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Why Star Wars Jedi: Survivor doesn’t hit reset on Cal’s combat abilitiesRespawn chat to us about lightsaber colours and Cal’s expanded Force powers
Respawn chat to us about lightsaber colours and Cal’s expanded Force powers
An important Star Wars question is: what colour lightsaber would you have? The lightsaber is the mood ring of elegant weapons for a more civilised age. Jason de Heras, design director onStar Wars Jedi: Survivor, agrees with me on the purple blade (a colour introduced to the canon specifically because Samuel L. Jackson wanted it for his character in the prequels). “I was like, ‘we gotta have a pink lightsaber blade’,” says production director Kasumi Shishido. “So whenever I play I always stick with my pink saber.”
Shishido tells me the dev team focused on improving onJedi: Fallen Orderfor this sequel, and one of the bigger areas where they did that was customisation. “We knew we wanted to put more resources and effort into it,” she says. “There’s a lot more that you can do with Cal, with BD… and just within Cal, it’s not just outfits you can customise, so I’m just really excited to see what players are going to do with it.”
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor - Official Story TrailerWatch on YouTube
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor - Official Story Trailer
“The reason why we chose ‘Survivor’ as the title is that, like, he is a survivor, he survived Vader at the end of Fallen Order, he survived Order 66. He’s gone through so much trauma, and especially at a young age,” says Shishido. “But he’s also met and built relationships with a lot of different people that he cares about. I would say there isn’t aspecificCal, but during these dark times I think he’s constantly conflicted with wanting to run away and wanting to protect people.”
Hair today, gone tomorrow.
The more substantial change Survivor brings to the table, at least in my mind, is the lightsaber combat. Your range has been expanded to include five distinct combat stances here (even though you can only equip two of them at a time), and de Heras says this change is all “tied to story, tied to the pacing of the game, tied to the character progression”. De Heras was the combat lead on Fallen Order, and also the developer who gave us the post-preview demonstration of all the flashy moves Cal can pull off if you actually know what you’re doing with the controls - including a combination Force power and baster dead-eye attack where you can target multiple enemies at once and then shoot all of the stupid suckers.
“You always want to be mindful of enemies taking too many hits,” de Heras explains. “You know, it is a lightsaber. But at the same time it’s a balancing thing with, if everything died in one hit, sure it might be cool for the first five minutes, but, you know… you want to be cautious of that.”
Cal is, after all, a more experienced Jedi Knight now, five years on from his adventure in Fallen Order. But for player purposes you need game difficulty to ramp up, so he can’t be an all-slaying, Force-powerful demi-god right from the off. That opens you up to that 00s buzzphrase of choice, and the old ludonarrative dissonance.
“We don’t want to take away powers from Cal, so you do start with them,” says Shishido. “But since we’re making a brand new game for the sequel, we want to reward players and make sure there’s a nice progression system, where you feel like, as you play through the game, you’re getting more powerful.
“We’re really thoughtful about when exactly, and how, Cal acquires another power or an ability,” she continues, emphasising de Heras' earlier point about everything being closely linked to what’s happening in the game’s plot. “It’s not like you open a box and, like, ‘Oh, I have a new Force power!'”
It’s a measured kind of progression that feels intimately tied to the combat. In my preview build, I was running past big fights to try and see more of the world, but when playing for real they would be encounters that I’d slow down and take my time with, because the skill points are worth the earn. There are, de Heras points out, alotof different enemies in this game, and the team had to make sure that each provided a slightly different challenge. In practice, I often saw groups of B1 combat droids, which you can dismember like a toddler smashing a TV remote and therefore make you feel powerful, paired with a commando droid or two, which are faster, hardier, and have blasters or electrified swords. Stormtrooper squads will come with a couple of Shield Troopers. The mix stops you getting too complacent.
