I played through Star Wars: The Force Unleashed as part of this month’s Game Club (like a book club) over at Gamers With Jobs. I don’t have any real spoilers, since I spend my time mainly on mechanics, but just in case: Spoiler Warning: I describe one pretty climactic scene.
My own history with this game was that years ago I bounced off it on the Wii because I didn’t enjoy the waggle controls and knowing I was getting subpar graphics. This time around I played the Ultimate Sith Edition on the PC to make up for it. This game reviewed at release as pretty middling, and all these years later it still feels that way. This post is me trying to figure out why it felt so mediocre to me, and what I might have changed.
The biggest problem is the Quick Time Events (QTEs). After you’ve worn down a mini-boss or boss you’re able to trigger a QTE to finish them off. The point of these QTEs is to provide some sort of jaw-dropping cinematic action sequence. The effect they had one me was to mentally remove me from the immersion. The reasons are that while a QTE is happening:
- I lose all meaningful control over my character
- The actions (verbs) the character uses are ones that I don’t get to do.
- The verbs that I don’t get access to are the ones they are prominently displaying as the coolest part of the game. I want to do the coolest stuff myself!
- I miss most of the cinematic anyway because I end up staring intensely for the next button indicator
Given all these problems, it’s amazing that QTEs were such a design fad during this era at all. I’m glad they’ve gone away. These days we turn to games like E-Sports, MMOs, and Randomized Permadeath roguelike-like-likes to generate the excitement and stories` that these QTEs were supposed to achieve.
My other major problem with the game was the controls. One problem is the same as a problem that many people had with Bioshock: as I gained more and more Force moves, I ended up just sticking with the handful that I’d already learned. I never felt any real desire to master my moveset.
This was compounded by something that I’m still not fully sure about. In a game like Street Fighter, your basic moveset consists of fast weak moves with low range of attack, slow strong moves with long range, and often something in the middle. This design is a nice clear structure that lets you pick the tool you want to use for that moment, and build up your combos accordingly.
In The Force Unleashed, you have one normal button that you hit over and over to do a lightsaber combo, then adding in a Force Power. You can also initiate with a dash. In contrast to Street Fighter, I had only one normal that I could use if I didn’t want to drain my meter, and I ended up just mashing the lightsaber button over and over and over and over totally out of sync with the character animation. I never felt like I was fully in control of my character even as I was mowing down my enemies.
There are some other problems like bizarre Star Wars universe stuff like Force-powered junk bots, and this very awkward sequence where you wield dual thumb sticks to slowly bring down a Star Destroyer (almost, but not quite a QTE!) but I think the two major things above are my core complaints. The designers opted for cinematic visual setpieces at the expense of player control. This choice permeated all of the climactic parts of their game’s design and what makes it a mediocre game in my view.
If I were to change this game I’d remove the cinematic QTEs entirely. I’d either turn them in to cut-scenes at the end of a fight or remove them all together and focus on tightening up the mechanics to emphasize the already cinematic nature of the average fights. I’d also slim down the force powers and spend more time trying to get the player to really learn them effectively. Some of my favorite parts of the game were trying to figure out how to beat a single tough enemy, and more of those instead of another wave of easily beaten normal enemies might have served the game well.
