FORSPOKEN - PS5/PC - Luminous Productions new game

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Lulcielid

Warrior of Light
Oct 9, 2014
3,826
2,826
28
Argentina
#1
March 18, 2021: Officially titled Forspoken

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Title: Forspoken

Developer: Luminous Productions

Platform(s): Playstation 5 (time limited exclusive) and PC

Release date: 2022

Description:
Project Athia is the culmination of Luminous Productions’ philosophy to create a completely new and fresh gaming experiences that fuses together the latest technologies with art. With the PlayStation 5, their vision truly comes to life, and with Project Athia you can look forward to being transported to a vast and detailed world filled with beauty and dismay.
Trailer(s):
 
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FFChocobo18

Warrior of Light
Jan 9, 2017
1,045
1,514
#4
Project: Athia and Horizon: Forbidden West were the only games form the event I'm interested in, and I'm looking forward to both of them, especially the former one, it looked very interesting, especially the landscape and monsters seen so far. I'm also looking forward to hearing more about this game's story.
 
Likes: Storm

Ikkin

Warrior of Light
Oct 30, 2016
1,099
1,705
#7
Project: Athia and Horizon: Forbidden West were the only games form the event I'm interested in, and I'm looking forward to both of them, especially the former one, it looked very interesting, especially the landscape and monsters seen so far. I'm also looking forward to hearing more about this game's story.
There were a few other games that interested me (most notably Ratchet and the Avatar: the Last Airbender style adventure game), but this was definitely one of the best moments of the presentation.

Gotta love the delicious irony of the Luminous Engine powering one of the few truly next-gen looking PS5 games, given the amount of unfair criticism it endured over the course of FFXV's development. The combination of smoke and fire effects on that dragon was ridiculously impressive.

The traversal looks really cool, too. And the story seems to be an isekai/normal-person-dropped-into-fantasy-world kind of thing? Could be interesting!
 

Bazztek

Keyblade Master
May 26, 2014
719
1,890
#8
I'm really excited for this game, it's great so see Luminous Productions finally get to show off what they've been working on and it being so heavily featured on PlayStation's and Square Enix's social media accounts too.





Here are all the direct feed images they've uploaded, which are on the SE Press Site
https://press.na.square-enix.com/PROJECT-ATHIA#?tab=screenshots-2

And here are some official websites for it too.
https://project-athia.square-enix-games.com/en-us/
https://www.luminous-productions.com/news/10/

The PlayStation blog also has some info by Takeshi Aramaki, Head of Studio at Luminous Productions who is listed as being the Director, which is interesting, though he did state he was Technical Director for FFXV Windows Edition and that he was in charge of a team of 70 people during that, though I do wonder if they will have a Creative Director, or Co-director or a similar position in addition to Aramaki's role..
https://blog.playstation.com/2020/06/11/a-first-look-at-project-athia-designed-for-ps5/
Takeshi Aramaki: Director said:
We are so excited to be able to share a sneak peek at what we have been working on at Luminous Productions with you today. During the PlayStation 5 showcase, we showed a teaser trailer for the upcoming debut game from our studio, Project Athia (working title).

Project Athia is the culmination of our philosophy here at Luminous Productions to create completely new and fresh gaming experiences that fuse together the latest technologies with art. With PS5, our vision truly comes to life, and with Project Athia players can look forward to being transported to a vast and detailed world filled with beauty and dismay.

Project Athia will take you on a thrilling other-worldly adventure – it is going to be action-packed, and at times twisted, tempestuous, and forbidding. It is a journey that we want to feel as much yours as it is our protagonists.

We are hard at work on making full use of the exciting potential of the PS5 hardware for this project. While today was just a sneak peek, we’ll have a lot more to show you in the future and we can’t wait to tell you more about the game.








There's definitely some FFXV flavour here with the animations, lighting and general look, the art direction in the cutscene parts even looks really close to the Kingsglaive art direction too, the scene with the dragon especially reminded me of the visuals and art direction seen in the Cerberus fight at beginning of Kingsglaive, and the part with the broken down ruins also has similar art direction to the ruins in Kingsglaive where they have their skirmish with Niflheim.

















Even the design of the Protagonist herself seems to have design elements from Solara and even kinda from Luna's WoR outfit from Episode Luna mixed in, her general silhouette is very similar.





On that note the team at Luminous Productions that we at least know of is mostly comprised of people who had worked on Episode Ardyn with whoever else they've hired since then who are now working on Project Athia, with some staff doing R&D and some other things, in addition it seems like they're using mainly Hollywood writers for narrative stuff, while the things like the gameplay systems, lighting and tech, world, designs, art direction and so on is by the staff in Japan.
Like mentioned above Gary Whitta is involved and has "led a crack team of A-list writers from the worlds of film, tv, games, and fantasy literature who helped create this immense new universe", there is also Amy Berg who was a showrunner for Counterpart who's also involved. While I'm not particularly deeply familiar with either of their works I have seen Rogue One, which I think is the least bad of the New Star Wars films but also doesn't really stand out either, but from what I've read he only wrote the 1st draft of the script and not the final one used in the film, I havn't played any of the Walking Dead Telltale games but I always hear about it being highly acclaimed or whatnot, and I've seen about half of Counterpart season 1 which was pretty good and interesting but never got around to finishing it.


I'd also like to echo sentiments I've seen people have in that it feels like it's using concepts or ideas from Agni's Philosophy stuff, there wasn't really much that we knew of but we're seeing a magic casting girl in a cape using the environment around her and fighting off some magic dogs, and there is a dragon too, not exactly things exclusive to Agni itself, but I think when looked at in a bubble alongside each other it does have a similar kinda feel and vibe, even the way she casts magic is similar to how Agni also did, which incidentally is also similar to how Noctis, Regis and the Kingsglaive cast magic.





Though the designs of the dog monsters and the dragon widely differ, I vastly prefer the designs of the dog monsters and the dragon in Project Athia either way.










I think on that note there is some connection with the names "Athia" and "Agni" through their Hindu origin, I don't really know how accurate this is but after 10 minutes of Google searching this is what I found, Athia is a name often given to baby's born in Krittika Nakshatra, which was a name for the Pleiades in Hindu Astrology, and who are personified as the 6 nurses of Karttikeya (the Hindu equivalent of Mars) a son of Shiva, and with Agni being the Deity ruling over them. So who knows, maybe Agni might even be a character in Project Athia?

http://www.babynology.com/name/athia-f.html
shorturl.at/emqM9

It also looks like the actress playing the protagonist/ the face scan for the protagonist is Ella Balinska, this hasn't been officially revealed yet but Imran Khan who used to be at Game Informer and who had heard details of the game beforehand has said that it is her in a new deleted thread over at Resetera.






Overall I'm very excited for this project and hope we get to see more soon, with the Luminous team at SE being the most efficient AAA staff they have, putting out FFXV in only 3 years at such high fidelity and with the advanced graphical and technical prowess that it has, which not even FF7R or KH3 managed to surpass despite taking 5-6 years on UE4, I expect we could see Project Athia release before even FF7R part 2 releases.
 

Bazztek

Keyblade Master
May 26, 2014
719
1,890
#11
Nice, this was basically strongly implied through various interviews the Luminous devs did, saying things like they want to use their open world know-how gained from FFXV and to further develop it with their "new IP", and that they said they were looking at other open world games like Breath of the Wild for influence too.

But it's nice to get actual explicit confirmation now.
 

Lulcielid

Warrior of Light
Oct 9, 2014
3,826
2,826
28
Argentina
#17
While looking at the page of Athia I found this curious: Captura.PNG

For any of the EU pages the game has a provisional PEGI 18 rating, like FFXVI does, the strange thing is the trailer didn't show anything resembling strong content in the slightless like the FFXVI trailer.
 

Rei

Stiltzkin's Apprentice
Jan 13, 2021
5
3
#18
While looking at the page of Athia I found this curious: View attachment 1367

For any of the EU pages the game has a provisional PEGI 18 rating, like FFXVI does, the strange thing is the trailer didn't show anything resembling strong content in the slightless like the FFXVI trailer.
Well spotted! So that means Project Athia will possibly be a dark fantasy.....Great!!