I’ve been playing through Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga as of late, and — for the lack of a more critical, nuanced term — it is fun. The sheer extensiveness of each corridor’s design, with an overdosing fill of collectibles and lootathons, greatly exacerbates this franchise’s willingness to reward exploration, even in the face of its largely linear levels. Characters that explode with endearing personality, especially following their LEGO-version translation. Narrative moments which represent well their originals. Combat that, while not really too challenging, still has so much charm I could never really put into words.
But as much love and reverence as the Lego Star Wars games have pretty rightfully received, especially considering their impressive breadth and production quality, I would not be so quick to call their gameplays “enthralling”. Enthralling means, capturing one’s attention; fascinating, in a word. The game’s world? Certainly enthralling. Creativity? Off the charts. Gameplay at its core, though? To some degree, not so.
This article is not a “Strengths-and-Weaknesses” analysis of Lego Star Wars‘ core design, of which there are plenty both. Really, this text is but one, brief look at how even the most prestigious games can have a single mechanic, which if improperly designed, could completely obliterate its pacing. That mechanic being, looting.
Looting
In games, looting generally refers to the act of collecting or picking up items or currency. Passive looting, or what I like to call “unconscious looting”, is when the rewards are automatically obtained by the player, much like how, after defeating monsters in Earthbound, some may seldom find items dropped by dead foes. These item drops are sent to the player’s inventory without any extra effort. A different yet similar example is Genshin Impact‘s expeditions, found in the Adventurer’s Guild, which allows the player to send available characters to The Mines™ for materials. Passive looting, in this sense, essentially occurs when the act of looting is already directly tied to progress, not “out of the way”, or is something that occurs in the background.
Active looting, on the other hand, is when the act of collecting items or currency is done consciously, and with effort, an intentional deviation from the critical path, a divergence. This could entail a player’s conscious checking of room corners for healing items, or even solving tricky puzzles just for a little bit of extra gold. Active looting doesn’t have to be easy, nor hard, mind. It could be as simple as touching Sonic‘s rings or jumping on armor-packed tables in Half-Life, and it could be as intricate as jumping atop stone pillars in Mario Odyssey or activating hidden doors in DOOM. Point is, active looting is active. It requires work.
My definition and categorization of looting here is, admittedly, crude and loose. Not so dissimilar to game design terminologies in general. Still, much of the looting in Lego Star Wars is indubitably active. I argue, extensively so.
In Lego Star Wars
Unsurprisingly, players prominently play as Jedis in video games with stories where Jedis are the protagonists. Shocker. But knowing just how pertinent the Skywalkers and the Kenobis are to the central gameplay experience, it’s fairly imperative that this specific class of characters, at least if nothing else, feels fun to play. Whether or not the Jedis actually feel fun to play, this, you may debate, but the way they loot their environment simply hindered the Lego Star Wars experience, at least for me.
See, in Lego Star Wars, Jedis interact with essentially any thing in the world using the Force, if allowed. Through these interactions, certain things can happen depending. Grass in pots bulge and deform; tanks explode; crates fly elsewhere. For non-Jedis, these things are interacted with by merely destroying them. In most of these interactions, studs (the game’s form of currency) drop, as a reward for exploration and for taking the time to interact with the room’s elements. I hope you see where I’m going with this.
Indeed, the act of pressing B, when facing an in-world interactable, with the purpose of obtaining stud-currency, is an example of active looting. But — and this is the catch — it is delayed active looting. These are fictitious terms, made up for the purposes of discussion, but the way I see it, active looting can be immediate or delayed in response. Immediate active looting is when the player exerts the effort and obtains the reward in an instant. Collecting spacecraft scraps (called Minikits) is immediate, for instance. But in most cases, interacting with an item in Lego Star Wars plays an animation, and it waits for that animation to finish before rewarding the studs. This animation takes time. A small amount of time, but time nonetheless. Additionally, the studs themselves take time before they are tangible. That, too, takes time. The game purposefully bides time before throwing out its sweet, sweet lego-candy, of grey and gold variants, only for the player to run amok and pick them up. Delayed looting.
Before one could claim that delayed looting is always bad and immediate looting is always good — not so fast. Delayed looting can have legitimate rationales for their inclusion. In some scenarios, it adds tension and panic, especially when the delay is noticeable, and more especially in cases of frantic chases by swaths of enemies. Imagine zombies chasing you to your death, with you sheepishly searching for a weapon, only for each cupboard and crate to take a second or two to dredge. How much time could you buy? On the contrary, delayed looting can also give respite, like how Pizza Tower plays an animation for when the player grabs a key, letting them breathe for seconds before once again hitting mach speed.
For Lego Star Wars, cases like that surely exist, somewhere. But more often than not, waiting for animations to finish for each and every flower pot and vase and Lego Bricks and box — of which there are plenty — only serves to create tedium and drag out the most boring parts of the game.
To discern, looting is what I like to call a frequently repeated mechanic. A frequently repeated mechanic is a game mechanic that is short and simple, but frequently repeats to give the game flavor. Examples of frequently repeated mechanics are Bioshock’s pipe-hacking modules, or Fallout: New Vegas’ computer-hacking minigames, or Deus Ex’s ATM-hacking — okay, that’s a lot of hacking. But you get the point. These mechanics are frequently repeated, and frequently repeated mechanics must, believe it or not, be frequently treated with utmost care, especially considering their frequency, because if they are frequent and uncompelling, it’s only natural that the player will get frequently bored.
Frequently, frequently, frequently. Even words, used to this extent, can start to feel meaningless.
For context, here’s how I play Lego Star Wars. I skim each room, killing all enemies within, and only after I’ve reaffirmed safety do I start scavenging for goods, ensuring that I won’t get in a crossfire bent over. It’s a safe and intuitive way to play the game, and moreover, it adds a natural rhythm, a natural pacing to the game. Action, then exploration. Gunfights, then respite.
The problem is, that moment of “respite” is dragged out for too long far too often, making those exciting battle sequences feel drowned out compared to the slow looting. Here are some concrete numbers. It takes around, say, 2-5 seconds to interact with most stud containers, since the player must wait for the animation. Plus, an additional 3 seconds needed to wait for the studs to be grabbed from the ground, because they can’t be grabbed as soon as they spawn. They must have landed on the ground first, allowing them to scatter out, and only then could you pick them up. And because the studs are plenty and scattered, it takes another, say, 3 seconds just to walk around and chase after them before they disappear. In total, looting a single item takes about 8 to 11 seconds each. And seeing that a room contains around, say, 10-20 stud containers, size depending, that is anywhere from 80 seconds to 220, should you scavenge through most or all of any room. That’s one to four minutes the player has just lost, opening what are effectively simplistic money-boxes1. And, egregiously, some of this computation doesn’t even account for the rather snail-like movement speed, which by itself already adds more time-tickets to the tollgates.
To enlighten ourselves, let’s examine a few examples.
In the first Lego Star Wars, the very first room of the game, in Episode I Act I, there are 10 chairs around a table which can all be individually interacted with, dropping a few hundred studs, taking around 5 seconds for each chair. They also sing a little jingle, taking up to 6 seconds. Charming personality aside, those combined sequences already flush 50 or so seconds from looting in the first room, and for many players, that’s the first impression they’ll get of the game.
In the very next room, the player is first greeted by a few Battle Droids which they will need to fight: the first bit of action. Great! But immediately afterwards, they are greeted by walls chock full of levers which also spit out studs — ten of them can be seen in the screenshot above, along with two pieces of debris that have their own fixing animation, again rewarding studs. I’ve timed myself activating all these levers and collecting the studs as well as the special scrap that they spawn once they’re all activated, and it takes around 60 seconds to accomplish. In comparison, fighting the enemies takes around 10 seconds. Of course, there’s not many of them in the first room, yet the contrast there is still quite shocking. 60 seconds of looting. 10 seconds of combat.
Perhaps a more appalling example is the beginning of Episode I: Act II, as seen above, which starts in Naboo Valley in the midst of the Trade Federation’s invasion. Along this line of dirt are plants that one can uproot for some studs, taking 3 seconds for each plant. Just within this beginning field alone, there already 25 plants in total, amounting to around a minute of looting, from just the greenery, notwithstanding other factors.
But, get this, battle droids are constantly spawning. Which means, on top of the time the player is already spending uprooting the grass for money, they’re also spending time killing unwavering, forthcoming foes. In my first playthrough of this level, I spent four minutes on this beginning path alone, constituting not even a quarter of this act’s length. Four minutes. Jar Jar Binks hasn’t even appeared yet!
The common denominator in any case is the fact that looting is a frequently repeated mechanic. When I say “looting a room takes four minutes”, it’s not as though Scrooge McDuck kinds of gold had been splunkered on the floor which, like a sea, takes four minutes to gather. Generally, I mean that there are sixty loot bags that each take four second to collect, amounting to four wasted minutes total.
Just in these two examples alone, we’ve seen how Lego Star Wars (particularly, the first game) drags out playtime and greatly harms the game’s overall pacing, seemingly by throwing small racks of currency wherever it can, even if it results in precious playtime spent looking away from the game’s core progression. When 60 seconds of the first few rooms are spent looting and only 10 on combat, the game is naturally going to seem like it focuses little on combat, despite it being the fun part.
Effects on Pacing
Also, I’ve been mentioning it, but pacing, in a sense, is the natural rhythm and rhyme of a game’s rambunctious events. How much a player is engaged by a game is determined quite largely by its pacing. Too much action in too little time can produce anxiety, and too little action in too much time can produce boredom.
Perhaps Lego Star Wars’ pacing issue is best visualized by a time and action graph, akin to a time and tension graph often used to examine a plot’s gradual build-up. Lego Star Wars is, after all, an action-exploration game. It must strike a decent balance between those two aspects. Fascinatingly, for the people who blitzed through this game’s content without even so much as looking twice at each room, the level pacing can feel fairly regular, as the game shifts constantly from action to inaction, by way of natural downtime, as it ideally should. Look at the graph below. Any act contains skirmishes, and breathing room between skirmishes, for keeping the player engaged, especially as it builds towards its climax. This is the ideal pacing of, well, any game. And, indeed, when I played through several levels while barely looting, this is almost exactly how I felt with Lego Star Wars.
The problem is when you factor in the looting. Looting in games is not necessarily bad. Many have done it. Quite a few have made it well. But knowing that, in Lego Star Wars, each container takes a few seconds to open, and all the cash take a few seconds to collect, and all the boxes take a few seconds to walk to, and that there are so many of them, looting is almost a curse, binding the game’s pacing to extreme depths, at chokehold.
For most games, looting in the sense shown above will almost always be considered a chore. Thankfully for Lego Star Wars, most of its next-level collectibles are hidden so effectively, they actually remain joys to find, and why so many still hail this title as a champion of gaming exploration. Touching a space Minikit trinket and hearing its metallic, clanking sound, after making precise platforming or prudish puzzling, is pretty fun. But the rest of it, the studs, the boxes, the plants, is tedium made manifest. Made manifest by the game’s sluggish nature. Felt by its slowpoke design.
Is This Actually A Problem?
Before we examine how to potentially fix the game’s drawn out level design (thanks in large part to its tedious looting mechanisms), we should first ask whether or not it’s a problem in the first place. And, in the case of Lego Star Wars, I’ll give you my straight answer: probably not. Lego Star Wars does not require looting in the slightest, and much of it can be completed without even batting an eye. Studs, golden bricks, scraps — all of these are mainly for cosmetics and extras. Players are not contractually obliged to loot, unlike in, for instance, Horizon Forbidden West, where looting also takes time because of animations, slowing the game down in similar ways as seen here, but there it’s in many ways not as optional. If obtaining True Jedi2 is required to beat Lego Star Wars, only then does it present a much bigger issue.
I would also like to clarify I still really do enjoy Lego Star Wars. Just… for many other reasons other than its pacing. In particular, I love the way Lego Star Wars constantly throws around new ideas, especially gameplay ideas, keeping the overall experience fresh, even in the face of its long loot-job. In fact, I’d say the sheer creativity and explorability at display here essentially makes up for this flaw. That’s why I stated earlier that if any other game had this pacing problem, it would be burnt toast. But not Lego Star Wars. As far as bad looting mechanics go, this is actually one of the best bad ones.
Still, though, for something as far-reaching and open-ended as Lego Star Wars, captivating a larger audience is as potent as anything else. Completionists exist. I’m a completionist myself, and to tell the truth, doing all that looting frankly in Lego Star Wars became mind-numbing, and it’s only the rest of the game (which still is quite great) that motivated me to keep going. Most people who praise this game do so under the lens of it being a core part of their childhood. Children probably have no allegiance towards in-game fictional valueless collectibles. Maybe that’s why they didn’t find the pacing so much a problem. But to shy away from people who are willing to put in the effort to collect everything, by way of making their progression as slow and as tedious as possible, is surely not a way to reward a game’s most dedicated players, even for one this generally beloved. The issue of looting breaking pacing may not be a game-breaker, especially for Lego Star Wars, where looting isn’t required to begin with, and where much better money makers exist by late game, but in this facet of the game, it is a problem, one that never needed to exist.
Of course, criticism is incomplete without feedback. How could such a pacing problem actually be fixed? This is where we look back now, on the idea that looting is a short but frequently repeated mechanic. To loot a single container by itself needs not much effort or time, but because of its sheer quantity throughout the duration of any stage, the real time sunk balloons to great heights. We could simply reduce the quantity of interactables in every level, which I would personally agree with. But, alternatively, if we, as game designers, ensure that the aforementioned mechanic is as unobtrusive and as streamlined as possible, we could reduce the core of it significantly, thus disallowing it from reaching tediousness. One could consider reducing the amount of animation time the looting takes. Think about it, if we have a single 10-second long cutscene and we reduce its length to 9, that’s only a single second shaved for an individual instance. But, if this cutscene is used a hundred times throughout the game, that’s a decrease of 900 seconds overall. That’s 900 seconds the player can instead spend shooting down monsters and breaking down bosses. That’s 900 seconds the player can spend actually playing the game.
And, indeed, this is a lesson that Lego Star Wars II actually learned, noticeable starting from Episode IV. In there, studs are actually easier and faster to collect. So though there’s still just as plenty collectibles, because each takes less than before, the overall effect is a noticeable cut-down on far too elongated looting time. In fact, The Skywalker Saga iterates on this development further, by making stud collection passive looting instead of active looting, changing the makeup of the looting mechanic entirely.
The Ultimate Lesson
For game designers, the ultimate lesson here is to ask ourselves through every stage of development: “What are my players most often doing? And is it any fun?” Too easily can we be so engrossed in our worlds and narratives that we unknowingly design a frequently repeated mechanic so tedious it transforms into the focal point for many players. Good frequently repeated mechanics maintain player interest; they keep players in check. Bad frequently repeated mechanics, ironically, make players check out. Disengage.
As game designers, it is imperative that we look into and understand our intended player experience, and a huge part of that is knowing our game’s rhythm and pacing. What are our players doing? And for how long? Are they overwhelmed? Or are they bored? Get answers for these questions, and examine why. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a game mechanic that persists which just so happens to be rather dull, but which simultaneously uses up a surprising amount of playtime. Is this intended? If not, it may be worth it to pull out the Jedi within you, and, by using the Force, deconstruct an awkward mechanic, and reconstruct it into something somewhat better.
Footnotes:
- To be fair, many gamers nowadays are seemingly quite happy to be opening nothing but simplistic money-boxes for minutes and even hours on end, a la B. F. Skinner’s pigeons. If you think about it that way, Lego Star Wars was just way ahead of the curve. ↩︎
- The True Jedi collectible is awarded when the player collects enough studs throughout a level. As you can imagine from reading this article, that takes goddamn ages.
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