Luminous Productions has had a rather strange life. The studio was formed in early 2018 out of employees who had just finished work on Final Fantasy 15 Royal Edition and Windows Edition. Its job was to continue making games for Square Enix’s Luminous Engine, using the skills its developers had learned working on Final Fantasy 15 and the various tech demos released in the years leading up to it. Now, its latest project has finally been revealed: Forspoken, an action-adventure role-playing game featuring the magically empowered Frey Holland.
After Final Fantasy 15’s rocky development, up to and including the abrupt cancellation of its second DLC season due to company restructuring, it’s good to see that the Luminous Engine and its dedicated developers are still seeing work. There’s a fairly clear through-line between Final Fantasy 15 and Forspoken, the game formerly known as Project Athia, and that may be its greatest strength. A developer familiar with the issues and mistakes of its path can work to avoid repeating them, and that may be what is happening with Forspoken.
The Unifying Engine
Luminous Productions, formerly titled Luminous Studio, was initially conceptualized around 2011. This period was a difficult one for Square Enix; the Final Fantasy 15 project then known as Final Fantasy Versus 13 was hitting technical barriers as it transitioned to open-world environments its original Crystal Tools engine could not handle. Faced with these issues, Square Enix decided to bring in former developers from Sega to create new engines for its products, including the Luminous Engine. Square Enix decided to avoid sharing between companies or internally between games until the engine had been finalized with a released game. This resulted in Luminous Studio being restricted to what would become Final Fantasy 15 during development, while other major next-generation titles would use outsourced engines.
A preview of the gaming engine came in the form of E3 2012’s Agni’s Philosophy tech demo, a famous cinematic that depicted a grim and modern take on a Final Fantasy world. This is the point where the Final Fantasy 15 tagline of “a fantasy based on reality” began to take a tangible form, as the trailer appeared to be set in the fantasy equivalent of a war-torn urban area. This protagonist, Agni, even wore contemporary clothing under her summoner’s garb. This element can still be seen with Frey in Forspoken, which was a key component for fans assuming that Agni’s Philosophy and Project Athia were related somehow. There’s even focus on different types of hellhounds in each of their trailers. If it weren’t for the explanation of Frey and her role in the story, fans would have been forced to assume that her and Agni were one and the same — and that still might be true.
About a year before Final Fantasy 15 came out, another tech demo featuring Agni was released. Titled Witch Chapter 0 [cry], this showed Agni grieving amidst some ruins. Though, what it was really supposed to show was the Luminous Engine rendering tens of millions of polygons at 8K resolution, as well as Agni’s realistic individually-rendered hair and tears. That technical work has not gone to waste, as Forspoken is planned for the powerful modern hardware of the recent PlayStation 5 for a good reason. However, the most notable thing about this trailer isn’t its contents - it is its name.
When Sony uploaded the March 18th, 2021 Forspoken name reveal trailer, it accidentally included the line, “introducing WITCH, the new narrative-driven adventure set in a beautiful yet cruel world.” The other information in the trailer’s YouTube description was accurate to the game, so it appears that Forspoken not only went by Project Athia at one point, it was also internally known as WITCH. This identical name to the earlier Agni trailer demonstrates that the developers likely consider Forspoken to be an evolution of what those tech demos were meant to portray.
A Fantasy Based On Reality
And that portrayal is also present in Final Fantasy 15. Looking at FF15 and Forspoken’s gameplay, it's clear to see that Luminous Productions has a longstanding vision it still wants to fulfill in terms of how its games unfold. Going off of the traversal shots, both games are open world action-RPGs with a focus on fighting photorealistic monsters in a setting that oscillates wildly between realism and fantasy. Frey even uses abilities like a shield that wouldn’t be too out of place in the Final Fantasy 15 Brotherhood MMO expansion, showing a clear gameplay evolution between the two. Evidently, Final Fantasy 15 coming out with much of its back portion excised did not sit well with some developers at Luminous, and they want to make up for that with Forspoken.
Luminous Productions was initially founded to work on video games and other types of media, but a few months into its life it was refocused back to making games, reporting a 33 million dollar loss in the process. Frey Holland’s portrayal by the actress Ella Balinska, and Square Enix’s description of Forspoken as a "narrative-driven adventure," may be holdovers from this early direction. Frey’s presence as a normal human being transported to a fantasy realm also seems to be a direct response to Final Fantasy 15’s odd mesh of fantasy elements, realistic modern elements, and the sci-fi technology that pops up throughout the game thanks to the Empire of Niflheim.
All in all, Forspoken seems to be the synthesis of all of Luminous Productions’ projects before it. Committed to carrying out the spirit of the “fantasy based on reality” mantra, picking up where Final Fantasy 15 left off, and even fulfilling the dream of an Agni’s Philosophy game all seem to be in the cards for this new title. Luminous Productions has had a rocky history, and the current pandemic is no doubt putting another hamper on what was supposed to be the studio’s most well-defined and prepared-for project yet. Still, with a commitment to a 2022 release and multiple trailers already released, it seems like Forspoken is going to be the technical marvel game that Luminous Productions always intended to make.
Forspoken is set to release for PC and PS5 in 2022.