Forspoken Concept Writer Gary Whitta Reveals That Square Enix Completely Rebooted the Story from His Pitch

Shortly after its release, rumors that Forspoken had received significant changes throughout its development started circulating on the Web. The rumors may have been indirectly validated by the statements renowned writer Gary Whitta (Star Wars: A Rogue One) made in a recent video interview with Alanah Pearce. When Pearce asked Whitta whether he wrote any of the game’s dialogues, he said he didn’t. Whitta didn’t play the game, but as far as he understands, only the name of the world (Athia) remains from his pitch after Square Enix decided to completely reboot the narrative and changed the writers a couple of times. Here’s the full story relayed by Whitta.

I don’t think so. I mean, 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 and the mythology and the story?’. I went away and came up with some ideas for them and presented them. They liked them and they said ‘Would you run a writer’s room to really 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 really talented writers and just like chewing the fat and talking about story. I’ve done a bunch of those.

[…] It’s really fun and that’s kind of what we did with what eventually became Forspoken. I said I’d like to do a room and I got to handpick a bunch of writers that 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, that kind of stuff. The one thing that 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 literally the only thing I know for sure of mine that’s in the game. What happened was some months after that they came back to me and one of the other writers and said ‘We’re going to start over to completely reboot the story; we want it to be this now’. What they pitched us was something that’s very close to what they actually have now, which is 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 neither me nor the other writer were available anymore because we were too busy and they wanted to want us to write the whole thing. We both knew what a huge undertaking is to write a whole video game, so we said ‘Look, best of luck with it, obviously use any of the stuff that 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 actually wrote Forspoken.

The developers from Luminous Productions promised to improve the game through post-launch updates after gathering the community’s early feedback. Forspoken is scheduled to get a prequel DLC called In Tantas We Trust at some point in the Spring. Meanwhile, a new patch is out now.