Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order received its full gameplay reveal at E3 this year, and while it looked solid enough, there were many who were displeased with how much of an ordinary third person action adventure title it looked like. Following its reveal though, impressions started coming in that praised the game’s metroidvania level design, or talked about how much its combat resembled that of something like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice– leaving many to wonder why all these things hadn’t been shown off at E3 instead.
While those that were watching EA Play 2019 got to watch a fifteen minute slice of combat and set pieces, a behind-closed-doors demo played by the press went deeper into the aforementioned aspects. Now, to show off the game properly, EA and Respawn have released that demo, showing 25 minutes of gameplay footage that is probably a lot more representative of what the final game will be like than its E3 showing was. Take a look below.
Meanwhile, the gameplay footage is also accompanied by letter written to the fans by game director Stig Asmussen, in which he starts off by talking about why EA and Respawn went with the sort of demonstration that they did.
“We spent months going back and forth discussing the best strategy to release this content, and ultimately decided for the first-look, it was critical to present a focused 15 minutes of raw, in-game footage highlighting lightsaber gameplay that speaks to the Jedi fantasy in an empowering way,” Asmussen writes. He then went on to speak of everything from the combat, to the game’s difficulty, to its metroidvania-inspired design philosophy, and a whole lot else.
“But it should not be mistaken that our combat is overpowered or easy,” he writes. “I promise there is considerable challenge and depth to be found within our combat system. The same can be said about our approach to level design, which is crafted in a non-linear way with heavy influences from games like Metroid, Castlevania, and the Souls series. The game will feature several planets that the player can elect to travel to via starship. On these worlds unique abilities and upgrades can be found that open up new paths across other planets, making retraversal an essential part of the gameplay experience. This is a lot to describe in 15 minutes of gameplay. Getting hands on the full 25 minute experience is best to completely understand it.”
“We would like to share the full demo video with all of you,” Asmussen prefaces the demo with. “The top of the demo showcases a hand-crafted sequence we refer to internally as a Star Wars™ moment. Midway through look out for a small peek into our planet hopping system, an example of an upgrade/acquire, as well as our Metroid inspired map (in action). We sincerely hope you enjoy!”
Hopefully this gives us a much better idea of what the game’s actually going to be like. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is out on November 15 for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Head on over here to find out why it’s being developed on the Unreal Engine 4 instead of EA’s go-to engine for pretty much everything, Frostbite.