With the way thatForspokensold itself on dynamic magical combat and high-speed Magic Parkour, the final product had a lot to prove with the quality of traversal across its open-world. Interestingly, this parkour mechanic is somewhat similar to theAssassin’s Creedseries, especially when comparing it closely to the most recent title and its wide-open plains.
This comparison betweenForspokenandAssassin’s Creed Valhallagoes a step deeper than just seeing the ways that both games allow players to run around and skip over rocks and fences. The overall control given to the player across both titles is surprisingly similar, with traversal across large areas being easy as long as the protagonist can be wrangled in line long enough to actually start climbing mountains.
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Controlling Frey and Eivor’s Four Left Feet
One aspect of making a character that is able to quickly run across open plains and climb all over densely packed structures is the fact that increased speed leads to lowered control. This is made immediately apparent for bothForspokenandAssassin’s Creed Valhallathe very first time the player is given control ofprotagonist Freyand Eivor. As fast as either is able to rush across their respective open worlds, both can run into issue whenever they hit an errant rock that the game isn’t exactly ready for and sends the character careening off to one side or the other.
In the case ofForspoken’s Magic Parkour, the worst issues arise when Frey decides that instead of taking a quick grip of a nearby ledge and continuing her momentum forward, she instead does a flip into the air and redirects awkwardly. While Eivor doesn’t run into the exact same problem while out in the field, they can definitely take strange turns while climbing up and down a building or mountain, often finding a handhold that wasn’t obviously present. However, much of these comparisons are also ignoring the major differences that come when either character tries to travel the massive distances from one point of interest to another.
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Eivor’s Mounts Vs Frey’s Rapid Running
Another similarity between the design ofForspokenandAssassin’s Creed Valhallais the way that much of these two open worlds have been built with large, open plains to travel across. While both of these worlds might seem similar on the surface, the ways that the characters travel over them at top speed are vastly different. In this specific case, Frey’s clunky parkour does manage to beat out some ofEivor’s most epic mountsthanks to the ease of transitioning between modes of travel and overall control at top speed.
Eivor’s mounts don’t really bring anything new to theopen world genre, with very basic horse controls and the ability automatically follow along roads. In this case, the best thing thatAssassin’s Creed Valhallabrings to the table is the ability to passively travel along the long roads throughout England and Norway, as long as Eivor isn’t ambushed by random enemies on the way. However, this is all encumbered by animal controls that don’t allow mounts to quickly turn like a human character and the need to summon and wait for the mount to approach.
In comparison, the Magic Parkour Frey gets access to afterChapter 2 ofForspokencan be activated at the push of a button, and is perfectly suited for traveling at high speeds across open fields. The problems again come when trying to maintain control as the terrain becomes less smooth and Frey takes every opportunity to jump around kill her own momentum. Altogether, there are naturally differences between the two games, but they both share much of the high-speed fun and minute frustrations present in most modern attempts at letting players freely traverse over mountains and buildings.
Forspokenis available now for PC and PS5.
