Interview: Respawn on how Jedi: Survivor expands on Fallen Order ‘in every possible way’

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is finally EA getting Star Wars right.

After 10 years of exclusive licenses for console games set in a galaxy far, far away, the terms of that deal began to expire, and the monolithic publisher had little to prove.

Two games in the Battlefront Reboot series (the second of which faced outrage over microtransactions and rocked the industry, forcing the company to make a U-turn before the game was fully released) have been announced by Uncharted. A string of canceled projects, including projects by industry veterans such as Amy Hennig’s Project Ragtag (which also meant the death of EA’s Visceral Games).

Join Respawn – EA’s premier studio, the massive battle royale hit that managed to keep its course in a market already oversaturated with impeccable giants like Fortnite We’ve just had the success of Apex Legends. Needless to say, Titanfall, his second of his games, was praised for its phenomenal single-player campaign despite its conservative commercial success.

Led by a God of War veteran Stig Asmussen, Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was the story of Cal Kestis. A young Jedi who manages to escape Order 66, the genocide of all but a few Jedi by Emperor Palpatine as he seeks to seize control of the galaxy.

Now a junker on a distant planet, Cal’s latent powers are revealed to him and the sinister Sith Inquisitor who chases him across the galaxy to hunt down the last remaining Jedi.

A solid critical success and massive commercial success, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order gave EA the Star Wars triumph it had been seeking since it was first licensed after the Disney acquisition.

Four years after the pandemic, Respawn is back with Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. This is the continuation of Cal’s journey to discover his place in a universe that has adamantly rejected his race.

I recently had the opportunity to play a game that lasted about 4 hours. You can read our impressions here. Soon after the demo ended, Principal UI Visual Designer Daanish Syed, along with Respawn’s lead his producer Paul Hatfield, on Fallen Order’s building blocks he talked about how Jedi Survivor would evolve. We talked.

“Jedi Survivor is an extension of Fallen Order in every way,” said Syed. “Everything we’ve done and established in that game in terms of story and gameplay exploration has been blown to the extreme.”

Hatfield adds:

“For the first game, it was about mastering what the team was trying to do and building the team from the ground up. We were learning and building the game.

“So in the second game, we were like, ‘Okay, we’ve learned a million things. We’ve heard so much feedback, we’ve got internal feedback and player feedback. Putting it all together, Let’s attach a bow for the second round.

Fallen Order received positive reviews upon launch and did well commercially, but some of the first game’s clunkiness and lack of quality of life kept it high on fans’ wish lists for the second entry. It was nearby.

I asked if there was any specific feedback that stuck with the developers from the first entry.

“A concrete example is a map,” Said replied. “I heard a lot of feedback about it, so I spent a lot of time on the new map.

Hatfield laughed. “There were many [feedback], is really hard to pinpoint. Fast travel is something you’ve all seen and talked about many times in the first project, but ended up not using it.

“It’s all a combination of feedback from players and feedback from developers. There were also some comments about how long the first game was. .”

“In the second game, we were like, ‘Okay, we’ve learned a million things. We’ve heard so much feedback, we’ve got internal feedback and player feedback. Let’s put a bow on for

And big. Previews noted how the game feels like his third entry in the series rather than a sequel. We wondered if Respawn was in danger of trying too many things at once.

“I don’t think so,” Said replied. “In addition to the new ideas that we came up with for this game, there were so many great ideas left over from the first game. .”

“Each department had a bucket list left on the table from the first game that they wanted to expand on,” Hatfield added. We wanted it to be unique, and that was a big thing for the combat team.

“We use the term ‘junk’ internally for anything that doesn’t quite work the way we thought it would in the first game. For this game, I wanted to kill the junk and make it polished.

“It’s always a balance between making sure my scope is checked and being able to polish everything, and making sure everyone is doing their to-do list. It’s been hard, but I’m really happy with where we ended up.”

“Stance is a great example of that,” Said explained. “I think Stigg said that in the first game a full dual he stance was planned, but time ran out, so in Survivor he said that five stances were essential to the game and that’s what we really wanted to do. That was it.”

Our demo was about an hour into the game, and even in its early stages it felt like it opened up a ton of content and side stories that were far from the linearity of the first game. rice field.

Respawn asked how they intended to give players a gentle introduction to all the game’s concepts without feeling like one long tutorial.

Syed replied: I see that the demo has a grappling hook. It’s introduced into the story in such an organic way that it feels less like a tutorial and more like a natural progression of the story.

“I was going to say the exact same thing,” agreed Hatfield. “Like the first level, there’s always something going on. It’s not like a demo level or a checkbox, you’re thrown into this area and the whole world opens up. Naturally you have to get through it and survive I have.”

Jedi Survivor takes place several years after the first game. Our demo didn’t feature Cal with all the unlockable customization styles he earned on his first trip over the Mantis, but one of his popular collections in the first game Fully unlocked. Start – lightsaber color. I asked if this was an intentional change.

“One of the reasons we did this is because we have so many cosmetics and putting crystals in chests doesn’t feel as good as finding mullet or something a little more fun,” Hatfield explained. .

“If people wanted to go in, they liked green lightsabers, and they wanted to play with green lightsabers, we decided it didn’t feel right to lock it up behind something.”

“If people wanted to go in, they liked green lightsabers, and they wanted to play with green lightsabers, we decided it didn’t feel right to lock it up behind something.”

“We were very clear about not taking anything away from the players from the first game,” says Syed. “For example, double blades and single blades are the ones that kick off the game because we had them in the first game, and that was part of our reasoning as well.

The pair said customization was a pillar of the game’s creation and was a big focus for the team responsible for ‘What color poncho do you want?’ Choose from the first game and then expand it with clothing, haircuts and even beards.

Ponchos are fun,” Hatfield smiled. “Teams love them, players love them, but at the same time, they have a lot to offer when it comes to customization. That was a big motivation for us..we wanted to make it completely new.”

Speaking of new, Jedi Survivor ventures into the High Republic, a hitherto largely unexplored realm of Star Wars canon. This is the era of the Star Wars story, which takes place approximately 350 years before the Skywalker saga.

Respawn couldn’t divulge too many details about largely unexplored territory in the Star Wars canon, but the relationship between Respawn and Lucasfilm seems to be a symbiotic one.

“It’s tough when you’re working in parallel with another company and basically developing something at the same time,” says Hatfield.

“What’s exciting is that we can pitch ideas to each other, and I think that’s a huge strength of our partnership with Lucasfilm. If you have an idea, you can go to them and they’ll They give me feedback and vice versa.”