I've only played the demo, but it really sounds (and felt) like a game that would have benefited from someone forcing it to focus on its strengths.I continued to play Forspoken and finished it with a lot of optional content completed in about 70 hours. The game probably had some addictive and interesting properties to keep me interested for all that time.
I stand by everything I wrote about the story presentation, which is frankly quite bad. The good news is that the really slow sections with a lot of hand holding, weird camera angles and annoying loss of player control are concentrated in the first couple of hours of the game.
After a certain point, the main story is very much in the background, and free open world exploration turns out to be the obvious focus of the experience. And the open world exploration is pretty decent. Story content is almost non-existent in the open world, so the experience is perfect for having something to do with your hand and your unused brain power when you listen to podcasts. No annoying factory produced Ubi style characters and dialogue to be distracted by! What you do is using an ever expanding arsenal of magical abilities to parkour across the world, upgrading those abilities by performing actions in the world, beating combat encounters ranging from easy to somewhat challenging, solving puzzles, beating mini dungeons, beating bosses, and getting new gear as well as items to upgrade your gear with. For me, that experience was not less engaging than the one I had with Vampire Survivors or the Diablo IV beta. The game is much prettier to look at as well!
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