Forspoken’s concept writer has confirmed rumors that surfaced online after the game’s release.

They said that the game had been radically changed during development. Gary Whitta (Rogue One – A Star Wars Story) chatted about it with Alanah Pearce. He created the concept for Forspoken but didn’t write the dialogue or play the game, as essentially only the world name (Athia) was left over from his idea after Square Enix rebooted the narrative and changed the writers several times. It’s unbelievable!

“I never wrote an actual line of dialogue, but at the same time, I haven’t seen the finished game. I’ve not played Forspoken, so I honestly don’t know. I think I’m credited for the original concept or something like that. What happened was that Square came to me five or six years ago and said, ‘We have this idea, but it’s just a germ of an idea. Would you be willing to help us build out the world, mythology, and story?’. I went away and came up with some ideas for them and presented them. They liked them and said, ‘Would you run a writer’s room to build it out?’ I love writer’s rooms; it’s one of my favorite places to be. I get no more joy out of anything like being in a room with other talented writers and just chewing the fat and talking about the story. I’ve done a bunch of those.

I said I’d like to do a room, and I got to handpick many writers I admire from film and television and video games and literature, and we sat in a room in Los Angeles for a week with the executives from Square Enix. We pitched a bunch of ideas and came up with, like, here’s how magic would work, and here’s the history of the world. The one thing I know that I contributed to the game is the name of the world. Athia is something I came up with, and the world in the game is still called Athia, but that’s the only thing I know for sure of mine that’s in the game. Some months later, they returned to one of the other writers and me and said, ‘We’re going to start over to reboot the story completely; we want it to be this now.’ What they pitched us was very close to what they have now, about a girl from the real world that gets sucked into this fantasy world.

The version that we did was nothing like that. They said, ‘We want this girl from the real world to get sucked into this fantasy universe.’ The problem was, at that point, the other writer nor I was available anymore because we were too busy, and they wanted to want us to write the whole thing. We both knew the massive undertaking of writing an entire video game, so we said, ‘Look, best of luck with it. Use any of the stuff we gave you if it’s compatible with this new version, but we can’t go any further.’ Then I think Amy (Hennig) and Todd (Stashwick) came in after us and did some work, and then they left, and I think there was a bunch of other writers that wrote Forspoken,” Whitta said.

Square Enix gets an A for losing its head repeatedly…

Source: WCCFTech