T w e n t y S i d e d
Our adventure brings us to Zeffo, which is a planet and not a lost member of the Marx Brothers. This is the homeworld of the now-extinct Zeffo civilization. We’re here to explore the local tomb so that the droid – which we brought with us – will show us the next holo-vlog from the late Jedi Master Eno Cordova. This is a very roundabout way of doing things, which becomes even more roundabout when we realize the Empire is here, digging for Jedi treasure or artifacts or whatever.
The only real risk in our plan is having this droid fall into the hands of the empire. And now we’re dragging the droid with us into an Imperial outpost. If Cordova hadn’t been so cute and decided to play Ready Player One with this galaxy-changing data, we would currently have the thing we’re after and we’d be totally safe from the Empire.
I know it’s basically the mission statement of the Republic-era Jedi to create more problems than they solve, but I still roll my eyes when Cere feels the need to remind us what a brilliant guy he was.
We’re Just Here for the Vids
Like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, our lone hero is fighting against a large and well-organized force. Unlike Raiders, this isn’t a typical race for treasure. Specifically, we’re not directly competing with the Empire. They’re looking for artifacts in general, without a single prize in mind. Meanwhile, we’re here just to reach the vault or whatever so BD-1 will play the next video. Like, the thing we’re after is something we brought with us.
There’s a brief conversation just before we leave the ship. Cere says that our communications are down due to the storm. (This place occupies the eye of a continuous continent-sized hurricane.) So I figured the game was finally cutting us lose from our tutorial buddy and sending us off to explore the place alone. But then less than two minutes in, Cere calls you up to say she’s got comms working again. So… whatever? I’m not sure why the writer created a two-minute communications blackout at the start of this two-hour puzzle dungeon. The whole thing is sort of pointless, so I’m not sure why they spent the dialog to create and resolve a problem that is ultimately so pointless. It’s not harmful, it’s just a bit of a head-scratcher.
Our path takes us across a large landing platform, through a short cave, around an abandoned village, through some more caves, up the side of a mountain, over some Imperial infrastructure, through an Imperial outpost, down through a series of ice caves, across a ruined temple, into a different cave system, through an imperial dig site, down an obnoxiously long but still-functional Zeffo freight elevator, and into a tomb.
It’s a long trip!
Jedi Master Tom Braider
In the tomb we find a bunch of puzzles where we have to use powerful windsEveryone knows how windy it is underground. to push enormous metal spheresLarge metal objects are notorious for the way they get tossed around by the wind. around to get them into little depressions that act like switchesApparently the Zeffo never discovered the classic block-and-pressure-plate puzzle technology.. This sequence really caught me off guard. On the previous planet, the puzzles were ultra-tame things like “Jump to the left so you can push a button to open a door on the right and solve the puzzle.” I assumed the entire game was going to be a series of Last of Us style puzzles where it’s less about making an intellectual challenge and more about making room for dialog and giving the player a breather from the sound and fury of combat.
I was wrong. This is a real puzzle. It has numerous moving parts spanning several rooms, and solving it means navigating a fully 3D space, including a great deal of vertical movement. It’s probably not that complicated to an outside observer, but when you’re running around inside the tomb it takes a bit of time to just get the whole thing into your head so you know what the options are and how to navigate the space as it changes shape. The Tomb Raider games usually take a few hours before the puzzles ramp up to this level of complexity, but SWJFO expects you to solve this right out of the gate.
And you know what? It was fine. It’s actually nice that the designer didn’t feel the need to waste one of our big puzzle rooms on a baby-mode introduction.
I will say that it strains credulity when the game suggests that we’re following in the footsteps of Eno Cordova. These puzzles are destructive by nature. You need to fling several metal balls through stone walls, shattering them in the process. Did Cordova rebuild the walls when he left?
I don’t know. Maybe Cordova is smarter than CalContext: This is a very low bar. and figured out how to solve the tomb without bashing holes in everything. And maybe he’s also a huge dick for resetting the entire puzzle before he left. I wouldn’t put it past him.
I’m poking fun at the game, but really this is all fine.
Well, it’s all fine except for the…
How Did YOU Get Here?
Earlier in the series I praised SWJFO for the way the gameplay and art teams were able to work together so that the camera regularly ends up in a position for a beautifully-framed shot that conveys a sense of scale, wonder, or trepidation. The game doesn’t even need to give you one of those “Hold the X button to see the cool view we created for you.” It just happens organically. It’s brilliant.
But I also have two gripes with the level designer. One is sort of frivolous, and the other is serious.
The frivolous one: Sometimes this game creates moments of “Hang on, how did YOU get here? And WHY?” You’ll climb up the side of a mountain, through a pipe full of smashy machinery that only a Jedi could navigate, blast open a stone wall with the force, and find yourself on a metal platform where a couple of stormtroopers are hanging out. How did these clowns get here and what are they supposed to be guarding?! (Sometimes the designer puts a little cosmetic door nearby to answer the “How?”, but sometimes they forget.)
I think the designer recognized this. During the tutorial, we run into a situation where Cal parkours his way onto some impossibly remote platform. As he lands, there’s somehow a fellow scrapper working nearby.
“How’d you get here?” she asks.
“How did YOU get here?” Cal fires back.
I imagine this is the game designer winking at us, saying, “Yeah, try not to overthink it.”
I appreciate the gesture sir / ma’am, but overthinking things is my job. I know the audience needs to be willing to allow for some willing suspension of disbelief, but that’s two-way street. Sure, the audience is willing to go along with space wizards, laser swords, and Bigfoot with a Crossbow fighting space Nazis. But that doesn’t mean they’re willing to accept ANYTHING. Teleporting stormtroopers aren’t part of this setting. These trooper platforms feel too videogame-y and thoughtless.
That’s my trivial gripe. Now the more serious one…
The Rat Maze
Some of the environments in this game are a complete pain in the ass to navigate and explore. Levels are filled with surprise one-way doors, time-wasting elevators, loading screens masked behind “character crawls through narrow space” animations, and needlessly convoluted 3D paths that overlap in the map view without connecting spatially, making it really hard to figure out where you’re going and how to get there.
You’ll get to a T intersection and think, “Ah, this narrow opening is obviously a side-tunnel. I’ll bet it leads to a secret!” But then you go there, drop down, and realize there’s no way to climb back up. Was that other path a secret? Maybe you’ll find out in a couple hours on your way out.
You know how Skyrim dungeons did the thing where you’d reach the final room and find a secret door that led back to the entrance so you didn’t have to go back through the entire now-empty dungeon to leave? It was pretty contrived, but saved the player from a lot of annoying backtracking. Well, SWJFO has the opposite of that. You’ll spend a few minutes navigating a series of platforms. At the end you’ll come to a fork in the road. Ahead of you – the most obvious direction of progress – is a one-way slide down a slippery hill, returning you to where you started. It’s just as nonsensical, but now the nonsense is a hindrance to the player rather than a convenience to save them time. The whole thing is this obnoxious game of Chutes and Ladders.
It’s important to note that there is no fast-travel in this game. You visit the planets multiple times, and every time you parkour across Zeffo you have to hike all the way back to your ship to leave again. And if you jump off the path looking for secrets, you can wind up getting dumped back where you were five minutes ago.
The layout of Zeffo is particularly egregious. At several points you run into inclines that:
- Are SLOW moving elevators.
- Are entirely ONE way. Once you arrive, you can’t go back. Which makes me wonder how anyone else navigates this place.
- Offer blind travel because you can’t see if the incline is going where you want to go until after you’ve taken the ride for the first time.
- Sometimes take you back to where you were earlier.
- Don’t offer an interesting view. The tiny windows face a stone wall, so you can’t look out and see anything useful during the ride.
- Did I mention they’re slow? We have all of these traversal mechanics for navigating the world, so why are we locking the player in a box instead of letting them do this trip in gameplay? It’s not like these things are loading screens. (You don’t need a loading screen on your way down via parkour, so it’s not clear why you’d need a loading screen on the way up.)
Once you’re done with the Zeffo tomb, you have to navigate all the way back to the surface, then go back down to a central hub controlled by the Empire, then ride an elevator up to the surface again, then back down to the hub area again but this time on the opposite side, then up to the surface a short distance from your ship. The path is so ridiculously convoluted for no reason, and the map is blank until you’ve committed yourself to a particular path so it’s easy to end up trapped in a path that goes the wrong way. And even once the map is filled in, it’s hard to read because of the overlapping levels. I haven’t seen maps this incomprehensible since Descent.
Even worse: Quite a few rooms / elevators look similar, further increasing the chances that you’ll make a mistake and lose a bunch of progress.
Here is the kind of scenario you’ll find yourself in…
Round and Round
You get off your ship. You’re here to grab that one collectible chest you saw on your previous visit. So you enter the one-way door into this planet’s obstacle course. A few jumps in, you realize that you’ve passed the opportunity to go for the chest. It’s on the other side of a chasm in front of you, but the route to reach it was back a few platforms and you can’t climb back up. So now you need to go all the way to the end of the dungeon, then jump into the obstacle course leading all the way back to your ship, then enter the first obstacle course again, but this time making sure not to overshoot. You follow the side-path, reach the chest, and discover you haven’t yet unlocked the geegaw needed to open this particular chest. But it’s not over yet! Now you want to leave, which means getting back on the main path, go all the way to the end of the dungeon, then jump into the obstacle course leading all the way back to your ship, AGAIN. You just blew twenty minutes trying to get one chest and you’ve got nothing to show for it.
You can mitigate this if you’re willing to constantly stop, open up the map, scroll and rotate it around until you find a useful angle to see through all the extra clutter and get your bearings, then study it to see where the doors will take you. Just do that EVERY TIME you come to a junction. That will save you from destroying you progress with a bad turn, but this is clearly a case of choosing the lesser of two evils. It’s a flow-breaking pain in the ass either way.
Also, the game auto-saves constantly, so if you realize you’ve accidentally signed up for the world tour obstacle course again, you can’t just reset the game to get back to your ship.
The idea of an open-world with secrets and collectible items is completely at odds with the idea of a maze full of one-way doors and blind choices. Yes, you can ignore collectibles if you want. However, secrets are the only way you can unlock additional health stimsAgain, Star Wars branded Estus flasks.. This game hits hard when you make mistakes, so passing on secrets can really hurt you in the late game.
I appreciate that maybe the designers were trying something new, but this design sucks. I have never hated searching for collectibles so much. What a stressful, time-wasting chore.
We’re almost done with Zeffo. Next time we’re moving on to the next planet.
Footnotes:
[1] Everyone knows how windy it is underground.
[2] Large metal objects are notorious for the way they get tossed around by the wind.
[3] Apparently the Zeffo never discovered the classic block-and-pressure-plate puzzle technology.
[4] Context: This is a very low bar.
[5] Again, Star Wars branded Estus flasks.
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Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
I vaguely remember Jedi Knight having 3D rotatable maps. And it was big on puzzles too. Maybe the Fallen Order looked at that for inspiration, among other games.
This is interesting to me, because I found it reasonably easy to navigate around using the map–for actual objectives, anyway.
I think it didn’t bother me because I realized that the collectibles (aside from the very few stim chests) were just cosmetic trash so if I wasted time trying to get them I had no one to blame but myself.
That and I’m used to games just giving you an unreadable 2D map, slapping you on the butt, and saying “off you go!” so just having the 3D map was such a shocking improvement I didn’t feel I could complain.
They fly now.
They fly now?
They FLY. Now…
They mostly come at night…mostly.
This part reminded me of the time an alpinist tried to climb a never-been-climbed summit and people helicoptered a gift shop there to screw with him.
While I too would’ve liked fast travel, I actually did not mind to traverse the levels that much. Dunno why, especially since I was collecting everything. Most of the time it was annyoing having to take the scenic route, but there were some instances where an apparent see-saw could be traversed backwards like the strange water wheel at the start of abandoned vilage.
The answer is rocket jump, obviously. When the first guy lands on the pillar, he throws the launcher back to his buddy, who follows him the same way.
I would pay good money for a game where AI enemies nonchalantly rocket-jump to navigate the map.
Especially this game, where the best way to kill them is to force-toss their rockets back at them XD
The second guy doesn’t have the certificate to use the rocket launcher. So the first guy just has to shoot a rocket at the other guys’ feet.
It seems like the whole “go to this place so the droid plays a video that’s already stored in it” contrivance would be easy to fix by having the videos be physically located in those places, with the droid only having the decryption keys stored to be able to play them back. It would still be contrived but at least now you wouldn’t be carrying the information right into where the empire could steal it..
I mean, the empire can still steal something valuable; It’s just not everything[1] all at once. It’s an improvement, but it could be even better. There’s real-world mathematics, that would justify a scavenger hunt in a video-game, and are simple enough to explain in a short YouTube video. You break up your secret plans into several different pieces, and make it so you need P pieces out of T total pieces, to unlock the secret plans. You could even do it so that there’s different levels of secrets, like: you need 3 out of 50 Secret Jedi Info Cubes, to get the basic info out of the plan, 10 of 50 for the next level, 20, and so on. Maybe 40 of 50 is all that’s needed to complete the game, and 50 out of 50 unlocks some bonus character art for the player.
[1] Albeit encrypted.
That’s actually a genius way of justifying “you need any X of the Y total pieces to unlock this door”
I don’t think I can ever play this game. It sounds maddening. I really struggle to tolerate games with levels that are supposed to be places where people live or work (or lived or worked, as the case may be) but are in fact ridiculous obstacle courses such that no reasonable person would ever want to live or work there. I can stand it all right if the game’s presentation is cartoonish enough (e.g., Mark of the Ninja’s maze-like office buildings and castles) but the closer the game comes to photo-realism or the more seriously the game takes itself (e.g., Arkham Origin’s, uh, everything) the more I end up grinding my teeth. I especially hate games of the latter type where there are enemies in places where enemies could not reasonably get to.
Exactly!! I wanted to immerse myself in the Star Wars universe but instead this is all just a big Sonic the Hedgehog level, custom made for your abilities, with a Star Wars skin on it.
Yeah, I think this game would have been better as a cartoony-looking game. That does however, conflict with the popular notions that videogames are for babies, and that cartoons are for babies. The first is already an impediment for bringing people who’ve only seen the new shiny movies, and the second could put off both people who like the movies and people who like other Star Wars games.
I don’t necessarily demand literal, actual cartoonishness. What I really need in order to tolerate nonsense spaces is for the game to indicate to me through its tone that I am not supposed to take the nonsense spaces literally or especially seriously–and there are a lot of ways to do that. In principle it could be something as simple as clearly and deliberately pushing play to the foreground and narrative to the background, though I’d expect a good game to complement that with other aspects of the design as well.
I don’t think photorealism works well with game-y gameplay, though. It’d be like watching a movie where it’s got the budget of of Terminator 2, the technical accuracy and sci-fi plausibility of Gattaca, and the humor of Dude Where’s My Car.
Let’s not confuse photo-realism with naturalism. Live-action movies are, by construction, photo-realistic but a good live-action film can still be surreal or full of improbable things. A good film can use cues like color, lighting, dialogue style, and more to get the audience to accept that the rules or internal logic of the film’s universe are not necessarily the same as those of the real universe. I don’t see why games can’t do something similar.
Guys, the game’s levels are a bit too.. videogame-y, but it’s not THAT bad. See for yourselves.
I don’t know why, but I feel the need to defend this game. I think Shamus is being a little too harsh on it. Then again, I though the same about some parts of his Mass Effect retrospective, so I shouldn’t be surprised, I guess. Nitpickery indeed.
He’s right about the annoying rat maze though. Having to go through the entire level all over again, full of enemies, in high difficulty, just because I missed some collectables is a PITA.
I’m sure you mean well, but there’s no way that I’ll ever be able to bring myself to watch a full hour and twenty minutes of a Youtube video about a game that I don’t especially want to play in the first place. I managed about six minutes before giving up, and I’m afraid that all I saw was Cal running back and forth and top speed while getting nowhere and accomplishing nothing.
It’s the worst I’ve seen in a game I’ve played these last couple of years.
The whole point of including the “realism” part of that phrase, is to indicate it’s aiming for a real-world, non-fanciful depiction. Dirty Harry is realistic; Dredd is a cartoon shot through a camera.
And yet it works fine for games like Bayonetta and Devil May Cry, who take themselves just seriously enough while still maintaining all the wonderful charm of not taking themselves entirely seriously.
Then again, I’ve read plenty of feedback Japanese have of Western media that we come off as stoic and drab, whereas a lot of Western players or viewers will complain about “tonal whiplash” in Japanese anime, live-action, or video games. Yakuza is another great example of a game series with a lot of super dramatic moments, and yet splashed about with crazy absurdity and the willingness to laugh at itself.
I suppose it comes down to an individual’s suspension of disbelief. I’m willing to buy into the video game’s video gameyness no matter the realism (and in fact welcome it because I’m playing a video game because it’s a video game, not because I want a simulation of a reality that I’m seeking to escape or is designed pragmatically rather than mechanically). So this sort of discussion/debate is one that feels unusual to me altogether.
So much this. Ultimately, I feel like they should have had a more experienced level design director take one more pass over the game and force them to iron out the issues. In addition to all of these gripes, I felt like they had never heard of signposting (using lights or colors to make the intended path more obvious). I would constantly get onto a visually busy platform and wind up having to open the map to figure out that there was only one way to move forward, even though it blended it completely to the rest of the scenery.
By the time I was out of the tombs and you find yourself fighting those random storm troopers on the pillars, I was so done with Zeffo.
It was right at the end, but any videogame level that makes you feel “I never want to come back here again” has gone wrong somewhere. And especially in a game where they gate you off secrets and expect you to come back.
I’m finally playing this game and I just finished the main path on Zeffo (still have a bunch of stuff here, but it’s clearly unaccessible until I get some other skills), and I agree with both these criticisms. In fact, just while parkouring through some underground caves I literally thought “Do stormtroopers have to do this shit themselves every time they want to get here?”. Because sure, the game handwaves a few of these characters by having dropships flying away when you get in, but in other areas (particularly underground ones) their presence makes no sense, especially considering they’re there to hunt for artifacts and not to fight you.
That being said, one thing you said made no sense to me:
The hell are you talking about? Oh, sure, the game will autosave collectibles and map areas you’ve visited, but your location is only saved by using the meditation circles, which requires your input. One death and you’re back. Am I missing something here?
Interesting. I didn’t know that the save system would let you keep your goodies through a death warp. I was always a little unclear on what exactly got saved. For example, I had a few crashes, and when I re-launched the game it would send me back to the most recent meditation circle, NOT the most recent auto-save. Like, you sometimes get the little spinning save icon, but that’s not a “real” save, or it’s a different kind of save than the one you get at circles. So checkpoints are some sort of soft saves that vanish when the game closes.
I guess if you’re good enough to make it all the way to the thing you want without needing to refill your health, then you can just skip the circles and deathwarp back to the ship. But if you’re a new-ish player then you’re going to be taking some hits. The idea of “don’t use meditation circles because you might go the wrong way and want to reset” is… not a comforting workaround, particularly for someone of my skill level.
Although if I go back to the game (and I forget how useless the collectibles are and decide to collect them again) I’ll use this trick.
That just sounds needlessly confusing, to have the auto-saves and the manual-saves save different amounts of information, invisibly. :|
It’s the Dark Souls system, DS saves… basically all the time: kill an enemy-save, pick an item up-save, use a consumable-save. However if you die or leave the game you get to respawn at fireplaces which act as “checkpoints”. What the game does is it remembers your character state (like: how many items you had, how many enemies you’ve killed etc.). Not triggering certain checkpoints for an easy return to a previous one through game reset or death also has a long tradition with this system, although obviously not on first exploring an area.
Soulsian tradition. Player state, inventory, some types of slain enemies, and pretty much every conceivable thing that isn’t your exact location is saved. The reason for this discrepancy is to allow for partial successes like picking up something important, or killing something that won’t respawn without succeeding fully by getting to the next checkpoint. Hell the most common thing is just managing to pick up your currency pile every time you die in a hard area until it builds to a character level or expensive shop item.
The savvy will gleefully exploit this by suicide rushing extremely important things way before you’d reasonably be able to get them safely. It makes wonderful sense in a setup where everything is depressingly horrible, and death is an expected step on the path to your goal…. Sadly makes less sense here, but that’s what happens when mechanics are lifted from the fluff that supported them.
Not a recommendation to try anything. Just contextualizing.
That makes sense for Dark Souls, since it’s A much more heavily in the “fantasy” side of the spectrum, and B notorious for difficulty and being obtuse. But this is regular old Star Wars, with a more light-hearted story, and a photorealistic-ish world. Arguably, the “Dark Souls” way is the same as old games like Mega Man or Mario, where you could pick up 1-ups or other items and still have them in your inventory after you fall to your death in a pit. But those are cartoony games, where you can more easily hand-wave stuff, or pretend that your character climbed back up out of the pit after a lucky grab and much arm-strain. :)
Actually not as cartoony as you’d think. People dying, and getting back up is a thing in universe. It’s not the standard go back in time to before the fuckup most deaths assume. The beings are bound to the relevant checkpoint of the game, and when killed will disappear, before reappearing alive at one.
Most enemies respawn, because again contrary to most games you are not in any real way chosen or a special even if some NPCs tell you you are. Countless have been in your position, and if you aren’t the one to succeed that’s fine. There’s more where you came from. There always will be.
That level of disempowerment is one of exactly two elements that brought together the general feeling of the series, and those that ape its atmosphere well. The other is giving the player hints, inferences, and suggestive language instead of facts, such that players have to piece things together like an anthropologist.
And yes, this game is only even remotely soulsian on a gameplay level. It’s got similar combat, and similar framework even if it is an experiment in making those things easier to attract a different market instead of directly competing.
To clarify I’m not looking down on that decision. When aping something you NEED something differentiating to point to so that people won’t just ignore your offering.
I was referring to Megaman and Mario as cartoony, not Dark souls.
You used them in the same comparison likening one set to the other. You may have meant to contrast, but you compared.
Both the second to last picture’s caption and the final footnote make reference to estus flasks- the redundancy of the footnote is a bit jarring if you’re read the caption on that picture (with the parenthesis). I’d recommend tweaking one of them. “Again, Star Wars branded. . . ” for the footnote so it’s continuing momentum, or a more literal description in the caption “(refilable healing)” so the footnote stands alone.
Thanks for pointing that out.
If you’re curious: The two bits were written months apart so I didn’t notice the redundancy. I usually write the text weeks or months in advance, but the images get added a day or so before posting.
Anyway. Fixed. If you erase it from your memory and read it again, you’ll find the reading experience much improved.
Yup, that’ll happen. Brain cycled, looks good.
One thing that I did really like about the map was how it would specifically tell you when an area was unreachable due to not having the right ability yet. Then, once you did get that ability, the color would change to signify that could access that area. One of my gripes with older Metroidvania games was that there was no way to mark maps when you came across a spot you would have to come back to later. It always meant having to do tons of needless backtracking as you try to recall a hazy memory of where exactly that small passage you ran past 4 hours ago was now that you can get in with your new slide ability. And in a game like this with its ridiculous maps, of which Zeffo is by far the worst offender, taking out (more) needless backtracking is nice.
No it doesn’t make much sense that your auto-map would instinctively know what areas you can and can’t access, but I’m willing to overlook it for such a nice quality of life improvement.
Good mapping is a serious prerequisite. Automatically tracking stuff like that is practically a prerequisite these days- I actually did have some fun running through the spots I rembered seeing a need to backtrack through in Hollow Knight, but it’s kindof an exception. Blatant visuals combined with an ongoing mapping mechanic where you seek out, fill out, add certain auto markers, and your own markers. But in other games I just won’t bother for anything but the most obvious, don’t think I’ve ever gone for more. I don’t collect all the missile tanks or pieces of heart or anything- I’m there to clear dungeons, not turn over every rock.
I did get nearly all the things in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, but that’s because there was usually only one annoying one per level and it took me a long time to git gud so the extra health bars were important. Still got fed up with the last couple and gave up though.
Ah, I edit-repeated myself, the hubris!
I think the automatic part of the mapping actually works against games like this. I’ve played so many games where I think, “Wait, where am I? How did I get here?” Having manual map-markers like in Hollow Knight works well, since the player gets to feel more involved in the big, beautiful, creative world. See also, these videos on the subject of maps and the perils of auto-mapping features.
I mean, your map is generated by BD-1, and he’s under strict instructions of only giving access to the videos under certain criteria by another Jedi, so you can argue that it does make sense from an in-universe perspective. Cordova must have programmed BD-1 to recognize when a fellow Jedi can access certain areas.
Whatever the case, I agree it’s a fantastic feature that more games of this kind need. Other games do have it, but it’s rare. The Resident Evil 2 remake, for instance, marks special doors with a symbol, so when you get the appropriate key you know where it can be used. Also, when you get your hands on an area map, the rooms you haven’t visited are marked in a different color. While the latter has always been a feature ever since the first game, all locked doors would just have the same distinctive “closed” color, regardless of which key was needed for them.
It also tells you if you’ve revealed the entire map in the local area and if you’ve finished all the chests/secrets. With all the one way shenanigans Shamus describes I was very appreciative of the info the map provides, even if it doesn’t 100% make sense
It’s strange. I usually have woefully low tolerance for Metroidvania design because I hate the two staples of the genre. The whole “tantalizing you with something you may or may not have the tools to get” trope makes me constantly anxious I’m missing some clever application of something I have, and their focus on backtracking drives me up the wall. Despite this I quite liked Fallen Order’s level design and never found it to flow badly the way you describe, aside from sometimes accidentally taking a one way shortcut to the start. I think I thought of the repeat trips more like running through a distinct level again than backtracking through a Metroidvania. It was not neccesarily me going back to pick up chests, it was me passing through on the way to the next plot bit and getting a chest I missed the first time on the way. I suppose this is a structure that appeals more to people with low tolerance in regards to backtracking, especially those of us who don’t care about cosmetic unlocks (I tend to find the default design looks best almost every time) or collectibles with no gameplay impact. I wonder if I would have felt differently had there been more collectibles that actually impacted gameplay – if I’m not wrong it was just the “Estus Flask” upgrades and very occasional Force extensions, and neither type was usually well hidden.
Which, now that I think about it, may be part of why I bothered going back for things in Lords of Shadow as mentioned above. There “backtracking” is literally just playing the level again (NPCs and cutscenes all as they were), but with all your new upgrades in place. So you’re not fishing around, but rather came back to hit or scan for stuff with your specific new tool, and grabbing some upgrade currency while you’re there. And a lot of those levels I actually did really like going through again, run through this or that vista while this or that monster pops up and then thrashing it with new upgrades and game skills. Whereas in the Metroid Primes say, there is some satisfaction from learning the paths to get around and then executing that movement efficiently, but it’s always very clearly backtracking and rock hunting (I like the MPs right up until you hit the end and have to back track for 73 golden keys- which 3 avoided pretty well).
I would totally love a game that marries the way that side-paths and secrets are handled in Metroidvanias, and the linearity of Metal Slug games. All the clever uses of tools and gadgets, with none of the backtracking! :)
I wouldn’t say collectibles were completely useless. They do give out a bit of experience. Its not much by the end of the game, but its useful in the early parts. And they can be nice to finish off an almost completed xp bar and bank a skill point without having to worry about losing your xp to a death.
That said, it was really annoying to go through some roundabout side path only to get a codex entry on new poncho color for your trouble.
Coincidence? I think not!
How did they die out? Crushed by giant metal balls, clearly.
Typo patrol: Cal talk like caveman.
What wrong caveman talk? You culturally colonize language? No good! Hurt me. Hurt you. Insensitivity hurt all.
This would have been awesome. The rest of the cast are super-serious, but Cal talks like a caveman all the time and it’s never addressed by the others. You’d only need to re-record one voice actor’s lines to recreate a classic comedy trope.
Again I’m reminded of an old Tenchu game I played which had a ‘B-side’ audio selection: the dialogue in the cutscenes was replaced by the voice cast just messing around. Good fun, and it made the cutscenes actually enjoyable to watch in a game with an otherwise awful story.
This in turn makes me think of that infamous noodle ad in Final Fantasy XV; the product placement was so lame and so blatant that the English voice actors decided to record one take sarcastically, making it sound like all the characters were just condescendingly humoring one guy’s noodle obsession.
That take was the one that made it into the actual game.
Lol. Did the noodle company complain/revoke their sponsorship? I can see that happening, though it’d probably be counterproductive…
It’s Cup Noodle(s). Ironic delivery won’t hurt them. It’s probably more on brand.
…I kind of regret dropping FF15 before seeing that quest. It’s a fun time.
Makes me think of New Vegas’ low-intelligence dialogue, where you’d say things like “I is scientistic” and nobody bats an eye since they couldn’t afford to double the VA.
Yeah, this bugs me too. If a character was truly clever, would we need it explained to us? Especially if they’re not that smart. Who exactly are you trying to convince?
“…It’s like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”
The backtracking is what ruined the game for me. I don’t usually care that much, but it’s so boring. I mean, even the famously unfriendly Soulsborne games usually have a way to teleport between save points, and the ones that don’t, like The Surge 2, make a big point of establishing relatively fast shortcuts or presenting the act of getting from A to B as a challenge in and of itself. Backtracking in Fallen Order, in contrast, is neither challenging, nor fun. Maybe if Cal felt faster and more agile, it would have felt a bit better, I dunno. As it stands, the backtracking is a big part of why I’ve abandoned the game halfway through. That and the fact that 9 times out of 10 the rewards for exploration are even more boring than navigating the game world. Curiously, another game that shares both of those problems is Control, but that at least has a very player-friendly fast travel system.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a classic piece of screenwriting advice often brought up by Mark Rosewater (M:tG): No line is worth a scene, no scene is worth a film. The two-minute comms drop sounds like someone had a neat idea and decided to put it in even though it didn’t fit. Sure, it places some emphasis on that giant storm that seems to come up again later, but in general that exchange spent resources to make a scene worse. Definitely feels like they did want to cut off tutorial prompts for this area, then changed their minds after recording and decided to reuse the obsolete voice-over anyway. Very few people care about the road the production took to get to the final product, and even those people who do care won’t excuse a weak final product because of the production decisions that led there.
The more common context I’ve seen this mistake is in comedy songs. When the entire performance is a set of jokes, there’s typically at least one joke in there which the author obviously loved too much to cut even though it sticks out and diminishes the rest of the performance as a result.
That’s a great aphorism. Haven’t heard that one before. Glad he could express those great stand-alone lines in flavor text.
Zeffo? That’s an embarrassing name. They might as well have called it Hogarth or something. What kind of sick person names their planet Zeffo?
It occurs to me that BD-1 is like a reverse key. Like, normally you take a key to unlock an environment. But with BD-1, you are unlocking the key with the environment.
I don’t remember blind one-way doors being such a big deal in the old Star Wars. I haven’t watched the new trilogy though, so I’ll just have to assume they’re a series of blind irreversible decisions made in the hopes of justifying some cool scenery.
What, you think the giant, incredibly successful Disney corporation, with extensive experience in film production from the ground up and having direct experience in creating cinematic universes would just wildly flail around without a plan and throw money at visuals while wrecking their 2 billion dollar franchise purchase with obvious mistakes and poor leadership?
Because if so, you’re quite right. Good job for dodging that bullet.
The puzzles that can’t possibly be done twice because of their destructive nature, the random stormtroopers on hard to reach platforms doing nothing but waiting for you, the backtracking and map, the useless nature of 95% of the chests you need to work so hard to reach, these were all game breaking things for me. I really disliked this game but kept on going because Star Wars.
Thanks for expressing exactly why I felt the design of this game was weak. I just don’t understand why you liked the game anyway.
Obligatory TVTropes link.
Shamus when you write these long series, do you get some satisfaction when you see people talking about something in the comments and you’ve already written an in-depth piece on that and it’s coming down the pipeline?
Copied to the Mailbag.
Time-wasting elevators?
Flashback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23Wd0an-dgU
Unfortunately, while the elevator conversations in Mass Effect were interesting, they did not happen frequently enough. 50% of the time it was news items which you already heard 3000 times .
How unfortunate that they did not do something like that in fallen order. Did they at least feature elevator music?
If found this video with all the elevator conversations in Mass Effect: https://youtube.com/watch?t=1102&v=T-9KoIfPa7M !
Wouldn’t it be because Cal can barely use the Force anymore, and has to make use of the environment, while Cordova was in possession of all his faculties (or not, not sure how crazy he was)?
I really for the love of god couldn’t understand why zeffo caves imperial elevators are one way, in-universe
They’re one-way for you. Doesn’t mean they’re one-way for the Imperial troops who actually have security clearances and someone to operate the outside elevator controls for them and stuff.
Well, how do I access them to travel in one direction and why can’t I repeat that on the way back?
Because they were trying to hang a lampshade over the question of “if the Empire is already here and has a big established base and excavation set up, WHY didn’t they spot us FLYING IN AND LANDING?!” Answer, hurricane knocks out communications. But then you have to have your own communications be down and bring them back up again.
They rushed it, though, it would have been better if they’d given you a small initial activity where you have to set up a comms antenna booster or dig up a special resonance crystal that can ignore the interference or something. Since this is just an outpost of a minor dig site to the Empire it’d make sense why they hadn’t bothered to equip their own unimportant base with the fancy stuff and just left their clones to lump it when the weather was bad.
I give them props for noticing that they needed a lampshade there, though.
Or, there’s a straightforward and obvious way in that you can’t use because it’s crammed with more soldiers than you could ever conceivably fight, but Cordova used it when he was here the first time because the Empire wasn’t.
But if your team can get comms up – why couldn’t the Imperials? They have *dedicated comm and sensor techs* on hand. And better sensors. And more of them.
It doesn’t really make sense that they’d just let the stormtroopers suffer under this – this is an organized dig. Where someone felt the need to send troops out. There’s no way, if a single doohicky or digging up a space-rock would allow comms back that they wouldn’t have been doing it themselves.
Why couldn’t the Imperials? Why WOULD the Imperials?
1. They have ships in orbit that scanned you as you came in.
2. This isn’t a major dig to them, it’s a minor outpost doing a minor bit of digging on the offchance that something MIGHT be found. At this juncture they have no clue that there’s anything here that could be of significance to you or to them.
3. The Jedi are a non-threat at this time, as they’re scattered, broken, leaderless, and most of them are JUST DEAD.
Asking “why wouldn’t the Imperials get the coms working?” is a lot like asking “why don’t you break out the CB radio and start frantically calling the SOS every time you have an internet outage, or go out to the pole and start yanking on cables” I mean, what do you do when there’s an internet outage? Grumble and do something else for a while. That’s roughly the threat level the Imperial troops here are operating under at the start.
And they don’t give a crap about the clone troopers, otherwise they wouldn’t be letting all this dangerous wildlife run through the place and EAT them. If they don’t care enough about physical security and occupational safety to kick out the giant space toads, it’s ludicrous to think they’d be frantic at the thought of the comms being down for a few hours.
There’s no manual saving? Its all checkpoints? Single save slot? Why the *F* do console games insist on doing that – its already 2020. We stopped needing to do that like 20 years ago.
There’s manual saving but this game has an attitude similar to the 4th Ubisoft Prince of Persia game where they don’t want to set you back very far if you flub a jump. The autosaving is to make the platforming more forgiving.
Wait, does this game actually have manual saves? I saw it was doing a Souls-like thing and never even checked, because why the actual fuck would you put manual saves in a Souls-like? The auto-saving making your choices and failures permanent is like half of the whole point of playing a Souls-like in the first place!
I could be remembering wrong, but I thought it did. Wait, it does, it has those checkpoint circle things where you can save and reset your health and everything. They’re fairly frequent.
That doesn’t count as manual saving. Meditation Circles work like the bonfires in Dark Souls.
Manual saving would be like, pausing, going to the menu -> “save game” at any point in the game. It doesn’t have that. It would defeat the whole point of the game if it did.
FO has aspirations of being a DarkBorneKiro title, and those titles auto-save constantly to reinforce the idea that you’re in a world where your successes and failures have real consequence. And to be clear, when I say constantly, I don’t mean at regular checkpoints, it really is constantly. Like, every 30 seconds or so, as well as when you do absolutely anything of consequence (pick up an item, kill an enemy, enter a new area, die, etc.)
I actually really like this aspect of Souls-likes, because it makes your choices and struggles seem more real. Died and lost all your souls and humanity? Either march back there and get them back, or live with the loss – no reloading an old save to erase your failure. Killed an NPC to see if they drop anything good, or just for laughs, then realized “no, wait, I actually need something from them”? Tough shit, they’re dead for good, next time don’t be so bloodthirsty.
It doesn’t quite work so well in FO, though, because there aren’t any NPCs for you to kill, and the penalty for death is pretty tame – you just lose half of the XP you’ve built towards the next level. You can’t actually lose levels, though, and enemies respawn infinitely, so at worst death just means you have to grind a little more. And yeah, the death penalty in Souls games isn’t actually that much harsher, but humanity at least can be a pain to grind back up, since only a few enemies can drop it, and at fairly low rates at that. Not to mention that you lose all your souls in those games, and you can potentially save up enough to go up several levels at once.
Have you tried playing Outward? It has literally no save system. No, literally no saves. You can’t “die”, you just teleport somewhere and lose a bunch of progress.
It’s very weird, but it makes for an interesting game. Whatever’s happened, stays happened.
I like that aspect and the philosophy of the game in general. I don’t like how ugly and clunky the game is, though. Now that you’ve reminded me that I own it, I may revisit it and see if I can get into it in spite of that.
There have been some big updates, but yeah, it definitely has its own aesthetic that will not appeal to some people.
It’s in the co-op queue for me and my friend. We tested if the co-op works and it seemed bit janky but eh, jabbing sticks in your eyes is fun with friends so we’ll probably roll with it.
Not quite. Swee Jeffo doesn’t want to be exactly like “Dark Souls, but with Star Wars”, but rather “Baby’s First Dark Souls, but with Star Wars”.
It’s a lot more forgiving (or at least, less frustrating) than actual Dark Souls on purpose. I think that’s one of the reasons Shamus can actually enjoy this game while he just couldn’t get into Dark Souls proper.
That happens in mid west US every year. People aren’t even impressed anymore if they donnot wake up in Oz.
Objects with a high surface-area-to-volume ratio I could see getting blown around (like metal sheeting), but spheres are literally the shape with the lowest possible ratio of those two values. Unless they’re hollow spheres made out of some light metal like lithium or beryllium or something…
They are indeed hollow.
Can’t say anything about the material, though.
Weren’t there huge lighter-than-air spheres in Diamond Age?
The Neal Stephenson book? Yes, big diamond spheres full of vacuum – because the atmosphere is basically pushing inwards equally at all points around the sphere, the diamond lattice just has to be strong enough in compression to resist the crushing force, and then you would get a huge amount of buoyancy lift. Fill your Victorian-style hot-air balloon with thousands of them, so it’s not a catastrophe if a couple get crushed, and you get the retro-futuristic look that the Vickies go mad for.
At least Descent had that little robot that guided you to the exit of each level so you were never really lost even if you had no idea where you were.
I do not remember this feature in Descent, but then I’ve never made it past the boss at the end of the first chapter. (I don’t think that Descent was ever shareware, but it had a very shareware or Doom clone-like structure.) Perhaps it shows up later or in one of the sequels?
Watching Joseph Anderson climbing back up all the ‘one way’ slides in this game may have been the best past of it for me.
The game did a very poor job at presenting the 3D map in a way that made sense and wasn’t a complete pain in the ass. To some extent I had the same issue with some maps in 2016 Doom (like the forge/refinery or whatever)
Late comment is late.
I think the real downfall of Jedi: Fallen Order was implementing the Tomb Raider-esque amusement park rides in areas that then lack shortcuts back to the regular navigation areas. In fact, even the original Tomb Raider had the option to fast travel, as does Darksiders 3 and even the Soulsborne games.
What Bloodborne, at the very least, does excellently is design its maps in a “layered” or inter-connected fashion. There are a variety of locked doors and elevators that, once opened, allow you to navigate a level really quickly. In fact, you could probably run from zone-to-zone in just a few minutes once you’ve unlocked several of those doors. It makes any back-tracking really easy and also means there are some set pieces and difficult locations you may never even return to again.
Darksiders 3 isn’t quite so well designed since it also has the “You need this ability to access this location”, but those abilities also generate shortcuts themselves. So on top of including shortcuts and locked doors that can reduce the time spent wandering an environment, you also can use your abilities to reduce travel time. What’s more, in Darksiders 3 enemies only respawn after you die, so you can level-up or quick travel all you want and not have to worry about enemies respawning. My last playthrough, I made it a challenge to see if I could clear an entire map during a back-tracking run to collect items, and I almost managed to do just that. So if you’re playing on a lower difficulty than I was, it’s possible that you’ll be able to complete several zones without worrying about respawning enemies.
Both Bloodborne and Darksiders 3, however, lack the big amusement park rides that Jedi: Fallen Order relies on. What’s more, even Tomb Raider didn’t put collectibles at certain set pieces. Jedi: Fallen Order will place collectibles in the middle of these amusement park rides (I’m looking at one involving lots of mud-slides on Kashyyk in particular) and then not provide any shortcuts to those zones. So you’re lacking fast-travel, you respawn enemies at every meditation circle, you force players through amusement park rides, and then you fail to place shortcuts in locations as intelligently as the Soulsborne games you’re imitating.
I love the Metroid games and franchises that imitate them really well. But dang, Jedi: Fallen Order killed my interest in back-tracking and removed the satisfaction of returning to an old area with new abilities. Even Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, which had you flying to several different planets, included additional landing pads you could unlock so that you could choose where to land when back-tracking for collectibles.