I need to take all the opportunities to write about Fall Guys that I can get, given how much time I spend playing it with my son. This is a pretty good opportunity, too: a set of Star Wars skins are coming to the bean battle royale, as announced yesterday on May 4th, and they coincide with some major changes to Fall Guys’ platforming physics.
I refuse to acknowledge that May 4th is now “Star Wars day”.
I will however acknowledge that the Han Solo skin, which has him riding on top of a floating Millenium Falcon, is very cute. The pack also includes Chewbacca, Boba Fett and a Stormtrooper skin. They’ll be available in-game via the Fall Guys store from May 7th until the 20th, for a fee as yet undisclosed.
That means they arrive alongside Fall Guys’ Fall Forever update, also due May 7th, which adds a new Explore mode and makes some substnatial changes to the physics of jumping and ragdolling.
Explore mode lets you play an infinite number of creator-made levels – the game got a level editor last year – and also lets you skip to the next level in the queue if you land on one you don’t enjoy. Better yet: it lets players move immediately onto the next level once they cross the finish line, meaning they don’t have to wait for strangers to finish first. In creator-made levels – which are often larger and more confusing than the official levels – it is great not to get stuck waiting on someone who is lost, or on someone not trying, or on a ten-minute timer to expire.
On the flip side, if you are bumbling and slow, the timer isn’t ten minutes anymore. Since pootling around isn’t preventing other players from moving on, the new mode now has a 30-minute timer on every level. As someone who is often bumbling and slow in the oft extremely challenging creator-made levels, I appreciate this.
I like even better that the update is tackling some of the fundamentals of bean movement. Fall Guys is fun, I enjoy playing it, but it is simultaneously the most frustrating game I have ever played due to its randomness, timing-based obstacles, and habit of stripping control away from players. The next update aims to tweak some of those things.
“We’ve made some adjustments to the way the bean reacts to physics to reduce frustrations and deliver a more fun gameplay experience. You will still ragdoll when hit by obstacles but you will notice we’ve reduced moments where you ragdoll when you really shouldn’t. An example of this is when you’re going fast, land on your feet and then find yourself rolling on the floor,” says the update announcement. “In addition to this, we’ve increased the speed of getting up and recovering from a knock”.
Players will now also accelerate faster, reach maximum jump height easier, have more control when airborne, and have a landing target on the ground when leaping.
In playing Fall Guys over the past six months, there’s been a distinct sense of playing a live service game with a limp. Battle passes are unexpectedly extended, match player counts are cut and cut again, the official website goes unupdated, and updates go untrailered. These things are, I assume, what happens when your parent company lays off a lot of your staff. I still hope the game has a long future ahead of it, however. Not least because I don’t want to have to explain the concept of death (of live service games) to my son when he’s still so young.
