup pre-release, the magical action RPG dissipated almost immediately upon release into the wild. Part of the hype for the game was the writing talent attached, including Rogue One scribe Garry Whitta and Amy Hennig of Uncharted fame. But as these things so often go, it looks like little of either's contribution made it into the final form of the game.
In an interview with Alanah Pearce on her Video Game Writing 101 podcast (thanks, GamesRadar+), Whitta discussed his involvement with the project, noting that «I did some very very early foundational world-building lore stuff on Forspoken, I never wrote an actual line of dialogue”.
He describes the way the whole thing came together: „What happened was Square came to me five or six years ago and said 'we have an idea but it's just a germ of an idea, would you be willing to help us build out the world and the mythology and the story?'”
Whitta accepted and was asked to lead a writer's room, which he did, where much of the lore and history of the world of Athia was created. Incidentally, Whitta says the name “Athia» was one of his few contributions that actually made it into the final game.
A couple of months later, Whitta says that «they came back to me and one of the other writers and said 'we're going to start over to completely reboot the story, we want it to be this now'». This new story was about a young woman from the real world sucked into a fantasy realm, the story that Forspoken would ultimately ship with.
Whitta is credited in Forspoken under 'Original concept', with Hennig's contribution billed as 'Story Concept'. Whitta acknowledges that having the names of such high-profile writers attached to the
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