Reports prior to the new LEGO Star Wars game's release alleged crunch at developer Traveller's Tales, and it shows in the finished product.
Although very much a great game, it's obvious that LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga's development involved crunch, as the finished product contains numerous glitches and a competing selection of disparate and often half-baked gameplay ideas. Reports of crunch during the development of LEGO's Skywalker Saga first emerged in January of this year, with the game having ostensibly experienced a hectic development. Development crunches, unfortunately, seem to be an industry standard in video game development, and can often lead to messy launches. While LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is a blast to play, it may have been too ambitious, with the game's scale arguably coming at the expense of polish and compelling level design.
Though the game suffered from a tight schedule and shifting management, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga has managed to bring a lot to the world of LEGO Star Wars games. Players can play through all nine major Star Wars movies starting with whichever trilogy they prefer, using a roster of over 300 playable characters. TT Games also overhauled the third-person camera system and combat, making LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga the best LEGO Star Wars game so far. It's also by far the biggest installment in the series yet, with the game boasting over a dozen hub worlds for players to explore, each with its own set of collectibles and side-missions to take part in.
However, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga's development at TT Games was also fraught with top-to-bottom challenges, as a Polygon report from January suggested. The article explained that, from the beginning of the game's development in 2017, TT Games made frequent changes to management teams, gameplay features, and even the game engine the game was being built on. These changes allegedly led to hundreds of hours of work lost, dozens of employees breaking down from stress, and a finished game with a litany of bugs and glitches. The scale of The Skywalker Saga's LEGO-built open world is staggering, but during play, it becomes obvious that there was a real human cost.
The evidence of TT Games' development crunch can be found throughout LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. While the game introduced multiple hub worlds from throughout the Star Wars movies, those hub worlds appear more detailed and thought-out than even the best levels in the game. These issues, and many other features in the game, might have been more polished and thought out had The Skywalker Saga's development gone more smoothly, or even if it had adopted a less grand vision. This new LEGO title is the first open-world Star Wars game to release on next-gen systems, and it boasts the kind of detail and gameplay variety one would arguably expect from a more mature offering. Exploring the galaxy this way is fun, but the question of whether or not it was necessary for a LEGO game is debatable, especially when it seems to have come at the more linear levels' expense.
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is still ultimately a good game, and one that feels like a true celebration of George Lucas' franchise. However, its lack of launch day polish and its competing gameplay visions intimate a hectic development. Making games on this scale all too sadly tends to have a cost, and while it made sense to make this the biggest LEGO Star Wars game yet, that very size can often prove problematic.
Source: Polygon
