{"id":50753,"date":"2020-09-17T06:00:22","date_gmt":"2020-09-17T10:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=50753"},"modified":"2020-09-17T09:44:19","modified_gmt":"2020-09-17T13:44:19","slug":"jedi-fallen-order-part-6-zeffo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=50753","title":{"rendered":"Jedi Fallen Order Part 6: Zeffo"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our adventure brings us to Zeffo, which is a planet and not a lost member of the Marx Brothers<\/a>. 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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<\/i> with this galaxy-changing data, we would currently have the thing we’re after and we’d be totally safe from the Empire.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We’re Just Here for the Vids<\/h3>\n

The location title is false advertising. This place isn't abandoned. It's wall-to-wall with stormtroopers. I'm never trusting you again, location titles!<\/div>
The location title is false advertising. This place isn't abandoned. It's wall-to-wall with stormtroopers. I'm never trusting you again, location titles!<\/div><\/p>\n

Like in Raiders of the Lost Ark<\/i>, 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<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It’s a long trip!<\/p>\n

Jedi Master Tom Braider<\/h3>\n

Relax dude. It's just another TikTok from Cordova. There's no rush.<\/div>
Relax dude. It's just another TikTok from Cordova. There's no rush.<\/div><\/p>\n

In the tomb we find a bunch of puzzles where we have to use powerful windsEveryone knows how windy it is underground.<\/span> to push enormous metal spheresLarge metal objects are notorious for the way they get tossed around by the wind.<\/span> around to get them into little depressions that act like switchesApparently the Zeffo never discovered the classic block-and-pressure-plate puzzle technology.<\/span>. 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\u00a0 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<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

Ok, I have to raise this platform so I can reach the wall where I can pull a switch to release a ball that will press a button to change the direction of the wind so... Uh. What the heck am I trying to do again?<\/div>
Ok, I have to raise this platform so I can reach the wall where I can pull a switch to release a ball that will press a button to change the direction of the wind so... Uh. What the heck am I trying to do again?<\/div><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

I don’t know. Maybe Cordova is smarter than CalContext: This is a very low bar.<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n

I’m poking fun at the game, but really this is all fine.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Well, it’s all fine except for the…<\/p>\n

How Did YOU Get Here?<\/h3>\n

Those two guys on the right are on top of a stone pillar. To get there, you need to jump over a bottomless pit and climb up the face. Cal can barely pull it off using his Jedi abilities, but the guy on the right pulled it off while holding an enormous rocket launcher. For no reason.<\/div>
Those two guys on the right are on top of a stone pillar. To get there, you need to jump over a bottomless pit and climb up the face. Cal can barely pull it off using his Jedi abilities, but the guy on the right pulled it off while holding an enormous rocket launcher. For no reason.<\/div><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But I also have two gripes with the level designer. One is sort of frivolous, and the other is serious.<\/p>\n

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?! (<\/i>Sometimes the designer puts a little cosmetic door nearby to answer the “How?”, but sometimes they forget.)<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“How’d you get here?” she asks.<\/p>\n

“How did YOU get here?” Cal fires back.<\/p>\n

I imagine this is the game designer winking at us, saying, “Yeah, try not to overthink it.”<\/p>\n

I appreciate the gesture sir \/ ma’am, but overthinking things is my job<\/a>.\u00a0I 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<\/a> and thoughtless.<\/p>\n

That’s my trivial gripe. Now the more serious one…<\/p>\n

The Rat Maze<\/h3>\n

We FINALLY reach the top of this eternal elevator ride, and Cal looks just as bored as I am.<\/div>
We FINALLY reach the top of this eternal elevator ride, and Cal looks just as bored as I am.<\/div><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On the left is the agonizingly slow one-way elevator we just rode. So obviously we slide down the ice chute ahead, right? HA HA! Gotcha! You just slid back down into the previous chamber! Have fun repeating all that platforming and riding the elevator again! (Off to the right is a smaller door. That's the one you need.)<\/div>
On the left is the agonizingly slow one-way elevator we just rode. So obviously we slide down the ice chute ahead, right? HA HA! Gotcha! You just slid back down into the previous chamber! Have fun repeating all that platforming and riding the elevator again! (Off to the right is a smaller door. That's the one you need.)<\/div><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The layout of Zeffo is particularly egregious. At several points you run into inclines that:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Are SLOW moving elevators.<\/li>\n
  2. Are entirely ONE way. Once you arrive, you can’t go back. Which makes me wonder how anyone else navigates this place.<\/li>\n
  3. 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.<\/li>\n
  4. Sometimes take you back to where you were earlier.<\/li>\n
  5. 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.<\/li>\n
  6. 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.)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    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<\/b> 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<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    Here is the kind of scenario you’ll find yourself in…<\/p>\n

    Round and Round<\/h3>\n

    The yellow crates give out stim canisters. (Estus flasks.) These are really valuable. They're also a pain in the ass to get. The game loves to tantalize you with them, compelling you to look for the way in. But later you'll learn you're really waiting on some new tool that gets unlocked later in the story.<\/div>
    The yellow crates give out stim canisters. (Estus flasks.) These are really valuable. They're also a pain in the ass to get. The game loves to tantalize you with them, compelling you to look for the way in. But later you'll learn you're really waiting on some new tool that gets unlocked later in the story.<\/div><\/p>\n

    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<\/b> of the dungeon, then jump into the obstacle course leading all the way back to your ship<\/b>, 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<\/b> of the dungeon, then jump into the obstacle course leading all the way back to your ship<\/b>, AGAIN. You just blew twenty minutes trying to get one chest and you’ve got nothing to show for it.<\/p>\n

    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. <\/p>\n

    This is the map that's supposed to guide you through this rat maze. It doesn't entirely fit on screen and we're only looking at the top layer, but you get the idea.<\/div>
    This is the map that's supposed to guide you through this rat maze. It doesn't entirely fit on screen and we're only looking at the top layer, but you get the idea.<\/div><\/p>\n

    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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    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.<\/span>. This game hits hard when you make mistakes, so passing on secrets can really hurt you in the late game.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    I appreciate that maybe the designers were trying something new, but this design sucks<\/b>. I have never hated searching for collectibles so much. What a stressful, time-wasting chore.<\/p>\n

    We’re almost done with Zeffo. Next time we’re moving on to the next planet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[612],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-retrospectives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50753"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50771,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50753\/revisions\/50771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}