Forspoken's Original Writer Says The Final Game Was Nothing Like His Pitch
Forspoken hasn't gone down as one of the great releases of 2023. Besides the technical issues, which are numerous and at times game-breaking, much of the criticism leveled at Forspoken centered around its story, which has been generously described as "cringe."
Although Rogue One writer Gary Whitta is credited in Forspoken, he recently told Alanah Pearce of the Video Game Writing 101 podcast that he actually had very little to do with Forspoken's story and dialogue. In the interview, he admits to being contacted by Square Enix and Luminous to write Forspoken's story, but his initial pitch was tossed somewhere down the line and the released game looks nothing like the released game.
Related: Forspoken Thinks Its Worst Feature Is Its Best Feature
"I did some very early foundational world-building on Forspoken," Whitta explained. "Square came to me five or six years ago and said 'we have this idea, would you be willing to help us build out the world and the mythology and story.'" Whitta said he signed on and contributed an initial pitch, but later, Luminous decided to change Forspoken's story to be more about interdimensional portals.
"Some months after that they came back to me and one of the other writers and said 'we’re going to start over and completely reboot the story, we want it to be this now'," Whitta continued. "The problem was at that point that neither I nor the other writer were available anymore, and they wanted us to write the whole thing."
Whitta said that the only thing from his original pitch that made it into the final game was the name of the world: Athia. The dialogue and story beats are all from a team of writers that signed on after Whitta and Uncharted director Amy Hennig, who are credited with
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