Athia is a huge open world full of places to explore, creatures to fight, and mysteries to unravel. Luminous Productions harnesses the power of the PlayStation to make this happen, from the magical flames that erupt from Frey’s hands during combat, to the speed at which she zips across the vast world map.
Now that it’s easier than ever for players to pick up a PS5 and enter the world of Forspoken, Takeshi Aramaki, head of Luminous Productions and director of Forspoken, explains how the Luminous Productions team is using the PS5. and share some insights on what makes this adventure come to life.
PlayStation Blog: From a developer’s perspective, what was your first impression when you first learned about the power and capabilities of the PS5?
Takeshi Aramaki: I felt that the latest GPUs that support ray tracing and high-speed SSDs that can load data instantly would bring about a big change in the whole game development. Being able to display assets on screen without requiring loading time creates new gaming experiences. What surprised me the most when I actually started development was the ease of development.
DualSense wireless controllers offer a unique level of immersion with haptics and adaptive triggers. How did the team go about implementing the DualSense controller when developing this PS5 game?
The DualSense is such a unique controller that we wanted to create a game where players could feel and experience it to the fullest. Since Forspoken is a game designed for his PS5, Adaptive chose to allocate L2 and R2 for casting spells so he could feel the feedback from his triggers. Forspoken has over 100 spells and we’ve adjusted the force feedback to make all spells visible. and Feels unique. Additionally, haptic feedback creates a realistic sensation of traversing at high speeds when using magic parkour.
Forspoken features blazing fast travel in its fantasy open world. How did the development team harness the power of the PS5 to make this happen?
The SSD makes the PS5 about 100x faster than the PS4, so that’s all I need, but I also use Ooodle Kraken and Ooodle Texture for data compression. In addition to that, the PS5 also handles memory allocation and decompression on the hardware side. CPU processing of that data becomes a bottleneck, so we tuned the Luminous engine over 100 times to achieve this loading speed.
Forspoken features a stunning array of magical visual effects and character animations for moving and traversing Freys. How did the team harness the power of the PS5 to achieve this rich visual performance?
In Forspoken, we aimed for a unique visual expression. The GPU handles shaders dedicated to magical visual effects, while the CPU handles many of Magic Parkour’s processing needs. The PS5’s capabilities were sufficient for what we wanted to do. So powerful, in fact, that I had to add more visual effects. And while achieving this level of representation generally requires a lot of memory, the PS5’s dev tools are so easy to use that I was able to work faster than before. This gave us plenty of time to optimize the memory and process load required for Forspoken’s rich visuals.