Forspoken (PROJECT ATHIA) (PC/PS5) - January 24, 2023

[Uzor]

PS5 availability is still low in the US? It's finally not sold out everywhere just this month in Sweden

[Melena]

PS5 hasn't hit found in the wild consistently in stores, but there's enough constant online sales and such through multiple retailers, including Sony that if you really want one, you can get one.

[Krandor]

When I grabbed one it had been a Horizon bundle through Sony's website, and that was available for a good 2 or 3 days before selling out.

But I still have yet to see one sitting on an actual store shelf.

[Gokulo]

It's the same here. You're not going to see any in the stores, but getting one online should be pretty easy

[Krandor]

Well they did release a demo on Steam/Epic/etc, so good for them on that.

[Gokulo]

Well they did release a demo on Steam/Epic/etc, so good for them on that.

Not quite sure if "good" is what will come out of that

[Krandor]

Well, the demo is running at 1440p/60fps on my system (Standard preset + DLSS quality) when by the recommended settings I wasn't even expecting to hold 30 fps.

I think it's a VRAM thing, since the laptop 3080 has 16GB of VRAM compared to the desktop versions having under that.

Edit : honestly demo ran so much better than I expected I bought the game. I'm going on a deployment tomorrow and really wanted a new game to work my way through on it, so Forspoken wins

Another edit : the full game has a built in benchmark. No ray tracing and most settings on High got me an average of 72 fps at 1440p w/ DLSS quality. This game runs way way better (at least for me) than SE was implying

[Malithar]

I'm going on a deployment tomorrow and really wanted a new game to work my way through on it, so Forspoken wins

Runtime spoiler:

Spoiler: show

Not sure how long your deployment is, but one of the reviews I read clocked the game with the majority of side content done at just under 20 hours. Dunno your duration, but may be worth loading up another game along with it. It's far less time than I would have expected of the game.

[Krandor]

Well my laptop has 30 games on it and I have a retro gaming miniPC I've been putting together with roughly 360 games on it.

I'm covered.

[Salodin]

And it's using FSR on top of that, so the internal resolution is even lower. These guys have had two console gens to optimize/tailor this engine, yet it's reportedly an unstable performance wreck like FF15 before it.

Spoiler: show

That said I still want to play it at some point, but that'll be a couple years at the rate PS5 availability in my area goes plus the current price of PC parts.

Fwiw I saw two PS5 at my local Walmart in Florida. It's happening...slowly...good luck lol

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[NynJa]

Last time I was at EB Games, they had a sign saying PS5's are in stock. I didnt inquire further, since I already got mine.

[Salodin]

EB Games

What

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[Krandor]

What

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Some of them still exist in Canada along with Australia and New Zealand. Think the Canadian ones are slowly being rebranded as GameStop tho

[Salodin]

Wow talk about nostalgia. Brought my Dreamcast from an EB Games

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[NynJa]

Some of them still exist in Canada along with Australia and New Zealand. Think the Canadian ones are slowly being rebranded as GameStop tho

Old habits die hard.
It might be a GameStop, but its the same place.

[Krandor]

So I got like 2-3 hours in. (Performance wise I'm using a 5900HX/RTX 3080 16GB with 32 GB of RAM)

I think the performance stuff on PC is really just a VRAM/RAM thing, the game eats A LOT of memory (usually sitting in the 10-12GB VRAM range for me at 1440p with mostly the High preset + turning on DLSS, and like 13 GB of RAM), cause it's performing fine for me. Some dips under 60 during some cutscenes and really heavy fights, but nothing Gsync can't cover for.

Ray tracing seems like a waste, the shadows mostly just look like higher res of the normal shadows, and the AO is only going to show up on faces during cutscenes (toggling it on and off on the environment I could see zero change). Neither of them is remotely noticable during normal gameplay.

The writing is ass, there is no way around it, but the game on a whole seems like a perfectly fun romp. That said I can already say 100% if I wasn't about to be deployed and in desperate need of entertainment for the next 45 days, I would absolutely wait for a sale.

[Qalbert]

remember funcoland?

[Ayn]

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

[Kaisha]

I think the performance stuff on PC is really just a VRAM/RAM thing, the game eats A LOT of memory (usually sitting in the 10-12GB VRAM range for me at 1440p with mostly the High preset + turning on DLSS, and like 13 GB of RAM), cause it's performing fine for me.

I'm curious to see if this is still the case on a rig capable of running with DirectStorage on (this being the first retail game to support it iirc), since it was probably built around that expectation w/ PS5 having a hardware decompressor. Wouldn't need to cache as much into ram/vram if you can just rip it off of your storage on the fly near immediately as it's needed.

PS5 availability is still low in the US? It's finally not sold out everywhere just this month in Sweden

I've still yet to see one in the wild in Canada. Did see my first Series X last month though after there's been fuck-all across current/last-gen besides the odd Series S. Honestly just going to wait for a revision/Pro at this point, I'm in no rush, and I got plenty on my PS4 to play still.

Spoiler: show

Granted a good bit of that backlog I intend to just play on a PS5 instead due to Pro BC mode, or they got a free upgrade path

[Krandor]

My computer supports directstorage (loading times are instant) and it's still eating up the massive amounts of RAM/VRAM

It is quite simply just not a well optimized game, but in specific circumstances like mine (since the laptop 3080 had more VRAM than the desktop versions for whatever reason) you can get around it and have a good experience.