Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order hasn’t had the easiest path to tread. In the shadow of the PR mess surrounding Star Wars Battlefront 2’s microtransactions, and the disappointing cancellation of Visceral’s title, the weight of the world’s expectations for a compelling single-player Star Wars game have fallen heavily on Respawn’s shoulders – as if producing a game for one of the world’s biggest franchises wasn’t already pressure enough.
Things didn’t get off to the best start, too, with the first EA Play video underwhelming fans who felt the game looked too linear, and the combat too simple. But soon after, things began to change: journalists went hands-on with the title and reported on its Metroidvania influences and FromSoft-style gameplay, an extended gameplay video was released, and the most recent trailer seems to have gone down well with fans. And, having spent an additional three hours with the game, I’m feeling significantly more confident in its potential. Many of the E3 demo’s problems seem to have been resolved, and it’s starting to show sparks of that wonderful Star Wars charm.
Likely in an effort to keep the story top secret, there’s still an air of mystery surrounding the game – and plenty of questions about the narrative remain. With less than a month left until the game’s release, I spoke with director Stig Asmussen at a Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order preview event in Los Angeles this week to talk about the final stages of development, the team’s philosophy surrounding the writing, and what it means to be working on a canon Star Wars game.
What are the main changes you’ve made since the E3 demo – anything big, or is it pretty much the same with some tweaks?
Stig Asmussen: That’s a good question – since E3 we’ve done a lot of playtesting – we did playtesting before E3, but we’ve done a lot since. And probably the biggest change that we’ve made is difficulty in the game. Most of us at work like a challenge, but we recognise this is Star Wars, [which has] a huge audience, we don’t want anybody to feel left out. So we made some adjustments, we added a new story difficulty mode, overall we kind of tweaked things down a little bit for our default mode. And then we made an even harder mode. And all that was influenced by what we were finding in the playtesting, and iteration.