I know this isn’t one of my best traits, but I tend to have very strong opinions about Star Wars. Watching a new Star Wars movie for the first time is always a terrifying experience, because I don’t go into it knowing if it’s going to be great or if it will be yet another misfire that tarnishes the reputation of Star Wars for years to come.
I tend to cut video games a little more slack, but I still went into Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order with a bit of hesitation.
Despite my initial nervousness, I’m really, really loving Fallen Order. It does a lot of things right. Lightsaber combat feels really good, and the environments are incredibly well-designed. And while the story can feel a bit contrived at times, the characters are better developed than you’d expect from your typical video game (though admittedly nowhere near as well-developed as the characters in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales).
But then there are the Wookiees. Dear lord, do these guys look weird.
The Wookiees in this game look all emaciated and stretched out, and their fur looks awful. It’s kind of looks like someone took a pile of hay and shaped it into a some vaguely Wookiee-shaped figures, then forgot about them and let them sit out in the elements for a few years. They look so weird.
I’m not alone in noticing this, of course. There’s a whole thread about it on Steam’s forums. There, users speculate about why these things look so weird, ultimately deciding that Wookiees just never look good in video games.
But that’s not true. I mean, this is what Wookiees look like in Star Wars Battlefront II:
Battlefront II, I will point out, was published by EA Games, who also published Fallen Order. Sure, it was developed by DICE, Motive, and Criterion, while Fallen Order was developed by Respawn. But with Battlefront II, we had three studios sharing assets to put together a cohesive game. Couldn’t these studios also share some assets — or, at the very least, design pointers — with the folks at Respawn?
Now, just to drive this point home, here’s what Wookiees looked like in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed:
Sure, they’re not perfect, but their body shapes aren’t all messed up and their armor actually looks pretty cool. The Force Unleashed, by the way, came out in 2008. That’s eleven whole years before Fallen Order.
So I don’t know what’s going on with Fallen Order’s Wookiees. I can forgive Respawn for this, of course, because the game is quite a bit of fun. I just can’t help but wonder how something like this even happens in the PS4/Xbox One era.
Oh, and in case the Wookiee nitpick isn’t quite enough, look how tiny the AT-STs are:
Weird, right?
