‘Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’ Design Director Talks Fast Travel and Giving Players More Optional Rewards
In one of Respawn’s final interviews with IGN as they cover Star Wars Jedi: Survivor on IGN First for the month of February, design director Jeff Magers finally shed some light on exactly how fast travel will work, and spoke about how to make players feel more rewarded than before for exploring new optional areas.
IGN’s Mitchell Saltzman confirmed that one of the key things Respawn did to make traversal easier in Survivor was moving the Mantis landing pads to more central locations on planets so players would find it easier accessing all of a planet’s different regions. In Fallen Order, the Mantis always landed at the edge of the map, which made returning to an area on the other side of the map a bit of a chore, but that shouldn’t be the case in the sequel.
IGN also revealed exactly how fast travel will work in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Apparently, meditation points will also act as fast travel points on the map. Once you discover a new meditation point, it will become unlocked for fast travel in the future, allowing the player to zip around any already discovered locations at will. It seems so simple — and already tested in the Dark Souls games (from which Respawn certainly took some cues) — that you wonder why this wasn’t an option in Fallen Order.
Magers spoke about using the “metroidvania” formula — where games initially block off areas before making them accessible once players have acquired the correct abilities — to make Fallen Order and Survivor‘s open worlds interesting, encouraging players to access new areas to find rewarding items. The formula was first made famous in Nintendo’s Metroid series and Konami’s Castlevania games.
Metroid-inspired games at their core are about discovering new abilities and then using those abilities to pass obstacles, unlock more regions, and eventually develop a sort of intimacy, understanding, and dominance over the game world. We wanted to make sure we evoked these same feelings from the player in our open spaces, and to do that we made sure that every time the player revisits one of these regions there would be lots of new things to discover using their newly acquired toolkit.
For Survivor, we knew that we wanted to add more optional areas for players to discover and explore. To do this, we knew that we needed to give better rewards for exploration.
We put a lot of work and focus into our customization system for this game so that our cosmetics would be more exciting to find, while also adding more gameplay rewards for exploration. By exploring the worlds, players will both make Cal more their own through customization, and more powerful and equipped to take on the challenges ahead with Skills, Upgrades, and Perks found in optional areas.
Saltzman confirmed that in his five hours playing the game, he always found taking an alternative route away from the main path rewarding, regularly finding tough battles that rewarded skill points, new customizable options, or shortcuts to make traversing the map easier in the future; all things that Fallen Order possessed in fairness.
He also revealed that the planet Koboh, shown off at length in a nine-minute gameplay preview, will act as a home-away-from-home for Cal, which is something that Fallen Order didn’t offer. As Cal gains access to new gadgets and abilities, he’ll unlock new areas of Koboh to explore. Apparently, this was directly influenced by the popularity of some of Fallen Order‘s optional content, like exploring the crashed Venator on Zeffo and the myriad of tough boss fights on other worlds.
It sounds like Respawn have really ironed out all the kinks with Fallen Order to make Star Wars Jedi: Survivor feel like a truly finished and all-around polished experience.
Josh is a huge Star Wars fan, who has spent far too much time wondering if any Star Wars character could defeat Thanos with all the Infinity Stones.
