Star Wars is arguably the biggest multimedia franchise and pop cultural phenomenon in the world, so it goes without saying that millions and millions of people will be looking forward to playing the upcoming Respawn Entertainment-developed Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. And due to that mass appeal inherent with the property, in spite of Fallen Order being a Soulslike game, Respawn are still looking to make sure that their game is as accessible as possible, and doesn’t alienate any players on the basis of challenge and difficulty.
One of the ways the game does that is by having multiple difficulty options, which each catering to different kinds of players- so whether you’re looking to just enjoy the story, or if you’re looking for challenging Sekiro-style combat, Fallen Order wants to deliver on all fronts.
Speaking with Eurogamer, game director Stig Asmussen spoke about this, mentioning that Respawn has done a lot of playtesting to ensure that all difficulty setting remain finely tuned and balanced to make sure the game is appealing to all kinds of players, while also explaining that Respawn added new difficulty settings to the game as part of this process as well.
“Since E3 we’ve done a lot of playtesting – we did playtesting before E3, but we’ve done a lot since,” said Asmussen. “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.”
Difficulty and accessibility have been major topics of conversation in Soulslike games – especially Sekiro, which Fallen Order closely resembles in many ways – so it should be interesting to see how Respawn have tuned and balanced the challenge with their upcoming games.
We’ll be finding out not long from now- Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order recently went gold, and will be out for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC on November 15. Check out its system storage requirements through here.
