How Final Fantasy 15 influenced Forspoken according to its co-director

Work on Final Fantasy 15 had a "pretty big influence" on Luminous Production's approach to its upcoming debut game, Forspoken.

In an interview with Forspoken's co-director by way of a translator, Takefumi Terada spoke to GamesRadar about how previous work on Final Fantasy 15 influenced the team's approach to creating Forspoken.

"I think it [Forspoken] very much is a natural move on from Final Fantasy 15. Obviously the development team for Forspoken at certainly the leader level and most of the programmers - in fact quite a large amount of the team - are the same people who worked on Final Fantasy 15. It's also developed on the same engine, the Luminous Engine, so the setup, the development environment we have is pretty much the same."

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"There was a lot of discussions and looking at Final Fantasy 15, working out what we think we did well for that game, perhaps what needed improving on that," Terada adds. "And a lot of the decisions on how we approached Forspoken and just the general way we've worked on it were very much based on learnings from Final Fantasy 15. So I would say there was a pretty big influence."

It may come as no surprise given that, as Terada says, much of the team behind the new fantasy RPG previously worked on Final Fantasy 15. Luminous Production studio head and Forspoken game director, Takeshi Aramaki, for example, previously worked as the lead programmer on Final Fantasy 15 and the proprietary Luminous Engine used during development. Terada, who is now co-director on Forspoken, was also part of the Final Fantasy 15 team, and worked on DLC episodes, including Episode Ignis and Episode Ardyn.

The upcoming RPG sees you take on the role of Frey, a young woman from New York who's about to turn 21. Suddenly, she finds herself thrown into the hostile fantasy world of Athia, where she faces many dangers. With the help of a talking bracelet called Cuff, she's able to use magical abilities such as spells and parkour.

Forspoken is currently set to release on May 24, 2022 for PS5 and PC.

Look ahead to more exciting upcoming releases with our round-up of new games for 2022 and beyond.

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Heather Wald is the Evergreen Editor, Games at GamesRadar+. Her writing career began on a student-led magazine at Bath Spa University, where she earned a BA (Hons) in English literature. Heather landed her first role writing about tech and games for Stuff Magazine shortly after graduating with an MA in magazine journalism at Cardiff University. Now with almost seven years of experience working with GamesRadar+ on the features team, Heather helps to develop, maintain, and expand the evergreen features that exist on the site for games, as well as spearhead the Indie Spotlight series. You'll also see her contribute op-eds, interview-led features, and more. In her spare time, you'll likely find Heather tucking into RPGs and indie games, reading romance novels, and drinking lots of tea.