How Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Evolves the Metroidvania Roots of Jedi Fallen Order | IGN First
One of the big differences between Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Fallen Order is being away from home on Planet Koboh. Sure, we’d revisit Bogano and Dathomir a few times, but it always helped push the story forward and follow the mainline plot. There are plenty of optional areas to explore, locked by progress, and each return to the planet opens up many new paths and discoveries. This grew out of one of the lessons his Respawn learned from Fallen Order’s feedback. Players really enjoyed options his content such as Crashed Venator and legendary beasts like Oggdo Bogdo.
“For Survivor, we wanted to add more optional areas for players to discover and explore. To do this, we knew we needed to reward exploration better.” said Design Director Jeff Magers.
And sure enough, one of my own big takeaways from 5 hours in Jedi Survivor’s preview build was that the rewards for bypassing the mainline quest path were always well rewarding. I regularly find tough battles that reward skill points, hidden traversal paths that lead to new customizable options in Cal, or shortcuts that make traversing areas much faster.
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“We put a lot of effort and focus into this game’s customization system, which makes it look more exciting while adding gameplay rewards for exploration. By doing so, players can make Cal more their own through customization, using skills, upgrades, and Perks found in the options area to become more powerful and well-equipped to meet the challenges ahead. You can,” says Magers.
Lead Level Designer Koboh talks specifically about design goals Martin Badowsky said Respawn wanted to create a planet with a dense central area that players could gradually open up and enjoy. At the preview, he played Koboh, and Dark Souls felt like a mix between the worlds of Firelink Shrine and Metroid. Like the Firelink Shrine, the cantina and Rambler’s Reach serve as a central hub for his NPCs to gather, with multiple areas within the cantina opening up as you progress through the campaign, outside of which you’ll find something like this gigantic Metroid. There was a world to explore with some paths that were inaccessible in the current slate of upgrades.
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The Metroid vibe is no accident. “The core of the Metroid-inspired game is discovering new abilities, using those abilities to pass through obstacles, unlock more regions, and ultimately a kind of intimacy in the game world. It’s about developing sanity, understanding, and control,” says Magers. “We wanted to make sure that the open spaces would evoke the same emotions from the players, so that every time players revisited one of these regions, they would use their newly acquired toolkits to do a lot of work. We have confirmed that there is a new discovery of
He also added that the team wanted to address some pain points players were having when exploring the world of Fallen Order. They moved the Mantis landing pad to a more central location on the planet to give players easier access to all of the different regions the planet has to offer. Most importantly, we added fast movement.
As you might imagine, fast travel in Jedi Survivor works by finding meditation points and resting. After resting at a meditation point, you can select fast travel to quickly warp to other meditation points you discover on Earth. Magers said the team took great care to ensure that players didn’t have to use fast travel to complete their journey, but it would be invaluable for those wanting to explore every nook and cranny of the expanded game world. It’s a tool.
Mitchell Saltzman is IGN’s Editorial Producer.you can find him on twitter @jurassic rabbit
