Amy Hennig shares her opinion on Jedi: Fallen Order and details more information about her canceled Star Wars for EA
Over the weekend EA revealed their single-player focus Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order game, which is developed by Respawn. There was a panel held for the game during Star Wars Celebration in Chicago, with it came additional gameplay features about the game and a trailer.
During the panel, the team talked about Jedi: Fallen Order was going to be purely a single player game with no microtransactions or multiplayer features.
For anyone who has kept with EA over the past few years, these statements felt like a complete 180 compared to their opinion nearly two years ago. When EA’s version of Battlefront 2 released, they were entirely on the path of believing multiplayer games were the foothold of their company, and that single player games were dying off.
Fast forward to 2019, and we’re in a time where God of War wins dozens of awards at nearly every game awards show, and is a critically acclaimed title. This game comes with no multiplayer features, whatsoever, and no microtransactions.
Those at Eurogamer were interested to learn how Amy Hennig about this. Hennig had spent several years working on Star Wars: Ragtag, a previously canceled game for EA, which they tossed away as they believed single player games were dead and they wished to change it into a multiplayer-focused platform, before later trashing the entire concept.
“There is so much change in this industry all the time. Over the course of my time at EA, we were back and forth on what the overall publishing corporation wanted,” Hennig told Eurogamer during their exchange. ” Everybody’s trying to figure out what the right path is. I also think Respawn’s game has the benefit of being largely developed before they were acquired. It is a protected entity, and Vince [Zampella] makes very sure – because he’s part of the executive team at EA, he can protect the interests of Respawn.”
Hennig talked about this could be a change of strategy for EA, as they received wild feedback from players who were against their multiplayer-focused direction. Later on in the interview, she spoke about how additional details regarding Ragtag. The game was set to feature a motley crew of criminals, and how the player was going to follow each of them as they told their own story, because if the player had stayed with a single character the other cast members would start to feel like side characters, not authentic protagonists.
“So I realised a couple of things: if we were going to make a Star Wars story, a lot of it would look and feel like Uncharted, because it’s in the same genre. But we needed to cut away to the villains, for one thing, which was something I never allowed us to do on Uncharted,” Hennig detailed. “If you look at those films, you don’t really cut away from what Indy knows. There are a few exceptions, but you’re more or less with him the whole time. Star Wars, not only do we cut between villains but we also cut between multiple protagonists. So you still go OK, Luke is the hero of the story, but when you look at Han and Leia, they’re co-protagonists. And then you look at Rogue One, the animated show Rebels; those are ensemble stories. That’s the Star Wars DNA, right?”
Hennig knew what Star Wars fans wanted.
Unfortunately, will remain in the canceled slot. However, players can look forward to playing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order later this year on November 15 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
Source: Eurogamer
