Opinion: Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order Looks… Kinda Bland?

Finally Debuting at E3 2019, Fallen Order Looks Disappointing

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was officially unveiled during E3 this morning at EA Play. While there are bound to be plenty of observations taken away from the game based on its 15-minute, unedited gameplay segment, I have a few burning thoughts… Biggest one? The game looks disappointing.

Uncanny Valley

Right off the bat, Fallen Order’s E3 demo gave me pause with a series of what I can only describe as “janky” visual animations. From the moment the presenter took control of protagonist Cal Kestis and began navigating through an overgrown part of an imperial facility on Kashyyyk, Cal looked stiff, with robotic running patterns and sluggish parkour movement. Compared to a character like Nathan Drake with silky smooth animations, Cal looked encumbered and weighed down — which is surprising, given the fact that he can’t be more than 20 years old.

Fast forward a few minutes in, when Cal first unsheathes his lightsaber to light the way in a dark cavern. Again, we see awkward animations, from Cal rigidly holding his blade up as he walks forward, to him showing the same canned balancing animation that we’ve seen in every action game (Uncharted included) under the sun.

From there, Cal enters his first of several combat encounters. At 3:15 in the video above, we see stormtroopers crumple to the floor like ragdolls (something that might have been endearing back in the original Star Wars trilogy, but has long been scrapped as the series’ cinematography and SFX have steadily improved). At 3:55, stormtroopers run towards Cal at a head-scratchingly slow clip, as if they were pacing themselves for a 5K marathon.

These animation oddities may seem like small details individually, but in aggregate quickly amount to an immersion-breaking atmosphere. And that’s just within the first four minutes.

A Dynamic World… or Is It?

As Cal made his way further into the facility, I began to key in on another thing that constantly bugged me throughout the demo: the scripted feel of the world. At 3:48, right before the stormtroopers begin their leisurely jog, the soldiers are slow to react to Cal’s presence. Later, at 7:15, a stormtrooper stays perfectly still atop a perched piece of terrain; the second Cal enters the environment, a pair of spider-like enemies “suddenly” appear, causing the guard and his fellow troopers to start moving into action.

We’ve come so far in the realm of believable scenarios in games. Uncharted, despite its linearity, makes the player feel like they are part of a perfectly paced movie. Tomb Raider, likewise, gives a sense of life to its semi-open environments, with wildlife that act on its own and guards that patrol areas of their own accord. Fallen Order, in contrast, feels like we’ve taken a time machine back to the PlayStation 2 era, when a lack of dynamism was a result of limited hardware resources — and certainly not a lack of creativity. It’s disappointing to see, especially from the people that brought us such wonderfully fresh feeling worlds in Titanfall and Apex: Legends.

Seriously, Where Is the Urgency?

I alluded to it before with my observation at 3:55, but my biggest problem with Fallen Order has to be its general lack of movement. Star Wars is a fast-paced series, with gripping fights and awe-inspiring stunts. The demo for Fallen Order, meanwhile, looks like it’s being played at 0.5x speed. Take 5:46, for instance. As Cal creeps through a ventilation shaft, a nearby guard yells, “Flame beetles! They’re coming through the wall.” Cal then watches briefly as the fire-spewing insects creep towards the stormtroopers, who retaliate with equally slow bullets from their blasters and fire from their flamethrowers.

Later, at 10:43, a pair of stormtroopers stop shooting and drop their arms for some inexplicable reason — literally after one of them shouts “Don’t be his next target!” — only to pick back up where they left off a few seconds later. No reload animations. No logical rationale for two stoomtroopers, staring down a dangerous Jedi Padawan, to just stand there and look pretty. And yet, in Fallen Order’s E3 showcase, it feels frustratingly commonplace.

So What’s Good?

It might sound like I hate everything about the Fallen Order footage I saw today, but I don’t. An early cinematic, complete with Forest Whitaker’s Saw Gerrera, was fantastic, and gave me hope that Fallen Order might tell a satisfying story within the Star Wars universe (the fact that the story is official canon, per Vince Zampella, doesn’t hurt either). Additionally, the game’s combat — aside from looking on the slow side — seems like it plays quite well. Deflecting blaster shots (like at 3:18) looked appropriately weighty, while a duel with a staff-wielding stormtrooper (4:29) showed off an excellent-looking swordplay system reminiscent of the parries, dodges, and counterattacks found in March’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. And while several of the games’ fights seemed a bit on the easy side (given the one-hit kill nature of most stormtrooper enemies), the final fight at 11:32 was nothing short of thrilling, requiring the presenter to fend off a strong group of troopers while finding the right opportunities to pick off weaker enemies in order to level the playing field.

At that moment, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order clicked for me. As Zampella stated after the demo, Respawn is trying to go for “thoughtful combat” in Fallen Order, rather than mindless battles. Quality over quantity, the age-old adage; it’s something I can certainly get behind, even though I feel like Fallen Order is only halfway there as of now. Some elements of the game, like bullet deflection and sword-on-sword combat, looked there, while others — vanilla stormtrooper take-downs, use of force powers, parkour — felt at odds with the arcade-y animations and brain-dead enemy AI.

Time Will Tell About Fallen Order

I still have plenty of hope for Fallen Order. November 15 is still a good five months away, and the demo very clearly states “Alpha Game Footage” at its onset. But today’s EA Play showcase for Fallen Order has left me feeling more skeptical than I ever anticipated, especially considering the pedigree of Respawn as a studio and its strong track-record of past titles. I’ll happily eat my words if I’m wrong, come November, but E3 serves as a stark reminder to all that — perhaps — it’s best not to let hype drive the news cycle for our favorite game franchises. Like Game of Thrones, or like anything else in pop culture, sometimes pragmatism is a virtue.

Thanks for reading! While you’re here, check out our pre-E3 predictions piece, as well as our E3 bingo card. Also, be sure to check back after E3 for our post-conference thoughts.