In an interesting twist on the hand-holding that comes from tutorials, Forspoken instead uses Spellcraft Challenges in order to push players to learn the more interesting tech built into the combat. These small challenges do double duty of giving players an incentive to experiment with Frey’s builds, as well as improving her skills as a reward for testing out different tactics.
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Spellcraft Challenges to Upgrade Skills
The Spellcraft Challenges themselves are a series of simple tasks that require players to use specific spells and other tech in certain ways that make the most of their abilities. This can take the form of requiring players to jump over enemies and strike them from behind using Magical Parkour all the way to mastering the Shimmy mechanic by activating it up to fifty times. Nothing is so difficult that it will conflict horribly with any one playstyle, and these are all optional challenges that have to be manually assigned in the rest areas scattered across Forspoken’s world of Athia.
To take these challenges a step further, completing the tasks and returning to the bookshelves in the Pilgrim’s Refuges will also upgrade the associated spell. It offers a dynamic way to improve skills that requires and incentivizes players to learn how to properly utilize Forspoken’s spells in combat. This means that farming materials and experience isn’t the only way for players to improve, and the other methods are tied directly to gaining a better understanding of the depth of the game’s controls and mechanics.
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Letting the Player Walk on Their Own
One of the most common complaints from AAA games in the modern gaming ecosystem is that a lot of developers have been leaning too hard on tutorials that pull the player out of the action to teach new mechanics. While a quality tutorial can help get players started on the most basic controls of a game, top-tier developers like Square Enix have taken criticism over the years of spending too much time explaining how its games work. The most common complaint is to call it “hand-holding” because the game forces the player to slow down and drags down the pace of the opening segments by reading out blocks of text and freezing gameplay mid-stream.
In the case of Forspoken, however, it would seem that while there is a basic tutorial to get players acquainted with the basics, developer Luminous Productions instead allows players to learn the deeper tech on their own. This is where the Spellcraft Challenges come into play, rewarding players for learning the depth of combat without ever stopping progress in order to read out a huge block of text. The result of this type of incentivized learning is that Forspoken’s difficulty curve will have a high skill ceiling, which the game actively leads players to reach up toward.
This type of development, with depth that is crafted into the core systems of a game, isn’t uncommon in modern titles, though they are more often found in the Indie sphere rather than mainstream releases. The fact that the developer is willing to take this step back, though, is a great sign that Luminous Productions is listening to fan feedback. With the development of Forspoken seeming to take the requests of fans into account, the upcoming title already appears to have a lot of promise.
Forspoken is set to release on January 24, 2023, for PC and PS5.
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