Forspoken pushed back to October for further polishing

metro.co.uk:

Square Enix’s big not-Final Fantasy role-playing game for 2022, Forspoken, has been hit with a five-month delay.

As both an original property and the first project from a relatively new studio, Forspoken’s launch arguably faces a lot more pressure to succeed than an already established franchise like Final Fantasy.

Publisher Square Enix and developer Luminous Productions appear to be aware of this, since Forspoken has now been delayed by five months, pushing it out of May and into October.

The development team hasn’t provided any exact reason for the delay, only saying that it will use the extra months to polish the game and ensure it gets its vision right.

‘Our vision for this exciting new IP is to deliver a game world and hero that gamers across the globe will want to experience for years to come, so getting it right is extremely important to us,’ reads a Twitter message.

‘To that end, during the next few months we will focus all of our efforts on polishing the game and can’t wait for you to experience Frey’s journey this fall.’

This statement suggests some lofty expectations for Forspoken to branch out into its own franchise, which seems optimistic given the previews last year were rather underwhelming.

From the footage we saw, its gameplay and visuals are decent although not especially impressive and protagonist Frey’s defining personality traits seem to be that she swears a lot and is from New York (which is ironic since her actor is British).

There was also some concern that she fell into too many obvious clichés for black characters and that the writing team did not seem to have any black contributors, the controversy around which may be what the tweet is alluding to when it talks about getting the hero right.

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