Forspoken‘s story was changed quite a bit when compared to the original version that was first worked on by Gary Whitta. Speaking on Video Game Writing 101, Whitta said that the story for Forspoken was rebooted while it was still in development, leading to a different story than what was originally pitched to publisher Square Enix.
Whitta is credited as being responsible for the “Original Concept” in Forspoken. According to Whitta, once the story of Forspoken got rebooted, he was no longer able to work on it.
“I did some very very early foundational world building lore stuff on Forspoken,” he said. “I never wrote an actual line of dialogue.
“What happened was Square came to me five or six years ago and said ‘we have an idea but it’s just a germ of an idea, would you be willing to help us build out the world and the mythology and the story?’.
“And I went away and came up with some ideas for them and presented them, they liked them and they said ‘would you run a writer’s room to really build it out?’.
Whitta states that Square Enix revealed its new plans for Forspoken after he and his teamed worked on conceptualising various aspects of the open-world game, such as how its magic would work. According to Whitta, the name of Forspoken‘s setting—Athia—was conceptualised then.
“Some months after that they came back to me and one of the other writers and said ‘we’re going to start over to completely reboot the story, we want it to be this now’,” he continued.
“The version that we did was nothing like that,” said Whitta.
Forspoken was released earlier this year on PC and PS5, and was the first major video game release of the year. For more details on the open-world RPG, check out our review.
