Stig Asmussen, the director behind Respawn Entertainment’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and its recent sequel has left publisher Electronic Arts for unspecified reasons.
10 Creatures We Wanna Ride In Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
2019’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was a huge hit, selling millions of copies and garnering rave reviews from critics and fans. Earlier this year, the game’s sequel, Jedi: Survivor, debuted to equally positive reviews and sales. Both games were seen by many as a huge improvement over EA’s previous Star Wars output, which included multiplayer shooters and canceled projects. And now, the man who helped lead development on the Jedi games is no longer with Respawn or the studio’s parent company EA.
When asked about the departure, EA provided Kotaku with this statement:
After careful thought and consideration, Stig Asmussen has decided to leave Respawn to pursue other adventures, and we wish him the best of luck. Veteran Respawn leaders will be stepping up to guide the team as they continue their work on Star WarsJedi: Survivor.
The specific reason for Asmussen’s departure is not yet known. His exit from Respawn, at least from the outside, does seem surprising, as the Jedi games have been considered huge successes for EA and its stewardship of Star Wars. His sudden exit seems even more surprising when you consider that, according to Asmussen, the Jedi series of games was always meant to be a trilogy, implying a third game is coming in the future.
In March, a month before the launch of Jedi: Survivor,Asmussen told IGNthat he “always wanted to see [the Jedi saga] as a trilogy.” He explained further that the team had “ideas of what we could do beyond [Jedi: Survivor].”
While it’s very likely EA and Respawn will develop a third game in the popular franchise, completing the presumably planned trilogy, it will seemingly be without the director who helped make the first two chapters memorable.
Respawn and Electronic Arts’ popular single-player Star Wars sequel, Jedi: Survivor, is making the leap from current-gen to the older PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles.
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Launched in April, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is the follow-up to 2019’s Jedi: Fallen Order. In this most recent Star Wars adventure from Titanfall devs Respawn, players again take on the role of Cal Kestis, a Jedi who survived the purge during the end of the Clone Wars as a young boy and who now hangs out with his ragtag found family of misfits as they try to free the galaxy from the Empire’s clutches. This very good follow-up originally skipped last-gen consoles in order to, in the words of the game’s director, offer up a “true new-gen experience.” But now, Cal Kestis is coming to a PS4 near you.
EA didn’t specify when these last-gen ports would be released and declined to offer any extra details to Kotaku.
The publisher clarified that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s current versions weren’t going to be left behind, and confirmed that “additional performance improvements” for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC still remained a “top priority” for Respawn. It also promised to share more about these improvements “as soon as the next update is ready.” This is good news, as the game still suffers from performance issues after previous updates helped, but didn’t quite fix, framerate drops and in-game stuttering.
For many, the news that EA is bringing Jedi: Survivor to PS4 and Xbox One will be surprising. While it makes sense from a financial standpoint—those older machines still have millions of dedicated players in 2023—it seems at odds with what Respawn said before the game’s launch.
Specifically, the game’s director Stig Asmussen explained the reason for skipping PS4 and Xbox One was so the team could deliver a “true new-gen experience in the Star Wars universe.” It seems Respawn is also willing to lower the resolution and framerate limits to accommodate the older hardware.
It’s also interesting that the game is coming to older, less powerful machines since Jedi: Survivor seemed to push the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S harder than most games. I’m curious how well the game will run on much older hardware, in particular the base Xbox One, which is rather long in the tooth. These consoles are almost a decade old, now.
Rick the Door Technician might not be the most powerful or dangerous enemy in Respawn’s fantastic sequel,Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. But he is a fan favorite who, in a game filled with great boss fights, provided one of the game’s most memorable and shortest.
10 Creatures We Wanna Ride In Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
Fairly late into Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s main campaign, while exploring a large Imperial base, your protagonist, Jedi warrior Cal Kestis, runs into a single stormtrooper. Right before this, Kestis had to fight off a large garrison of Imperial baddies in one of the game’s biggest, toughest fights. After surviving all that, and likely injured with no checkpoint, you encounter a new boss: Rick the Door Technician. While another boss encounter seems like an unfair challenge after such a big fight, this lone trooper is really just a joke character who Kestis can defeat with one hit. So why is he here? Well, according to Respawn, he was created to make you laugh and feel better after a tough fight. Isn’t that nice of Rick?
In an interview with IGN, Jonathan Wright, the lead encounter designer at Respawn, explained the origin behind this odd “boss fight.” After that very large fight, players were stressed out, as Respawn purposely designed that section to be even tenser by not including a checkpoint. This makes players nervous about what’s coming next, as they desperately search for a checkpoint. While this all worked to create a tense moment, Repsawn wanted to eventually provide something that would “be a release of all that built-up tension.” Its solution: making players laugh.
Fuzzy Bearbarian / Respawn
“Players have just come from an extremely hard fight. Players are more than likely very low on health at this point, and are probably very stressed with finding the next meditation point so they can rest,” said Wright. “The moment with Rick allowed us to build up another moment of tension as players think they are in for another hard fight, but then release all that built-up stress when they fully realize the moment with Rick. It’s a good emotional reset to prepare players for what is to come.”
This is all part of Respawn’s effort to balance the mostly serious narrative and events in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor with moments of humor. According to Wright, this balance is what makes the jokes “land.”
“The seriousness of the rest of the game is what makes the more humorous moments land,” said Wright. “The contrast between funny and serious elevates both kinds of moments. We knew that the moment with Rick was important because of this.”
Respawn didn’t expect people to fall in love with Rick
However, nobody at Respawn could have predicted how fans would react to Rick, quickly embracing the character and creating fan art, mods, and other content based on the lonely stormtrooper who tried to stop Cal Kestis. The character has become one of the most talked about moments in the game, and has players asking for more of Rick the Door Technician. (It would probably have to be in a prequel, considering what happens to him…)
Wright told IGN that seeing all the fan love and community support for Rick has been “indescribable” and that he “never imagined [Rick] would explode in popularity to this extent.”
“To me, there is no greater achievement than something you had a hand in creating [then inspiring] other people to be creative,” said Wright. “All the comments on videos from people describing their experience with Rick’s heroic last stand, all the jokes and the memes, the videos and stories, it’s all a spark of creativity that started with Rick and I think that is amazing.”
As for if Rick will return, as so many Star Wars Jedi: Survivor fans have asked about, Wright told IGN that it isn’t his call, but he added that he doesn’t think more Rick content is “needed.”
“Rick’s story already has a valiant ending,” said Wright. “The explosion in popularity and fan creativity shows that we already did a good enough job with Rick. Let players have fun with it and let people be creative with Rick’s backstory in their own minds.”
I still haven’t gotten around to playing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order or its new (apparently fraught) sequel Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, but the more I see of the game’s extensive fashion and customization options for protagonist Cal Kestis, the more tempted I feel. However, one Jedi rebel hairstyle is getting a lot of attention online, and that’s the mullet. It turns Cal from a spacefaring twink into a good, ol’ fashioned (still spacefaring) lover of beer, blasters, and the Second Amendment.
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Though I’ve seen all the movies and played several games, I’m not a Star Wars fan. But I am a fan of Shameless actor Cameron Monaghan, who both voices and performs the Jedi and provides Cal’s face. As a gay man who lived in the rural south most of his life, I find his Shameless character Ian Gallagher incredibly relatable as he sorts through his identity, the conservative expectations of Middle America, and how he deals with patriotism in a country that does not care about people like him. Because I latched on so heavily to his character during my ongoing marathon of the show on Netflix, I’m drawn to Jedi: Survivor for the actor at its center more than any of the other good things the game has to offer. But looking at Monaghan with a mullet and mutton chops feels like looking into an alternate universe in which Ian never overcame the expectations enough to become his own person, and fell hard into some right-wing, gun-nut mentality. It’s unsettling, but I can’t look away, especially as jokes about the mullet are spreading online.
Cal looks extremely silly with the mullet in context, but that hasn’t stopped fans from latching onto the lewk and making jokes about the intersection of Star Wars lore and conservative, good ol’ boy politics.
The quote retweets on this tweet showing Cal in his full space redneck persona are full of zingers.
Ultimately, as much psychic damage as it does to me to see Ian Gallagher with a mullet, the jokes have been very good, and it does speak to how much customization Jedi: Survivor allows. Between this and the game’s scene-stealing alien, Turgle, I keep finding new reasons to maybe jump into Respawn’s take on a galaxy far, far away. Maybe after I finish Shameless and the rest of the Summer Games Hell is over.
‘Tis truly a bountiful season for Star Wars fans! We’ve got the Star Wars live-action television series from Disney+ with season three of The Mandalorian coming soon after Andor’s recent season 1 ending. Their animated docket is also full, with a new season of Star Wars: The Bad Batch coming on the heels of this fall’s Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi animated anthology series. Star Wars has also had great success with their foray into video games, especially with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. So what’s going on with its sequel, Jedi: Survivor, and did we just find out its release date via Steam?
As fans might recall, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order takes place five years after Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. The game follows a former padawan, Cal Kestis, who managed to survive Order 66 and is now being hunted by two Imperial Inquisitors (Second Sister and Ninth Sister) and Darth Vader. He is tasked with tracking down a Holocron that holds the names of force-sensitive children across the galaxy before the Inquisitors can get their hands on it. By the end of the game, Kestis has rescued the Holocron, and his partner, Cere (a former Jedi Knight), has reconciled with her former padawan, Trilla … a.k.a. Second Sister. Unfortunately though, Vader kills Trilla for failing to stop Cere and Kestis. Cal decides to destroy the Holocron in an effort to keep the force-sensitive children on its list safe.
When will Star Wars Jedi: Survivor be released?
(Image: EA/Respawn)
New rumors rocked the gaming world and Fallen Order fans in early December 2022, when screenshots from the game were supposedly leaked. The screenshots reveal an alleged release date of March 15, 2023. Other sites also reported rumors that the game would be releasing March 16, 2023, based on information on the game’s Steam page that has since been removed. The Jedi: Survivor site has deleted any information regarding the release, so we can only speculate on whether or not the rumors of a mid-March release date are true. After all, it was also rumored that the release date would be officially announced during the 2022 Game Awards on Thursday, December 8!
And the rumor about the release date being revealed during the Game Awards turned out to be correct! Stars Wars Jedi: Survivor dropped the official reveal trailer during the ceremony! Along with the trailer was the official release date: March 17, 2023! So get your lightsabers ready because March is only a few months away!
What else do we know about Star Wars Jedi: Survivor?
Rumors about Star Wars Jedi: Survivor have been circulating ever since EA announced not one but three new Star Wars games: a first-person shooter, a strategy game, and a sequel to Jedi: Fallen Order. One rumor (from Bespin Bulletin) that has been proven correct was the announcement of Fallen Order‘s sequel at Star Wars Celebration 2022. The new sequel, titled Star Wars Jedi: Survivor was announced during the event’s festivities along with a new teaser trailer.
The new game will continue to follow the young Jedi Cal Kestis as he tries to escape the Empire. The new trailer was light on plot, but we gleaned some important details. Cal seems to have lost not only the found family of allies that he gained during Fallen Order, but it seems his lightsaber has fallen into the hands of the Inquisitors. Speaking of which, it appears that the Grand Inquisitor is going to be coming after Cal directly.
Along with the teaser trailer, it was announced that the game will be releasing officially in 2023. However, a specific date was not given. The game will be coming to next-gen consoles like PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, but the rumors circulating that the game will only be released on those platforms was neither confirmed nor denied. It is quite possible that players who still use PS4 and Xbox One will be out of luck if they want to play Jedi: Survivor. This is a frustrating possibility for many gamers, considering that there is still a shortage of current-gen consoles on the market, and PS5s are still incredibly hard to come by.
