Combat looks pretty good to me. One-hit kills on stormtroopers is a good choice, reminds me of old Jedi Outcast/Jedi Academy. The fights with more challenging enemies seem to have a posture system pretty much straight out of Sekiro, which I'm fine with personally. I can't be the only one who thought that system would be perfect for lightsaber combat.

Graphics look great for the most part. If they can make the story worth caring about, they may have a winner here for Star Wars fans.

If they can make the story worth caring about, they may have a winner here for Star Wars fans.

Chris Avellone and Aaron Contreras were part of a group of writers on the game(I believe the rest have not yet been publicly credited). That gives me hope.

The animations are really awkward, a little slow and plodding, and occasionally just straight up glitchy. Deflecting blaster shots in particular looks pretty bad. And that run animation has got to go, it looks really goofy.

I do like that the stormtroopers die in one hit, but some Jedi Outcast dismemberment would have been nice. I know, Disney wants to keep it less violent, but have you seen any Star Wars movies? People get decapitated, dismembered and cut in half all the time, it's a series staple.

I'll hold out hope that it could be good, but this demo is really bland.

I was excited for this when I found out that Respawn was working on it, but that demo had none of what has made the titanfall series so appealing to me. It looked like a very by the numbers uncharted game, which is funny, given the fact that EA has already previously cancelled two uncharted-like Star Wars games(1313 and the game Amy Hennig). As I am not a big Star Wars fan, this demo has left me very underwhelmed. The gameplay did not seem particularly engaging, graphically the demo seemed like a very mixed bag, and more than anything, I'm just tired of highly scripted corridor runs that rely more on visual spectacle than on unique gameplay scenarios. Hopefully there is more Respawn charm left to be shown, but if there isn't, I don't see myself being excited for Fallen Order.

Looks like an E3 demo from 5-10 years ago to me. Just in terms of the presentation style and that it doesn't seem to do anything new or unique. Fairly generic action B-game. Not even going to comment on all the half baked animations and jankyness of it all because this is claimed to be "Alpha" footage.

Cutting and poking things with lightsabers while there being no dismemberment or real meaningful, visible damage immediately takes me out of it. If you stuck a lightsabre through something.. It would be dead or fall apart. Creature or not, boss or whatever.. It should get f'd up and die in one hit. So to counter that, you design the combat interactions in a way that prevents you from just walking up and slashing it a couple times.

Whatever. I wasn't really that curious about this game to begin with but now especially, it just looks like a plain ol video game. Really makes you appreciate the details that Sony's first party studios put into things.

It seems to me like that's what they're trying to do. You can see the slash marks on enemies, which is what we get in most of the movies, aside from a few select scenes. Dismemberment would be cool, but we all knew that wasn't going to happen. Enemies seem to mostly die in one hit, and during the presentation they stated that combat encounters will vary more by the combinations of enemies they throw at you, not by enemies that take an increasing amount of damage to kill.

Yea, I think the fact that you see slash marks, as if they were cutting through metal even when striking organic materials draws attention to it. They should 100% model dismemberment because that's what it needs, in my opinion at least, to differentiate itself from every other third person action game out there. Move technology forward.. even though it was done forever ago (I remember loving Rune in 2000, lopping off arms and heads) And as pointed out, stuff like that is in the movies. It looks like they partially do it on certain extremities, like I think you can see him cut the hand/arm off one guy when he does that scripted kill animation and I think I saw one of the spider legs get cut in half toward the end there? It's not enough.

When he confronts the "special" enemy with the purple.. thing, they just look like they are bumping together with janky strike animations, lightsaber will hit or go through it and it doesn't register or mean anything. The enemy should block every single strike with really well done animations (potentially in final product) and only when you do manage to get a strike through it's guard, will it die or fall on the ground when you chop a leg off or something.

I wasn't really seeing any of that stuff. Again, it appears to be a run-of-the-mill third person action game and isn't really pushing any tech or design forward. Wow, they copy pasted the Titanfall wall run animations over.. That's not cool or new anymore and instead just feels like, oh Respawn is working on this so lets just stick that feature in. They are making this for a mass audience and likely a E or T rating so.. Meh.

Make Star Wars gritty and real/dark.

I was disappointed by it. The combat seems fairly straight forward and the animations really bug me. Like when he turns his lightsaber on and off he holds it up so oddly and it looks very unnatural. Everything has that unnatural feeling to it though.

That music thooooough

The Force (Un)leashed 3.

Yah to echo what was said above - lightsabers that don’t actually cut stuff to pieces really take me out of it as well. As someone commented online: they might as well just be LED tubes at this point.

Huh.

I'll keep an eye on this, but I am feeling "meh". Against normal mooks it feels properly Outcast. But the moment a melee wielder (or cortosis coated bug?) appears it is just Force Unleashed in all the frustrating ways

I don't need one hit kill sabers (I want them though). But I need proper hit reactions. For all my complaints against Sekiro's overly reductive gameplay that is one thing it partially got right. Unless it was boss armor it felt like you were hitting your enemy rather than just depleting their health bar.

@casepb said:

The term that came to my mind was "graceless." Which is a problem in a game where you play as a Jedi, since they are kinda supposed to be graceful when they move.

And while "Alpha footage and it's not final" yata yata-ing aside, I was unimpressed graphically as well. It's like the game can't decide which side of the fence it wants to be on. Some of it felt like they were trying to go for a Clone Wars-style cartoony aesthetic while other parts of it seemed like they were trying to be "real." It just doesn't mix together very well.

Also, the main character's face kind of looks like the character from the Ewok Movie. They do not want to remind anyone of the Ewok Movie.

After seeing this, sry, why didn't they just make Amy Hennig's game again?

Seems like a game that needs to graphically look way better given how average the gameplay looks.

Looks like a solid 7.5 out of 10 game. I'm not sure why EA is making such a big deal about it... it's nothing new and the popularity of Star Wars is fading. Not showing anything new for BF's Firestorm or Anthem was pretty lame.

If you want my hot take, I think it looks like the most 2019 third-person action game imaginable. Some vaguely Souls-ian overtures with the pace of the combat and the way that lock-on camera is positioned, but with all the scripted moments and filler climbing sequences of your Uncharted. It doesn't look bad, by any means, but it doesn't really look like something I'm interested in.

As someone that wants more Star Wars single player, this, unfortunately, doesn't look amazing, but we'll see. It may be a 'wait until it's in your hands' kind of game. I've never really been into the Jedi stuff, be it for story or gameplay but again, if they can make it work then I'm all for it. Nothing I saw of it today though excited me and looked kind of outdated in spots (like animations).

What people are saying here I pretty much feel the same way, like how lightsabers often feel overpowered and the impact of each hit doesn't really feel great (it's just a thing to smash through a swath of enemies in your way). This doesn't look a whole lot different. Then yeah, him not cutting through enemies felt wrong. I get that they're probably not going to make a super gory game, but it's not like we haven't seen limbs cut off. This just doesn't feel new or impressive. Here's to hoping it's something special though.

I thought it was neat though that they had at least one movie character in it and what seemed like Forest Whitaker? I'm hoping it's just the slice of gameplay they showed us and the culmination of everything the game offers comes together. Reading that it's basically a Souls-like Metroid game excites me alone. This game doesn't have multiplayer right? I have to imagine it's of decent length then rather than just a four to an eight-hour campaign?

looks alright, but certainly not hype-worthy.

Force Unleashed was unpolished and the combat felt incredibly floaty at times but I do think they at least maintained a certain feeling of “power fantasy” throughout. You didn’t have a droid to hack doors for you so that game was full of these little force power fueled environmental puzzles that made it feel like, yah, only you a powerful Jedi could have gotten through it all.

This Fallen Order gameplay was just a small slice but it really lacked grandeur that I think an E3 demo typically brings to the table. You know something isn’t quite right when instead of thinking what an awesome Jedi I am, all I could keep thinking was “why would these storm troopers keep coming at him when it’s obvious suicide?” When you think about it this is the biggest stage they could hope for to show off their new Star Wars game and the best they could come up with was some wall running and linear corridor fighting with typical Storm Troopers and, of all possibly cliched enemy types.. giant spider things.

Just read an interview with Stig Asmussen about how the game is actually a Metroidvania?

Is this a Metroidvania game?

Yes. What you saw [in the demo] was a scripted section of the game. There are maybe a handful of those in the game. This is not a linear game. When you get to that part of the demo where the spaceship lands and he went to the map and there’s all these different planets, you can fly to all of those. The only thing that’s restricting you from probing deeper into these areas is your abilities.

Seems like an odd demo to give, making the game look totally linear which seems to be really turning people off. There are some other details from the interview about the game's origin and inspiration, but that bit about the game being more open-ended is the most interesting part.

@nasher27: you would think they would show how non-linear and big their game is. The only reason I could think of is that’s not ready, which would be bad if true since the game is supposedly coming out in 5 months.

That is the very definition of "meh." Nothing about it looks special or even interesting, it looks like the kind of game I'd buy on sale years after its release and never get around to playing.

This being described as Star Wars Dark Souls makes the pace of it make sense, but then just draws out how odd this looks from a feel perspective. It seems a bit floaty, lacking heft.

But maybe once it's in my hands it'd feel good. I'll say this though, those vibrostaff troopers look fucking awesome, and the idea of a Star Wars Dark Souls that let you create a character [and change weapons and gear] and that didn't have a movie-tie-in sort of story would've been the closest thing to a modern Jedi Academy, and holy shit I woulda been all over that.

Do the same sort of hub thing and have you go around to different planets to deal with Jedi business, all working towards some central investigation. Fucking hell that woulda been fantastic. Shit, I might need to go play some Jedi Academy again.

I guess it still stands that this is probably still the closest thing to a modern Jedi Knight, so that's cool.

The lack of dismemberment is fine at this point. I got over that once they made g_saberrealisticcombat protected in Jedi Academy, when in Jedi Outcast you could set it to 999 and literally move your mouse so your lightsaber would just touch enemies and watch them collapse into pieces.

Yeah, the Game Informer preview also goes into this stuff. The game sounds way more interesting here than it appeared in the demo.

I like the actor, he was the best part of that gotham show, also the second actor to be a jedi and the joker in star wars

this reminds me a lot of the force unleashed games, and is that forest whitaker? So this is a prequel?

New trailer from the Xbox show.

Let's take the worst character from Rogue One and then add a less memorable player character. No thanks. The droid is the most interesting thing about that trailer, and that's not saying much.

@baelrun: I think the issue with Saw Gerrera during Rogue One was that he wasn't explained at all, he was presented like he was a big deal but we had seen nothing to appreciate that and then they killed him off. With Rebels (and this game), I think he represents a more interesting side to the Rebel Alliance which is more morally grey in what it does.

The game looks fine. I guess souls clones are the new God of War clones (preceded by DMC clones) i'll play them but I find it hard to be excited by them.

The protagonist looks like a cartoon character though, which is weird since they got Forrest Whitaker's likeness down quite well.

I thought this looked fun. Didn't see any groundbreaking new ideas, but a singleplayer star wars game with decent graphics, force powers and an actual story is much more interesting to me than the multiplayer games.

While the basics look good, the whole setting and the main character really do not.

Star Wars can be such a fun and diverse setting and instead we are at a facility alright.

The design of the main character could not be more boring. This is a problem with all their games at this point. As well as story in general.

Would dismemberment bring the game up to an M rating? Can't think of another reason the developers wouldn't include it. Other then that it looks pretty competent but wholly forgettable, hopefully good story and characters will make up for the basic looking combat or maybe with upgrades in the skill tree it will become more engaging. I like Star Wars but Wookie rescue with the forgettable Forrest Whitaker character doesn't give me much to be excited for. I know its still in development but Respawn isn't known for knocking it out of the park visuals wise nor are they known for 3rd melee combat- definitely a wait and see attitude on this.

If I remember correctly, the old Jedi Knight/Jedi Academy games had dismemberment and were rated T for Teen. Granted, the dismemberments were not very graphic, usually just an arm getting cleanly lopped off, with no blood. I don't think those games had decapitations, but I could be wrong.