At the turn of the 2010s, there was a belief amongst game developers that single player games were a dying art. This in spite of games like Uncharted and the Batman: Arkham series doing great sales-wise despite being single player (Arkham Origins did have a multiplayer component, but we’re not mentioning that here) even my favourite franchise, Ratchet and Clank had a couple of multiplayer titles.
EA Games, a company that should immediately be followed by
the Darth Vader theme, have held the license to Star Wars titles for a while,
though at time of writing no longer exclusively. And whilst they’ve had
success, the disaster that was the launch of Battlefront II in 2017 had to have
an impact on the trend toward multiplayer. Follow that one with the critical
and/or commercial successes of the Ratchet and Clank remake, God of War,
Horizon Zero Dawn, Red Dead Redemption and, of course, Spider-man, all
single-player games from the latter half of the 2010s.
Anyway, Star Wars Month
EA had shut down previous efforts to create a single player
Star Wars title, focusing primarily on its two Battlefront games, yes EA’s Star
Wars exclusivity period had 3 titles in total which is kinda pathetic from one
of the largest video game developers out there with multiple studios at their
beckon call.
OK, so Star Wars: Fallen order was released in 2019, an
in-canon Star Wars story taking place between episodes 3 and 4 because that’s
where every in-canon Star Wars story with original characters takes place,
until the Mandalorian came along anyway.
First thing of note is the game’s utilisation of the Unreal
Engine. I hear there had at a time been a push from EA for their games to
utilise their internally developed Frostbite Engine, as had been used in the
Battlefront titles. It was designed for FPS shooters and was a poor fit for a
lot of games, Anthem suffered for this.
Unreal Engines have housed a wide variety of games from the
Arkham Series to Gears of War and from Crash 4 to Kingdom Hearts. So, a
cinematic game that utilises set-piece moments isn’t unfamiliar territory to
them and they’d likely have a deal of support building their own framework.
But let’s get to brass taxes and dive into the game itself, I’ll start with the story.
