On August 8, 2022, the Forspoken team posted a marketing video so bad the entire gaming community on Twitter cringed. The Tweet in question wasn’t necessarily bad, harmful, or distasteful in any way, but it sent the wrong tone to potential players. The video featured a weird recap of Frey’s situation as a young New Yorker who has been magically transported to the realm of Athia, in the form of campy dialogue. It inspired a ton of pretty funny memes in response.
Today, the creative producer behind Forspoken has addressed the memes. His take? “Some of the memes are actually pretty funny.”
In an interview with Eurogamer, Raio Mitsuo mentioned that he had been pretty surprised by the reaction to the video at first, but in the end, he’s not worried that people won’t like the game. He said that particular video, which you can view for yourself in the Tweet below, was created by taking dialogue from multiple trailers that had already been released at that time to create a new social media post. The game itself will not be quite as chatty.
Mitsuo explained that Forspoken is a narrative-driven adventure game. In an attempt to not spoil or lessen the emotional impact of the game in a series of marketing materials, there is a lot of out-of-context dialogue out right now. It seems that he is more concerned with the quality of the gameplay experience than laying all of the cards on the table to generate buzz. That’s a stance we can respect. Trailers that give everything away are the worst.
That being said, the memeable trailer was pretty bad. It made the game sound like it was for children rather than adults looking for their next big combat-intensive game. To that, Mitsuo has some very good news: you can turn down the frequency of the dialogue. If you’re not a fan of debatably witty banter distracting you from fighting those “freaking dragons,” then you can turn down the frequency of how often Frey and Cuff talk to each other in the “accessibility menu.”
Mitsuo does hope that you will try the game with the proper dialogue settings though because Cuff is instrumental in explaining backstory important to the plot. In a recent video from IGN, a player who had the chance to play a demo mentioned that the back and forth was nowhere near as cringey as the social media post made it seem.
The takeaway is that if exploring an open-world magical realm full of zombies and beasts while fighting with magic and magic-imbued parkour sounds fun to you, ignore the memes. Forspoken will be available to play on PC and PlayStation 5 on January 24, 2023.
