Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Will Support Ray Tracing and Other Next-Gen Features; Work on the Game Began Before Fallen Order’s Release

Respawn Entertainment and Electronic Arts officially unveiled Star Wars Jedi: Survivor during yesterday’s Star Wars Celebration event in Anaheim, California.

The game has been confirmed to be coming only to PC and next-generation consoles, and indeed, Game Director Stig Asmussen told StarWars.com that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor will support ray tracing and other next-gen features such as fast loading times and DualSense controller on PlayStation 5.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Announced, Coming to PC, PS5, and XSX in 2023

I think the biggest thing is ray tracing, or lighting. That’s allowing us to do real-time lighting, all the time, at a fidelity that’s well beyond anything that we’ve ever produced before. Since it’s real-time, we get to see the changes as we tweak the lights — immediately, essentially. That means that we have more time to polish, that means that we can iterate more, and we can get better results that feel more filmic.

Beyond that, we have these blazing fast drives on these consoles that are allowing us to load tons of content really quickly. I’ve always worked on streaming games — games that don’t have load screens. The fact that these consoles have such fast storage has made it even easier. Those are probably the two biggest benefits. PlayStation 5 has some really interesting haptics on their controller that we’re digging into, and it’s just an easier process in general.

Asmussen also revealed that Respawn started brainstorming ideas for Star Wars: Jedi Survivor even before the release of Fallen Order. Last but not least, he teased that the new title highlights the overall theme of survival for Cal and his crew.

We started working, in earnest, even before we finished Jedi: Fallen Order with ideas of what the second game could be. There were a lot of things that we left — I guess you would call on the editing room floor — from Jedi: Fallen Order that we knew that we wanted to put into the sequel. Some of that comes down to like, more stances for combat, or where we’re going to go with the story, how Cal and the crew are going to evolve and grow, how we’re going to approach the worlds and the levels in the game, and expand them and make them more vibrant than they’ve been in the past. But yeah, you’re thinking about this stuff every day.

[…] The game is all about survival. That’s why it’s called Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. They are in dark times, and Cal and the crew are doing whatever it takes to stay alive. That might mean that they are making connections with people that, in other times, might be considered unsavory. Some of that is portrayed in the trailer, and again, I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s definitely a sense of… I don’t want to spoil anything, sorry!

Earlier rumors, alongside the fact that the publisher is planning to release a major IP in that quarter, pointed to an early 2023 launch for the game. However, Electronic Arts only gave a generic 2023 release window for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.