And is the game worth playing now versus Final Fantasy 16?
Meanwhile, performance mode exhibited frequent frame-rate dips in combat, souring the experience.
After all, the biggest issue with Forspoken’s visual presentation was its relatively poor indirect lighting.
Thankfully, this is the key area where the new patches have delivered very substantial improvements.
As of version 1.2, Forspoken’s ambient occlusion has been overhauled.
Gone is the crude-looking AMD CACAO implementation that was present before, replaced with a better-looking alternative.
Deep crevices are filled convincingly with shade, while geometric intersections only receive noticeable AO coverage when appropriate.
That’s not to say that the new AO is a complete improvement in every respect.
In some spots it can look a bit heavy-handed, darkening areas more than seems realistic.
That’s not the only lighting change at hand.
Despite those caveats, Forspoken now looks closer to what you’d expect from a current-gen game.
The most obvious lighting flaw has been addressed, leaving the game on much firmer graphical footing.
It’s not exactly impressive, but it feels more competent relative to what we saw back in January.
This is how Forspoken should have been configured at launch.
In a lot of ways, Forspoken was a failure.
Character rendering in Forspoken is fine enough, but FF16 is a big step ahead.
The revised lighting in Forspoken still has obvious flaws.
Light leak is a near-constant annoyance in enclosed spaces, with the baked lighting obviously at a low resolution.
Distant geometry is bereft of any shadow coverage whatsoever.
FF16 mostly avoids those flaws.
At times it can feel like the game is sort of playing itself.
And there are some things that Forspoken has to offer as well - like its excellent Luminous Hair system.
It does seem like we’ve seen the last of Forspoken too, for better or for worse.
