“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 noted 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 launch this year, this would mean 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 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 and 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 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.”

“We’re experts at melee combat, so that’s something that John got to see and it translates very well to D&D,” said Asmussen, referring to Wizards of the Coast president John Hight who previously 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.”

It is worth noting that Asmussen’s team at Respawn Entertainment had worked on Unreal Engine 4 to develop Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and its sequel Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. In this interview, he spoke about how Giant Skull is trying to avoid tech debt by making sure that it doesn’t bring over any of the bad decisions that were made with the Jedi games by starting with “vanilla Unreal”. Ultimately, this clean slate allowed the studio to make a “motion model” that ends up being much faster and smoother than what we saw in the two Star Wars Jedi titles.

“When we started Giant Skull and we started with vanilla Unreal, we couldn’t take what we did with the Jedi games over to a new company. So, all of those mistakes that we had made before weren’t there. We had a clean slate and we were able to build very quickly based on all of our learnings over the years before. That’s allowed us to create a motion model that’s so much faster now, so much more fluid. And it doesn’t have points where you get blocked because you don’t understand how to fix jank. It’s buttery smooth.”

While no other details about this Dungeons & Dragons title developed by Giant Skull have been revealed so far, this emphasis on having high-quality animations for melee combat would indicate that it will be a hack-and-slash game. When the title was announced, some of the words used to describe it were “immersive storytelling”, “heroic combat”, and “exhilarating traversal”. Asmussen noted in the interview that traversal would be a major part of the upcoming title’s gameplay.

“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.”

The new title is being developed using Unreal Engine 5, and will likely come to PC and modern consoles.

Speaking during the company’s recent Investors Day 2024 presentation, EA’s president of entertainment and technology Laura Miele revealed that Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor have collectively seen over 40 million players to date.

Individual figures weren’t provided for the two titles. Fallen Order stood at 20 million players as of June 2021, while player numbers haven’t been provided for its sequel to date. Following its launch last year, however, EA did confirm that it was selling better than expected. Meanwhile, with a PS4 and Xbox One release coming up, Jedi: Survivor is likely to keep seeing increasing player numbers.

EA has also confirmed that the next and final instalment in the Star Wars Jedi series is also in development.

As an exclusively single player, narrative driven game, Star Wars Outlaws is shaping up to be a very different kind of experience compared to what Massive Entertainment has traditionally been known for, while the same can be said on the gameplay front as well, where, rather than the loot driven RPG progression of The Division, Outlaws is going for an action adventure experience that seems to be inspired by Uncharted, while also being set in a massive, seamless, interstellar, open world map.

But though Massive likely will not have been able to look to its past works for solutions to new problems during Outlaws’ development on more than a few occasions, there are several other games out there that the game and its development team could and should have taken cues from. For instance, one direct and obvious point of comparison that can actually serve as a useful yardstick to measure Outlaws against is the Star Wars Jedi series by Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment.

At first glance, many might be tempted to dismiss that notion. Sure, both are single player Star Wars games, but in so many ways, they are entirely different experiences. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Survivor are both Metroidvania games with linear an semi linear levels, with combat being almost entirely melee focused (especially in the first game) and revolving around fulfilling players’ childhood Jedi fantasies. Star Wars Outlaws, on the other hand, is going to be an open world game with ranged combat and stealth mechanics stemming from a protagonist that’s better described as a rogue scoundrel than an honourable warrior of justice.

From combat to progression, from level design to the general structure of the experience, in some rather significant ways, Star Wars Outlaws would be best served looking at other experiences, from the likes of Mass Effect and the aforementioned Uncharted to even something recent like Starfield. But while Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Survivor don’t have an awful lot in common with Outlaws in some major areas, there are ways that Respawn Entertainment’s games do have some very obvious lessons to teach games releasing in their wake.

Because, at the end of the day, Star Wars Outlaws is a AAA single player story driven Star Wars game, which means the expectations that it’s trying to live up to are going to be very similar to the ones that the Jedi games do, even if they are so wildly different from each other in so many significant ways. With Fallen Order and Survivor, even though Respawn did not set the world on fire with revelatory stories, they did earn a lot of well earned plaudits for more than serviceable storytelling, writing, characters, and of course, authenticity in capturing and adapting the Star Wars universe and its very distinct flavour.

Star Wars Outlaws is going to have to do all of that, and there should be little doubt in anyone’s mind that more than a few critics and players are going to be comparing it to Respawn and EA’s recent Star Wars outings, even if it is on a subconscious level, if only thanks to the fact that the Jedi games are the most recent and prominent examples of this kind of a Star Wars experience. That, of course, means that Massive Entertainment’s game is going to have to ensure that it is at least matching (or coming close to) the strengths of the Jedi games in the storytelling department, because anything less is likely going to be viewed as a disappointment, for the plain and simple fact that we have seen recent examples of single player story driven Star Wars games done right.

Of course, being billed as the ultimate Star Wars scoundrel fantasy, Outlaws’ vibe and tone are going to be very different from the Jedi games, but it’s going to have to create its world as convincingly and with as much authenticity, while also ensuring that it can get players legitimately invested in protagonist Kay Vess and the cast of characters surrounding her. After all, characters are more often than not the heart and soul of the best Star Wars stories, so if Outlaws is hoping to strike a chord with players with the story that it’s telling, it’s going to have to ensure that it has well written and well acted characters populating that story.

Beyond the story-related stuff, I suppose it would be fair to point out that another obvious lesson Star Wars Outlaws can take from Jedi: Survivor in particular is to avoid a technically rough launch- though really, that’s a lesson that all games should take, regardless of whether or not they carry the Star Wars license. Many who’ve played Survivor will tell you that it is a legitimately fantastic game, more so than the larger perception surrounding it would have you believe. That, however, has been drowned out by what were ultimately entirely valid criticisms of the extremely rough technical state that the game launched in on all platforms (and, hell, it continued to be in that state for far longer than it should have been). Perhaps if it had released with the level of polish and optimization that players expect, its core strengths would have been able to shine through much better.

That, obviously, is a pitfall that Star Wars Outlaws needs to avoid, though whether or not it will succeed is anyone’s guess. Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment have earned their reputations for having delivered more than a few technically rough games over the years, and more often than not, gameplay footage released for Star Wars Outlaws has drawn criticism from some corners over perceived technical deficiencies and polish issues. Of course, the game is still not out yet, so the hope is that between now and release, Massive Entertainment will have polished the heck out of it, especially since the game has already gone gold, which means polish and bug fixing is what the developer is going to be focused on for the time being anyway.

To say that expectations surrounding Star Wars Outlaws are going to be high would be an understatement, even if there are some who are heading into the game with a healthy amount of skepticism- but if the game is to meet those high expectations, or even prove those aforementioned skeptics wrong, it’s going to have to knock the ball out of the park in more than a few areas. And when it comes to some in particular – especially the storytelling department – it’ll be crucial that the game doesn’t fall short of the standards that the Jedi titles have set in terms of the minimum level of quality a modern AAA single player Star Wars game should hit.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Monaghan confirmed the same during a panel at Ocala Comic Con, where he said (transcription via VGC), “We’re working on a third and we’re in the process of doing that right now. That’s a big undertaking and there have been some conversations so far, but hopefully when all things and said and done we’ll be able to go in and make something really cool.”

This isn’t the first indication that we’ve had that a sequel to Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is already in the works. EA CEO Andrew Wilson said recently that the company would “love” to continue working on the series, while in July, job ads by developer Respawn Entertainment suggested that work on the next instalment was underway.

Earlier this year, Stig Asmussen, director of both Star Wars Jedi games, said that he’d always seen the series’ story as a trilogy. Recently, however, it was announced that Asmussen had left Respawn Entertainment.

Work will continue on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor with “veteran Respawn leaders” guiding the team. It’s currently working on porting the action-adventure title to PS4 and Xbox One while further improving performance on current-gen consoles and PC. A recent patch “completely reworked” its 60 FPS mode on consoles to generally positive results.

As for what this means for the future of the Star Wars Jedi series, Asmussen has previously said he “always wanted to see this as a trilogy” while indicating that the team could eventually shift to Unreal Engine 5 for development. EA CEO Andrew Wilson also said he would “love” to see more from the franchise and that the publisher has an “incredible relationship” with Disney and LucasArts. Recent job listings have also suggested that work on the next instalment might already be underway.

Time will tell, as always, so stay tuned for further updates in the future. Check out our review for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor in the meantime.

Speaking during a recent quarterly earnings call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said that though the company doesn’t yet have anything concrete to announce, given the success that the Jedi games have enjoyed and the strong relationship that EA has with Disney and Lucasfilm, he would “love” to see more games in Respawn’s series.

“We don’t have anything to announce today, but, we have an incredible partnership with Disney and Lucas,” Wilson said (via Techraptor). “We’ve had incredible success in that partnership across the Battlefront and the Star Wars Jedi franchises and absolutely with Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes. Our teams are always thinking about what are new experiences that we might be able to create. Certainly, I would love to see more in the in the Jedi franchise over time. It’s just an extraordinary game that tells an extraordinary story.”

Wilson went on to further illustrate that EA has enjoyed success with Star Wars beyond the Jedi games as well – with more likely on the way courtesy of Jedi: Survivor’s in-development PS4 and Xbox One versions – and that the company will to “explore” opportunities for the property across both single player games and live service experiences.

“We may be a little biased, but our sense based on the feedback we’re getting from our community and the quality of [Star Wars Jedi: Survivor], is that it’s one of the great beats in the Star Wars galaxy this year, and will likely continue to be a very meaningful part of that galaxy for many years to come,” he said. “As we bring it to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, we think they’ll be another little bump there for the franchise.

“[There’s] nothing to announce today other than we have an incredible relationship with Disney. We’ve had incredible success so far in that partnership, and to the extent that we can find new opportunities to execute against new experiences, including live services, as part of that partnership, we will explore them.”

Recent job listings have suggested that Respawn Entertainment has, in fact, already started working on a sequel to Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Stig Asmussen, the director of both Jedi games, has also previously said he views the series as a trilogy. All of which is to say that a third Star Wars Jedi title is more than a little likely, even if it’s not outright concretely confirmed yet.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. A release date is currently unknown for the PS4 and Xbox One versions.

At least that’s what a group of recent job listings published by Respawn suggest. As spotted by Tech4gamers, the developer has ads up for a number of open positions on the Star Wars Jedi team that suggest that work is ramping up on the next instalment in the series.

The listing for Senior VFX Artist also mentions experience with Unreal Engine 5 as “a big plus” for the applicant, suggesting the next Star Wars Jedi title could upgrade from UE4, while the Senior Combat Designer listing does the same for “a passion for melee combat systems”. Meanwhile, the listing for Principal Game Writer briefly describes the project as “a fun, third-person action-adventure setting.”

Earlier this year, shortly before the launch of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, director Stig Asmussen said that he always viewed the series’ story as a trilogy, and that it would “a pretty safe assumption” that the next instalment’s development would migrate to Unreal Engine 5. Shortly after Survivor’s launch, EA confirmed that its sales were pacing strongly against the company’s expectations.

In our review of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, we awarded it a score of 9/10, saying, “Its performance leaves something to be desired, but Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is still an essential experience for genre fans and Star Wars fanatics.” Read the full review through here.

Respawn Entertainment is currently working on a narrative-driven FPS set in the Star Wars universe, in addition to collaborating with Bit Reactor on a Star Wars strategy game.

Interestingly enough, however, EA has started pivoting away from that. Live services and multiplayer still obviously remain a massive (and even primary) focus for the company, and its aforementioned recent change in strategy hasn’t been too drastic, but in recent years, it’s become clearer and clearer as time has gone on that EA is, impossibly enough, beginning to see the value of single player games once again. It’s the sort of pivot that none of us really expected to see from EA, of all companies, but we have to give credit where credit is due- because the publisher has already put out a number of great games that cater to solo players to varying degrees – games that have also been considerable commercial successes for it – while it still has several more in the pipeline.

This started, of course, with the launch of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order in 2019, which in so many ways was exactly the sort of game you wouldn’t expect a company like EA to make. Open world? Multiplayer? Microtransactions? Live serve elements? It had none of that. With Fallen Order, developer Respawn Entertainment focused exclusively on telling the story it wanted to tell in a single player Metroidvania experience. And it was excellent. Though not without its issues, the action-adventure title was praised by critics and audiences alike, while the level of commercial success it enjoyed also proved to EA the one thing that so many had been telling the company for years- single player games, especially well-made ones, will always hold the potential for great critical and commercial success.

So far, 2023 has seen EA doubling down on that with a couple more significant single player releases, with the Dead Space remake launching in January and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor releasing in April. Both games are stellar in their own right- Dead Space is an incredible remake of one of the best survival horror games ever made, while Jedi: Survivor builds upon the foundations of its predecessor with significant improvements across the board. Both have enjoyed widespread praise (even if Jedi: Survivor did endure some backlash due to the technical state it launched in), while both have also sold well. Dead Space, for instance, was the second best-selling game in the US in January, while EA recently confirmed that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is “pacing very strongly” against its expectations.

In addition to these games, meanwhile, the company has also released a number of games that might not be exclusively single player, but do certainly cater to that audience to great degrees. For instance, Star Wars Squadrons’ multiplayer component was obviously a big part of the experience, but it also had a solid single player campaign who just wanted to experience a cool new Star Wars story. Then there’s Need for Speed Unbound, where, again, multiplayer is a core component of the game, but still something that’s easily ignorable for someone who just wants to play a well-made solo experience. The same can also be said of Wild Hearts, which was published under the EA Original label earlier this year.

And looking ahead to the future, it’s clear to see that there’s still plenty more to come. In July, for starters, we’re getting Ascendant Studios’ Immortals of Aveum, published under the EA Originals label, which is promising to be a big, ambitious, narrative-driven single player magic shooter. There’s Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, a game that was reportedly set to feature live service elements in the early stages of its development, but ended up pivoting away from that to focus solely on crafting a solo RPG experience. EA recently confirmed that that won’t be coming out until sometime after April 2024, so clearly it’s still a ways away, but if Dreadwolf can get to the level of quality that we know BioWare can deliver, it’ll be a game worth keeping an eye on. Of course, BioWare also has a new Mass Effect game in the works, but it’s safe to assume that that is a long, long way off.

Meanwhile, Dead Space developer Motive Studio is also currently working on a single player narrative-drive action-adventure Iron Man game. Gaming audiences have clearly gotten sick of superhero IPs being wasted on live service experiences, as evidenced by the critical panning of the likes of Marvel’s Avengers and Gotham Knights and the pre-launch backlash against Suicide Kill: The Justice League, so to see an EA-developed Iron Man game choosing to do the smart thing and instead focus on a solo experience is an incredibly refreshing change of pace.

There’s evidence of EA’s increasingly lessening aversion to single player elsewhere as well. For instance, Respawn Entertainment is currently working on a Star Wars FPS, and while that may very well end up having some multiplayer elements, back when it was first confirmed to be in development, game director Peter Hirschmann described it as “a story [he] always wanted to tell.” Significantly enough, the studio also described the title in a recent job listing as a “story-driven single player game”. Beyond that, you also have something like Battlefield, which, after having ditched a campaign in its most recent instalment, has now seen EA establishing an entire new studio that’ll be dedicated solely to developing single player campaigns for the series.

In fact, even going into the rumour mill, you can see future solo titles that EA could potentially work on, or could already be working on. Last year, for instance, leaks emerged claiming that EA has a single player open world Black Panther game in the works. Meanwhile, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor director Stig Asmusses said shortly before its launch that his aim had always been to make a trilogy– and given the success that Jedi: Survivor is enjoying, it wouldn’t surprise us in the slightest to see EA greenlight another instalment to round off Respawn’s Jedi trilogy. Then there’s Dead Space, where, sure, we don’t have any overt evidence of future instalments, but do have plenty of evidence of the fact that developer Motive Studio wants to keep working on the franchise, and already has ideas for its future.

This wasn’t a position that any of us would have expected EA to be in until not too long ago. It was the company you’d least expect to be investing in big-budget single player games, so to see it once again beginning to see the value of that side of gaming has been one of the most pleasant surprises in the industry in recent years. Sure, live services are still the bulk of EA’s business, and obviously, that’s always going to be the case- but we’re finally at a point where the company has figured out that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. As long as the games are well-made, both styles can coexist.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

As revealed by GamesIndustry’s Christopher Dring on Twitter, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor has actually outsold Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order at launch in the UK by over 30%, when physical and digital sales are both accounted. That’s in spite of physical sales being down from what the predecessor managed, because the sequel as actually sold nearly twice as much as the first game where digital sales are concerned.

Not all has been smooth for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor in the wake of its launch though. The game launched with numerous technical issues, with PC players in particular getting the worst of it, prompting developer Respawn Entertainment to assure fans that patches are incoming. The first of these was released for all platforms last week.

In our review of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, we awarded it a score of 9/10, saying, “Its performance leaves something to be desired, but Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is still an essential experience for genre fans and Star Wars fanatics.” Read the full review through here.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.

Although physical sales were down, with the digital data, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor actually beat Star War Jedi: Fallen Order's launch sales by over 30%. This is because Survivor's digital accounted almost double what Fallen Order managed

— Christopher Dring (@Chris_Dring) May 8, 2023