Forspoken will load scenes in as little as a single second on PC provided you have a good enough rig and SSD.
As The Verge reports, Forspoken developer Luminous Productions made an appearance at GDC 2022 to show off how various technologies are making Square Enix's upcoming action-RPG look and run beautifully. In particular, it'll be one of the first games to benefit from Microsoft's DirectStorage tech, which will work with your SSD to almost eliminate load times. Most impressively, Luminous Productions technical director Teppei Ono said that certain scenes will load in one second flat.
In the below video, released in tandem with Luminous Productions' GDC panel, you can see Forspoken loading up a number of scenes weighing in at a combined 4.5 GB from two different SSDs and an HDD. As expected, the build with the M.2 SSD loaded the game fastest, with the SATA SSD trailing it by a considerable distance, and then the HDD crossing the finish line about 20 seconds after both SSDs. What's surprising is just how fast Forspoken can load off an SSD.
A PC with an M.2 SSD loaded the first scene of Forspoken in a blistering 2.2 seconds using DirectStorage, while a comparable build rocking a SATA SSD loaded the scene in 4.6 seconds - still very fast. The same PC with a regular ol' HDD took a leisurely 24.6 seconds to load the same scene. The second scene of the game took the M.2 SSD 1.9 seconds to load, while the SATA SSD took 3.7 seconds and the HDD clocked in at 21.5 seconds.
Ono confirmed that HDDs aren't compatible with DirectStorage due to hardware limitations, which only partly explains the lag. Any SSD, even without DirectStorage, will leave the fastest HDD in the dust any day of the week, DirectStorage just gives SSDs even more of an edge.
So how about those one-second load times? Well, we didn't actually see any of those in the video Luminous Productions showed, but Ono said it is possible as long as you have a PC running Windows 11 PC and an NVMe SSD with at least a 5,000MB/sec read speed, which you'll find plenty of on our guide to the best SSDs for gaming. Obviously, you'll also need a halfway decent CPU and GPU, as well as plenty of RAM, to achieve such fast load times, but honestly, anything under 10 seconds is pretty dang quick.
Forspoken is due to launch on October 11. Check out the best PC games to play in the meantime.
