'Forspoken' Players Are Frustrated With its PC Performance — How Can You Fix It?

The latest game from Square Enix, Forspoken, has launched to mixed reviews. Some critics are praising its unique story and fast-paced combat, while others find its dialogue to be off-putting and its characters lacking in substance. It’s a similar story for Forspoken’s PC performance, with players reporting a litany of technical issues, such as stuttering and frame rate drops. Thankfully, there are plenty of adjustments you can make to get Forspoken running as intended.

Forspoken hasn’t just been criticized for its PC performance – it’s also being called out for its PC requirements. At a minimum, you’ll need an AMD Ryzen 5 1600 or Intel Core i7-3770 along with an AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 and 16GB RAM. That’s a big ask for most gaming rigs, especially when you consider these are the minimum specs.

Even if you meet those requirements, you’re still not in the clear. Some players have reported frame rate dips despite running on a PC with an RTX 4090. Others have suffered from significant screen tearing, audio loss, lag, and other performance issues. If you’ve yet to buy the game, we’d recommend downloading the demo before springing for a purchase. This should give you a good idea as to how your PC can handle Forspoken and save you the headache of working around all these technical problems.

If you’ve already purchased Forspoken on PC and are noticing any of the above problems, all is not lost. There are a few different ways to try and enhance your performance (although, keep in mind results will vary from rig to rig). Here are a few things you can do to improve Forspoken’s PC performance.

• Update your drivers. If you’re lucky, this is the only thing holding back Forspoken from running as intended.
• Lower all your in-game settings. This one isn’t ideal, but if Forspoken isn’t running smoothly on your PC, you might want to try cranking down all your settings. The game doesn’t seem to be fully optimized yet, so even if you meet the minimum specs, you could be bumping up against the capabilities of your PC.

• Verify your Forspoken game on Steam. If you’re running through Valve’s popular launcher, right-click on the game in your library. Then, navigate to the "Properties" tab, then find the "Local Files" menu. From here, select "Verify Integrity." This will scan your game for any issues and could resolve your problems.

• Wait for an update. Every game launch has its issues – and it’s entirely possible Square Enix will release a patch that fixes many of these performance hiccups.

If none of the above works, consider reaching out to Square Enix through the official Forspoken website.

It’s clear that Forspoken isn’t off to the best of starts, but fans of open-world games should still find something to enjoy about the magical world of Athia. Our review gave the game a 4/5, praising its beautiful story and expansive world. And as Square Enix slowly releases updates, expect it to continue to improve.

Forspoken is now available for PlayStation, Xbox, and PC.