

In fact, the game doesn't seem to feature any ray-tracing until Frey arrives in Athia. The opening chapter shows NYC with snow in December, but the ground remains dry, presumably to avoid ray-tracing.

Doors inexplicably grow or shrink depending on how you look at them (reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland in all the wrong ways). If the sloppy opening - presenting Frey's entire backstory through documents on a table, with a judge handing down a community service sentence - doesn't turn you off immediately, the lack of consideration only gets worse from there. With publisher Square Enix already catching heat for producer Naoki Yoshida's defense of upcoming Final Fantasy XVI's scant diversity, Forspoken makes the nightmarish choice to start with its Black protagonist in court for her third felony. Put simply, Square Enix faces too many open-world competitors to get away with a poor showing like this.
