While publisher EA and developer Respawn Entertainment have been quiet about the Star Wars Jedi series since the 2023 release of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, a new rumour indicates that the companies are getting ready to showcase it some time this year. In a recent episode of the Kinda Funny Gamescast where the hosts were trying to rank the best upcoming titles, Tim Gettys mentioned a new Star Wars Jedi game being in the mix.
“I was thinking about this earlier when I was trying to come up with a game that wouldn’t make this list, and I was thinking about how… ‘received’… the last one was, but the Jedi Survivor sequel I think has a solid chance of coming out this year,” said Gettys in the closing minutes of the episode. “I don’t think it’s a slam dunk… I can see that game being announced in May and coming out in September.”
Other hosts also brought up the fact that the first game in the series, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was announced and released in the same year. Its sequel, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, would then be released just four years later. If a third game in the series were to come out this year, this would give it a development cycle of only three years.
Gettys went on to note that, “I’ve heard some things.”
It is also worth noting that Respawn Entertainment has seen quite a few departures since the release of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, including the game’s director, Stig Asmussen. The studio has also been the subject of some layoffs last year. Senior encounter designer on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Patrick Wren, had taken to social media to talk about how morale at the studio has been at “an all-time low”.
This statement came just a few days after EA had announced lay-offs across its various teams, including the Experiences team, with more than 300 employees being affected.
Stig Asmussen, in the meantime, has founded a new studio, dubbed Giant Skull, and has been working with Wizards of the Coast on a new game based on the Dungeons & Dragons universe. Back in June, he spoke about the studio’s experience with developing strong melee combat, and how the upcoming title will feature better animations than Star Wars Jedi: Survivor thanks to the lack of technical debt associated with those projects.
“We’re experts at melee combat, so that’s something that John [Hight] got to see and it translates very well to D&D,” he said Asmussen, referring to the Wizards of the Coast president that had worked with him on God of War 3. “There’s probably still legacy debt that’s in the Jedi games from bad decisions that we made early on. Some of those bad decisions were based on momentum because we don’t get stuck. We just want to keep on moving forward.”
Along with combat, another key pillar of the project is also going to be traversal. “Traversal is really important to us,” he explained. “Giving the player a suite of different ways to probe and interact with the environment, and eventually build their character up to a point where they’re dominating the environment. It all has to feel silky smooth.”
