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Thoughts on Yooka-Laylee

Hey folks,

I managed to finish Yooka-Laylee today. I haven't quite 100%'d the game yet but I don't think the last few items I have to collect will shift my thinking all that much. Here are my overall thoughts on the game.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the whole game.

I was disappointed. If you've been watching my commentary series on Banjo-Kazooie, then you'll know my interpretation of what that game is: a puzzle-solving exploration adventure. It is a platformer, sure, but that was never the primary focus, and the fact that it emphasized puzzles and exploration over pure platforming was the primary differentiator with Super Mario 64. I could accept a different interpretation of what Banjo tried to accomplish, but frankly I think this is the one that is most supported by the evidence in the actual game. If you're interested in my take and haven't seen the series, you can catch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mObPctBa5I&list=PLeXqRpNaAo9hoc7Rimb_zHzjdC97Xk1Oh

Yooka-Laylee heavily de-emphasizes exploration as a primary game mechanic. IMHO, the following three decisions are key to this:

-- five expandable worlds instead of nine or ten fixed-size ones (probably a result of resourcing - easier to re-use assets of an existing world and just build more stuff out of them)
-- main characters that are fast and mechanically strong
-- very large world size and sprawling level design

All three work against exploration. In order to make an exploration adventure work, the world needs to be compelling, it needs to be dense, the designer needs to be very meticulous about the path the player takes through the world so they don't forget something and they don't backtrack too much. Banjo solved this problem with small worlds and slow, plodding characters. That's not the only solution - for instance, Morrowind is massive but still facilitated exploration through a bunch of different design decisions, like a huge variety of exotic environments, static item placements and leveling, foraging and in-the-field crafting via alchemy, etc. My point is just to say that exploration is a first-class feature that needs to be actually designed and implemented, it's not a mere side effect of building a level.

The expansion mechanic hurts exploration because it's difficult to remember what areas got expanded and what didn't. As a result, you end up traversing the entire level again to see where the new content is and what you've missed. The problem here is your motivation. In Banjo-Kazooie, the primary goal was exploration and adventure. A side effect of exploring the entire level in full was collecting all of its items. The items themselves weren't the point. This is how the game manages to require 85% of the total musical notes in the game to reach the game's primary ending (the quiz) and 90% to reach the game's final ending (or 98% if you don't want to struggle with the fight). By contrast, in Yooka you are just hunting around for mini-games rather than genuinely exploring the world.

For what it's worth, this is primarily an implementation problem. If the expansion mechanic had simply appended a new area to the side of the existing world rather than modifying what was there, it wouldn't have been so bad. This is how Moodymaze Marsh and Glitterglaze Glacier were done and for me they were the best designed levels in the game.

The speed and mechanical strength of Yooka and Laylee is a pleasure while platforming but also made it too difficult for the level designers to make the worlds genuinely dense. It's so easy to simply run by things that I'd guess the worlds were made sparse to compensate. The lack of density, unfortunately, is self-reinforcing: it tells the player that they are safe to just zoom through worlds and not really pay attention to their surroundings. This isn't conducive to exploration. I think this is why the designers placed Trowzer in a very obvious location at the center or beginning of each world and had him sell all of each world's moves at once. Relative to the excitement of finding Bottles in a world, this was disappointing.

Finally, the worlds are just too big. Again, I'd say this is a consequence of how fast the main characters are, but it could also have been a marketing or simple aesthetic design decision as well. In any case, the worlds are sprawling open areas with relatively little content within them, and they feel empty. The game environment almost feels sterile. There are too many moments in the game where you can see everything thanks to the strong draw distance and get a sudden feeling of complete emptiness. You could call this a polish issue - that Playtonic simply didn't have enough time to put in enough content - but personally I see it as a deeper flaw in the level design. If you simply added more challenges or cosmetic items it would feel too busy given the speed of the main characters. I think in order to make such large worlds feel dense you'd need to re-organize the way that they're laid out rather than add new content.

When you take all three of these factors and combine them together, the result - for me at least - was that the worlds were not interesting to explore. I distinctly remember the moment when I first came to this realization: the tile matching game in Capital Cashino. The exact same game appears in the original Banjo-Kazooie, back in Gobi's Valley. Players enter the room by hitting a switch on top of the Pyramid, making it feel like a tomb. The music within is quieter and slower and creates a sense of tension. There's a Mummy in there, the first invulnerable enemy players will encounter in the game. Both entering the room and the game itself are timer-based, aligning with the feeling of tension and the tomb atmosphere.

It's not a ton, but it's coherent relative to the desert environment, it made sense, and it's not done anywhere else in the game.

The equivalent in Capital Cashino is just a random mini-game, randomly plopped down in the middle of the level. There's no reason for it to be there except that this is a collectible platformer and you need to collect things, so here's a challenge that'll give you something.

It's a genuine credit to the platforming design that it took so long to become acutely aware of these issues. Where Yooka-Laylee falters as an exploration adventure, it shines as a pure platformer. Yooka and Laylee are a sheer pleasure to control: fast and very responsive. In many instances you can complete a section without learning the requisite move if you have strong mechanical skill, such as the gliding game in Tribalstack Tropics and using the lamp in Glitterglaze Glacier to get to the top of the ramp without the high jump. There are also a bunch of areas where there are multiple valid ways of accomplishing the same task depending on your preference. This happens so often that it couldn't have been an accident, and it allows players to bring their own style and skill into the game and have fun with it.

If there's any one section that epitomizes what Yooka-Laylee is to me, it's the Icymmetric Palace. From the perspective of exploration, it's a travesty. It's just a bunch of mini-games randomly glued together in order to provide collectibles. From the perspective of a pure platformer, it's a pretty good time. There's quite a bit of depth and variety to the challenges. The boss fight in particular is a lot of fun. Stuff like this is the reason I'd happily play a Yooka-Laylee 2, even if it's far removed from being a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie it's still a good platformer.

Those are the high-level bullet points: a disappointment as an adventure and a good time as a platformer. Good but not great. Some other comments that are not as important but nonetheless came to mind:

-- air bubble mechanic was a brilliant way of building water sections. interplay between swimming / air bubble was fantastic.
-- didn't like trowzer's placements, but enjoyed how he was written as a character. imho the best written and animated npc in the game.
-- felt very little attachment to yooka and laylee as characters. not sure why the tutorial focused on collecting stuff. Banjo was brilliant in that it had players get to know the characters first, had them compete to get moves and all that. this again made the game feel like an adventure because it built player attachment to the protagonists.
-- transformations felt phoned in. honestly don't know what happened here. in the original game they were great because they solved an ubiquitous problem in the surrounding world (pumpkin excluded), so you got to re-engage with the world in a new way. in yooka they are just random excuses to build more mini-games and feel difficult to control to boot.
-- flying skill trivialized the late game. I was baffled when I unlocked this skill and it was the last nail in the "exploration" coffin. don't even need to walk anymore, just fly from mini-game to mini-game!
-- eating vs. collecting butterflies was an incredibly cool and clever solution to refilling health/energy without having a health item and an energy item.
-- early game is too explanatory and too heavy on dialogue. I wonder if this was in response to reviews.
-- kartos and rextro felt like an overdose on nostalgia. tropical freeze does mine kart levels better and a couple of rextro's games weren't fun, at least for me. and forcing the player to do them twice was unnecessary.

I had put together a much more detailed script in preparation for a YouTube video explaining my views on the game. But I decided to just put out this short blog. I'd rather focus my time on projects that I'm really interested in about games that I'm really excited about. Yooka is what it is and for the folks who like it, why make a video tearing it down unless I have a compelling reason to do so, and at this time I don't.

On that note, the next Banjo in-depth will come out in a week or two and then I will continue working on my StarCraft project and perhaps one other video.

Thanks folks and all the best!
brownbear