Updated: Job Listings Hint at New ‘Star Wars Jedi’ Game in Development at EA and Respawn, Including Principal Game Writer
Electronic Arts has published two new job offers to join their Star Wars team and work hand-in-hand with Respawn Entertainment, a collaboration that already gave us both Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, which released this spring. All things point to this being an indicator for a new Cal Kestis game in development (hat tip Tech4Gamers.com)
The first job offer is for a senior VFX artist to work on the sound design of the game. It requires at least six years of game audio experience, expert-level command of sound design and mixing skills, proficiency with Unreal Blueprints, and, interestingly enough, they promise extra points to applicants experienced with Unreal Engine 5. This could hint that the potential third game in the series would upgrade from Unreal Engine 4, which both Fallen Order and Survivor used.
Another job offer for a senior combat designer makes no mention of Unreal Engine 5, though, listing experience with Unreal Engine 4 as “ideal”. Applicants for that position must have at least five years of experience in the industry as a combat/systems designer, as well as experience designing and implementing “heroes, villains, bosses, or combat systems using a visual scripting or text-based language”.
Lucasfilm partnering once again with EA/Respawn for a third game comes as no surprise. Fallen Order sold over 10 million copies by 2020, and according to EA CEO Andrew Wilson, “millions of players” joined Cal Kestis and BD-1 in their fight against the Empire within a few weeks of the game’s launch. Moreover, game director Stig Asmussen told IGN he’d always envisioned Cal’s story as a trilogy:
“I always wanted to see this as a trilogy. How can we take Cal and the crew to new places beyond what we were doing in the first game?
We had a pretty decent idea of timeframe where we wanted Survivor to take place, what the stakes were going to be, what the tone o the game was going to be, what Cal was going to be up against, and how the crew was going to factor into that. And there’s ideas of what we could do beyond that as well.”
Survivor was already in early development even before Fallen Order came out in late 2019, and with Lucasfilm being confident in the sequel, it’s more than likely that a third game has been in the works for a few months already. Despite that, it’s unlikely we will be seeing it earlier than 2026/2027. In the meantime, Ubisoft Massive is coming out next year with Star Wars: Outlaws, Respawn also has a Star Wars first-person shooter game in development, and Quantic Dream insists that development on Star Wars: Eclipse is going well, so we could have our hands full with other Star Wars games before we meet back with Cal Kestis.
Of course, there is also the long-discussed question of Cal’s jump to live-action. Despite rumors of Cameron Monaghan signing on to do a Disney Plus series last year, Kathleen Kennedy insisted recently there are no current plans to do so. This also makes sense, as EA/Respawn will likely want to complete his arc in the games before they reveal the character’s fate, or tell any other stories with him in live-action.
UPDATE: Respawn has also posted on LinkedIn a “Principal Game Writer” offer (hat tip to r/GamesLeaksandRumors), looking for an individual with at least eight years of experience in professional writing as well as Senior or Lead Writer on shipped games, with a strong understanding of the story development process and passionate about the Star Wars universe.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
