Forspoken will get its DLC 25 days after Square Enix eats its developer
Going out on a high note?
Here's the good news: Forspoken's DLC is coming out earlier than the previously predicted "Summer 2023" release window, which optimists among you might consider a chance for it to live up to the potential it failed to reach in the main game. Here's the bad news: It's coming on May 26, 25 days after the game's developer, Luminous Productions, gets swallowed up by Square Enix and snuffed out forever.
The In Tanta We Trust DLC will see Frey sent back in time to the Purge of the Rheddig, which took place 25 years before the base game and drove the setting's ruling matriarchs to madness. You'll get new abilities, a new companion, and new heights in the form of "unique, vertically-designed environments". You will probably continue to talk to a cuff.
It's a bit of a swansong for Forspoken, which got kicked to the curb by Square Enix not long after release, following "challenging" reviews from critics and audiences and "lacklustre" sales all around. Not one for second chances, Square Enix announced it would be absorbing the game's developer barely a month after the game released.
It's a shame. Forspoken certainly wasn't great—PCG's Mollie Taylor scored it 65% in her Forspoken review—but there were the seeds of something in there. I would have been interested to see what Luminous could do with a new project after learning whatever it learned from Forspoken's development, and I guess this DLC is the closest we'll get to that. Call me cynical, but I doubt one piece of DLC will manage to convince me to do a 180 in my opinion on Forspoken as a whole.
You'll be able to pick up Forspoken's In Tanta We Trust DLC on Steam, the Epic Games Store, and the Microsoft Store when it releases on May 26. If you own the digital deluxe edition, you'll actually get it three days early, on May 23.
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One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.
I desperately hope Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Baldur's Gate 3 and Disco Elysium inspire more RPG devs to reject the traditional drip, drip, drip of DLC and expansions
FF14 is finally fixing the fact my carefully-constructed portraits keep reverting to a goddamn driver's licence photo whenever I change my goddamn gear