The developers of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor have explained how they maintained Cal's affinity with the Force from Fallen Order.
While many sequels are prepared to bump their characters' power levels right back down, Fallen Order is all about Cal's journey to repair his relationship with the Force. In an interview with 12DOVE accompanying our Star Wars Jedi: Survivor preview, design director Jason de Heras and senior director of production Kasumi Shishido explain how they balanced the need to start afresh with the baseline of Cal's abilities.
"We knew we wanted his skills to continue in Survivor, and that was one of the challenges," explains de Heras. Enemies had to be made "challenging," but Cal still needed his existing powers. "We had to kind of tweak enemies to handle his new powers" - the Force push and pull that you gain during Fallen Order - "from the start."
"We don't want to take away those moves, because they feel good. You can't go backwards, and feel like a Padawan. It has to feel that the power level is the same, but also, you have to reach another level."
Shishido adds "It's been five years since Fallen Order, and we want the player to feel like Cal has been through a lot. He's no longer a Padawan. So when you come back and pick up the controller, we want to make sure that it's accessible for people who haven't played Fallen Order - that's kind of tied into the tutorial."
"But at the same time, you would have those powers from the very beginning. And you can still develop. [Cal's] not a Jedi Knight, he's not Yoda. He hasn't mastered everything yet. So there are still a lot of things that he can learn. And so it's a balance of not making him too powerful from the get-go, but there's still a lot of progression from beginning to end."
The key, according to de Heras, has been "iteration." "A lot of tweaks to enemy design. New enemies that complement some of your powers, or whatever powers you get in the future. It's not like you're just gonna push every enemy and they always die." There is, however, a baseline to consider - the stormtrooper. "We make sure the stormtroopers are always gonna get wrecked, so we have a base, we know where to start from even on a sequel."
