The secret to making a good Star Wars game is to do less – Reader’s Feature

With Zero Company and Galactic Racer about to be released, a reader examines what makes a good Star Wars game and what common mistakes the bad ones make.

There is a particular temptation that seems to follow Star Wars wherever it goes. If you are making a game set in its universe, why not put everything in it? Jedi, smugglers, space battles, bounty hunters, Mandalorians, lightsabers, speeders, blasters, cantinas, morality systems, crafting, multiplayer, a few planets – and preferably several dozen. Maybe a loot system while we are here.

It sounds wonderful on paper, but it is also how you end up making a game that spends so much time trying to represent Star Wars that it forgets to be a good game. Some of the best Star Wars games ever made succeeded for almost the opposite reason. They picked one particular fantasy and committed to it.

TIE Fighter did not ask you to experience every corner of the galaxy. It asked you to sit in a cockpit and become very good at following Imperial orders. Republic Commando did not need Jedi powers, open worlds or a morality meter. It let you be a clone soldier with three other clone soldiers and concentrated on making that relationship work.

Jedi: Fallen Order largely understood that if you are making a Jedi adventure, being a Jedi should be the centre of the experience, rather than one system amongst 20 others. Looking across the full history of Star Wars video games, the licence has always contained an almost absurd number of possible games. Lightsabers naturally suggest melee combat, the Force suggests powers and progression systems, starfighters suggest dogfighting, smugglers suggest stealth and reputation systems, bounty hunters suggest contracts, droids suggest hacking, and podracing suggests racing.

The problem has never been a lack of ideas. The problem is knowing which ones to leave out.

That may be one of the most important skills in making a Star Wars game.

The best Star Wars games know what they are

TIE Fighter is still one of the clearest examples. You were an Imperial pilot. That was enough. The game did not suddenly decide that mission seven needed a third person lightsaber section because lightsabers are popular, and it did not make you wander around Star Destroyers looking for crafting components between sorties. It knew what fantasy it was selling.

You climbed into a cockpit, received orders from people who almost certainly knew more than they were telling you, and went to work. That limitation gave the game an identity.

The same thing happened with Republic Commando. In theory, a Clone Wars game could include practically anything: Jedi generals, enormous battles, vehicles, space combat, and half the prequel trilogy’s supporting cast. Instead, it gave us Delta Squad.

Four soldiers, simple tactical commands and the constant feeling that your squad mattered more than whatever enormous war was happening somewhere outside the room. Even the absence of Jedi became part of its personality. You were not the most important person in the galaxy. You were the person clearing the corridor.

That distinction mattered because Star Wars games had already spent years telling us that the natural endpoint of everything was becoming a Jedi. Republic Commando suggested something much more interesting. Perhaps being a soldier was enough.

Oddly enough, the same principle applies when the fantasy actually is being a Jedi. One reason Jedi: Fallen Order worked was that Respawn understood the central promise. You were going to explore strange places, learn Force abilities, fight with a lightsaber and gradually become more capable. Everything else existed to support that.

There were puzzles, cosmetics, exploration, and a sizeable cast of characters, but the game rarely forgot why you bought it. Its systems pointed in roughly the same direction.

That sounds obvious, but large licensed games frequently fail this test. They become catalogues. Here is the stealth section. Here is the crafting system. Here is the vehicle section. Here is the base building. Here is a dialogue tree. Here is a rarity-coloured pair of trousers.

Eventually you stop inhabiting a fantasy and start servicing features.

Outlaws was best when it remembered Kay Vess was a scoundrel

Star Wars Outlaws is perhaps the most interesting recent example, because it occasionally came dangerously close to becoming the giant Star Wars checklist I am talking about. It had multiple planets, factions, stealth, shooting, vehicles, cards, contracts, and space combat. There was a lot going on.

But its best moments were usually the ones where all of that noise quietened down and the game remembered that Kay Vess was a scoundrel. Sneaking into somewhere you were not supposed to be, taking a job from a criminal syndicate and immediately wondering whether it had been a terrible idea, or walking into a cantina and feeling, briefly, as though you belonged in the less respectable half of the original trilogy.

Those moments worked because they were specific. They did not try to fulfil every Star Wars fantasy. They fulfilled one.

That is the difference between giving players things to do and giving them a role to inhabit.

And that distinction becomes increasingly important as games become larger. The more systems you add, the easier it is for the actual identity of the game to disappear underneath them.

An enormous map does not automatically make you feel like a smuggler. 20 upgrade trees do not automatically make you feel like a Jedi. A hundred side quests do not automatically make you care about the galaxy.

Sometimes one good idea is worth more than 10 adequate ones.

Zero Company and Galactic Racer understand the assignment, that is why I am particularly interested in Star Wars Zero Company. GameCentral’s recent hands-on suggests that its very specific XCOM-like approach is working, and a squad-based tactics game is almost an act of restraint by modern Star Wars standards.

You have a team, you make tactical decisions, relationships between characters matter, and squadmates can ultimately be lost. The focus is not on making you the centre of the entire galaxy. It is on making a small group of people important enough that you care what happens to them.

That is a much harder trick than filling a map with icons, and it is exactly the sort of thing Star Wars games have historically done well when they have had the confidence to narrow their focus. A tactical game does not need to apologise for being tactical. It does not need a surprise podracing mode, and it certainly does not need to let me build a moisture farm.

If Zero Company can make me stare at the screen for five minutes because moving one character two squares to the left might get another character killed, then it has already found its identity. The same applies to Star Wars: Galactic Racer. GameCentral’s own hands-on was encouraging precisely because the game appears confident about what it wants to be.

Star Wars racing games have an obvious ghost sitting behind them in Episode I: Racer. Trying to follow that game is difficult enough without deciding that the successor also needs lightsaber duels, an enormous open world, and a home decoration system.

What is encouraging about Galactic Racer is how unapologetically specific it appears to be. The vehicles, handling, racing styles and builds are the centre of the experience. It is a racing game first, not a Star Wars simulator with some racing attached.

The fantasy is velocity.

That is enough.

In fact, it might be more than enough.

Bigger has never automatically meant better

Star Wars has a long history of cancelled games that promised enormous things. Some of them sound fascinating. Some sound like the sort of design document that begins with six excellent ideas and ends with someone quietly asking how many years there are in a decade.

The recently surfaced Star Wars: Magellan is a good example of that instinct. It was an ambitious action role-playing game with Jedi, Mandalorians, loot, multiplayer concepts, and several systems layered together. Perhaps it would have been brilliant. We will never know.

But it belongs to a long tradition of Star Wars projects where the ambition seems to be to contain as much Star Wars as possible.

That is not necessarily the same thing as making the best Star Wars game possible.

There is a reason smaller concepts remain memorable decades later. X-Wing knew you wanted to fly. Dark Forces knew you wanted a blaster. Republic Commando knew you wanted a squad. Episode I: Racer knew you wanted to go extremely fast while a Tusken Raider attempted to ruin your afternoon.

Clarity is powerful.

None of this means larger Star Wars games should disappear. I still want enormous role-playing games, planets to explore, and the occasional game that lets me spend an irresponsible number of hours wandering around the galaxy instead of doing anything useful with my life. But scale should come after identity.

The question should not be: how much Star Wars can we fit into this game?

It should be: what particular Star Wars fantasy are we trying to make convincing?

If the answer is being a Jedi, build around the lightsaber, the Force and the responsibility that comes with them. If the answer is being a smuggler, make crime, risk, and reputation matter. If the answer is commanding a squad, make every soldier feel important. If the answer is racing through the galaxy at ridiculous speeds, then please concentrate on making the corners terrifying.

The strange thing about Star Wars is that the universe feels enormous precisely because it contains so many distinct lives. Not everyone is a Jedi and not everyone is saving the galaxy. Some people are pilots, some are soldiers, some are criminals and some apparently wake up every morning and decide that driving an engine with a chair attached to it through a canyon is an acceptable career.

Games become more convincing when they understand that. The future of Star Wars games may therefore depend less on bigger worlds, longer feature lists, and more elaborate promises, and more on developers being willing to say no.

No, you cannot do everything. No, you cannot be everyone. No, this game does not contain the entire galaxy.

You are a pilot. Or a soldier. Or a scoundrel. Or a racer.

And for the next 20 hours, that is enough.

By reader Søren Kamper

Søren Kamper writes about Star Wars games, their history and the people who make them at Star Wars: Gaming, an independent publication covering everything from the earliest Lucasfilm Games releases to modern Star Wars titles.

The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

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