Despite the good initial impressions, ‘Forspoken’ ended up being, broadly speaking, a disappointing bet. His ambition worked against him, and despite a good number of very powerful ideas (a worked magic system, a fantasy world in which to do parkour), the title collapsed due to the most elementary of problems: to great traits, was not fun due to a series of technical problems and a collection of very little worked missions.
These problems have ended up leading to an unintended consequence: the closure of the studio responsible for ‘Forspoken’. Barely a month after the title’s launch, Square Enix has announced that it will close Luminous Productions, which will be integrated into the company and will cease to act as an independent studio. The merger will become effective on May 1 and has explained the reasons in a press release, classifying the decision as a way to “further increase the competitive value of the group’s development studios.”
Luminous, made up of employees who worked on one of the company’s biggest games in recent years, ‘Final Fantasy XV’, is thus closed after just one game, although they still have work to do: a free upgrade which will debug many of the bugs and issues seen in the first version of the game. They will also work on the ‘In Tanta We Trust’ DLC, scheduled for release this summer.
The studio has given its own version of events since your Twitter account. There they state that they hope to “continue creating new entertainment and experiences as part of the Square Enix family.” It is clear that we have reached a point where the video game industry cannot allow itself to fail: in a phase of the evolution of the medium in which games have become polarized and are very large or completely independent, the former cannot give missteps. Bad news for experimentation, risk and novelty.
Image: Forspoken
