Originally Posted by
ZeroBG82
I'm of two minds. On the one hand, if you use the map well and are being careful to explore enough to open shortcuts, it's honestly not that bad most of the time. I think it took me like 5 minutes to get from the Venator wreckage back to the Mantis once, and that was among the longer hauls I had to make. You can make pretty direct routes from the farthest corners of both Zeffo and Kashyyyk once you have all your skills.
On the other hand, those early marches ARE pretty brutal. Kashyyyk's isn't too bad, you can use the cargo transport thing to cover a lot of ground, but Zeffo, especially the first time you're there, requires you to think about the map distressingly hard if you don't want to just retrace 60% of your route. And it totally feels like those sections are just there to pad out play times, forcing the story to take unnaturally longer to progress so as to trick you into feeling you got more game.
And, of course, both of the above assume you aren't dying a bunch in the combat, which further pads out travel times and further extends the gameplay loop artificially. If you have yourself at a comfortable, challenging but not overwhelming difficulty level you probably make it through faster and with less fuss. If you're playing on Grand Master, particularly if you don't yet have a feel for how the combat mechanics or the controls behave, you're going to spend so much time respawing and covering old ground over and over and over again that I feel for you. (I played on Master, and it was challenging but not really hard. I leave Grand Master to you hardcore players.) The same is true with upgrades. If you're finding the stim crates relatively as swiftly as you can get each of them, the added healing will keep you from those long respawn waits, and the accompanying walks. But if you miss them, or save them for late game, you're talking about probably adding a sizable bit of extra time to the game.
That said, I pretty much agree. I have some issues with the combat, but the artificially padded retread pathing is easily this games' biggest problem.
Still, the story is really quite well done. Especially if you're taking the time to do all the conversations and get into the lore elements with the main characters. And I thought the puzzles were a lot of fun, but I'm a weird puzzle person so maybe that was just me. Easily the best SW game in quite some time.