Jedi: Survivor has a "dual-sided" approach to Star Wars canon
You can play Jedi: Survivor even if you've "never watched a Star Wars movie"
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor will naturally tie into existing franchise lore as you'd expect, but it seems the developers - and cast - are keen to make sure there's more to the upcoming game than pure fanservice.
"It's funny because it's this dual-sided thing," Cal Kestis actor Cameron Monaghan tells Game Informer. "You have an established lore, canon, all of this stuff, and you're so excited about it, and you love it. But at the end of the day [the game] needs to exist and be satisfying and interesting regardless of [the official canon]."
Of course, like any modern Star Wars project, Jedi: Survivor will directly reference events in the movies, books, and TV shows. Heck, there's even a tie-in book for the game where the cast meets familiar characters like the Fifth Brother. The recent Obi-Wan Kenobi series on Disney Plus even featured the Fortress Inquisitorius, which debuted as the setting for the climax of Jedi: Fallen Order.
"You want to be able to have [the game and other media] interact with each other, and have an interplay," Monaghan says, "but it's always been important with our stories, that the drama, the character, the stakes should be clear regardless of whether or not you have any understanding of anything outside of it."
As Monaghan concludes, "I want anybody who's never watched a Star Wars movie or read a Star Wars story to be able to jump into this and play it and still be able to understand it. And then, if you do have more experience understanding it, then you're only gonna have a deepened appreciation of what's going on here."
Jedi: Survivor takes place five years after Fallen Order during the gap between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. That span is also covered by several of the biggest Star Wars projects in production right now, including The Bad Batch season 2 and Andor season 2.
Here are all the upcoming Star Wars games you need to know about.
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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.