Forspoken was one of the most promising early PS5 showings, revealed with death-defying parkour, wide-open landscapes and beautiful visuals throughout. At launch, the game was far less impressive though – a repetitive, empty game with surprisingly dated graphics despite its high budget. A dedicated patching campaign seems to have improved the title’s plight, with reported visual and performance improvements in tow as of version 1.2. Have recent patches turned Forspoken into a technically sound title, or does the game remain a bit of an open-world mess? Some might say it’s both of these things, but let’s be clear – improved lighting, dramatically better ambient occlusion, higher resolutions and even superior frame-rates represents an often night-and-day improvement over the original launch.
Getting into specifics, let’s start with performance and resolution changes, before diving into more transformative upgrades to the game’s indirect lighting. As a reminder, some areas of the launch version of Forspoken had serious performance issues, often dipping to around 20fps in both quality and RT modes despite a 30fps target. Meanwhile, performance mode exhibited frequent frame-rate dips in combat, souring the experience.
The good news is that these issues appear to have been solved in 1.2, with a steady 30fps in quality and RT modes and 60fps during the vast majority of combat. Forspoken also includes 120Hz versions of each of its three modes, with quality and RT targeting 40fps while performance mode remains at 60fps and these modes also perform well, essentially trading resolution for higher or more stable performance. There are still occasional dips, but the vast majority of the performance issues seem to have been resolved which makes the game feel a lot better to play.
