Editorial: What We’d Like to See in The ‘Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’ Sequel
With recent reports indicating that a third game is in the works for the Star Wars Jedi video game series after two excellent entries in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, it’s natural to start wondering what we can expect from the threequel.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor leaves many dangling story threads to pick up in the next game, and after recently completing a New Game Plus playthrough, a few things jumped out at me. Naturally, spoilers will follow so if you haven’t played the game yet, turn back now!
Tanalorr and The Hidden Path
Survivor ends with Cal and his friends on Tanalorr intending on using the hard-to-reach planet as a haven for former Jedi and other Force sensitives, people who The Hidden Path is currently helping hide from the Empire. I don’t think Survivor actually did that great a job of explaining exactly why Dagan Gera and Santari Khri both thought Tanalorr was so special, so I think the third game needs to show us more about the planet.
Is it just that Tanalorr is a place strong in the Force? Perhaps we could find evidence of an ancient Force-sensitive civilization that used to dwell there, or an old artifact that could help the fight against the Empire. Either way, Cal needs to make a discovery on Tanalorr that drives his story in order for me to understand why the High Republic thought it was special.
Speaking of the Empire, it’s time for them to become a more prominent threat than they were in Survivor. Though their presence was strong in the beginning and end of the game, they mostly felt like a secondary threat to Dagan Gera, Rayvis and Bode Akuna. Considering the third game will likely mark the end of Cal’s story, it would make thematic sense to put the Empire front and center as the main antagonist considering how much they’ve influenced Cal’s life.
If the game was to focus on helping The Hidden Path send Force sensitives to Tanalorr, it stands to reason that the Empire would be the main obstacle to that important work. I can’t decide if I’d like to see the game jump forward in time to see Hidden Path refugees already on Tanalorr by the time the game starts, or if the story should chronicle Cal’s efforts to help them from the very beginning, but either way the Empire needs to be involved. Perhaps they will discover Tanalorr themselves eventually…
Kata Akuna
Survivor also ends with Cal, Merrin and Greeze taking little Kata under their wing after Cal killed her father. Her story is ripe with tragic potential; not only is she the child of a former Jedi, she lost both her parents at a young age and is now travelling with the very man who killed her father.
I would love the story to jump forward in time so Kata can be old enough to wield her own lightsaber and start training in the Force. As she goes through her teens she’s bound to feel a lot of negative emotions regarding the raw hand she’s been dealt. Cal and Merrin will have their work cut out to help her control the darkness inside her. It would be fascinating to see Cal try and teach a padawan of his own, as he deals with his own guilt that he was the one who made her an orphan. Is he really in the best position to teach her to be a better Jedi than her father?
Though the game will likely be about creating a safe haven for The Hidden Path on Tanalorr, it’s easy to imagine that the core relationship driving the narrative will be the one between Cal and Kata. It will be interesting to see if the crew of the Mantis can prevent her from falling to the same darkness as her father.
Cal and Merrin’s romance
Cal declared at the end of Survivor that he was finally ready to ditch the Jedi’s problematic rules on attachments and be with Merrin romantically. Naturally, I want to see more of these two together as their relationship continues to evolve. That’s about it really, as the two of them are so cute together in Survivor that it’s easy to want more of them.
However, if we’re looking for sources of potential drama here, I think we have to go back to Kata. Merrin and Cal will essentially be acting as mother-and-father-figures for the girl while they teach her about the Force. The two of them come from very different backgrounds with different attitudes about the Force. Surely at some point in Kata’s teachings, they will encounter some philosophical differences about what Kata should and shouldn’t do with her gifts.
Of course Cal has no problems with Merrin’s Nightsister background as an ally in combat, but will he start taking an issue if Merrin starts telling Kata it’s okay to embrace her darkness sometimes? Of course Cal has his own issues when it comes to resisting the dark side, but that line of thinking would surely fly in the face of any Jedi-related teachings he tries to pass down to the girl. This could create a real source of tension with Merrin over the course of their story.
Don’t limit us to two lightsaber stances at a time
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor did a great job of building on the excellent lightsaber mechanics of Fallen Order, allowing you to switch between five different lightsaber stances, all with different strengths and weaknesses. While restricting us to switching between two stances at any one time brought a nice additional challenge to gameplay, it still felt a bit odd that you couldn’t just activate the crossguard stance if you were already using two other stances and were finding it difficult to take down a Bedlam Smasher.
If the next game wants us to feel like we’re playing as Cal Kestis at the peak of his powers, then it should figure out a way to let us switch between a wider variety of stances on the fly. Hopefully that will be possible as Respawn Entertainment will have had more time to play with the tech in the current console generation and will be upgrading to Unreal Engine 5 (Fallen Order and Survivor were built on Unreal 4).
The rest of the combat feels pretty great already, so this is my only suggestion.
A New Game Plus mode with all the trimmings
The closest thing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order had to a New Game Plus mode was the ability to keep all your cosmetics and unlock a harder difficulty level, but it wouldn’t let you carry over all your abilities and skill points. Some of that is understandable; Force powers needed to remain locked until certain story beats so players couldn’t just run around the map and access areas the story hadn’t taken them to yet, but it was still a shame that we couldn’t keep our health stim collections and maxed out health and Force meters at least.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor took some great steps towards fixing this by adding a New Game Plus mode that let you keep all your skill points, perks, health stims, collectibles, map upgrades and cosmetics, but it made the puzzling choice to prevent you from replaying almost all the side content. While the Jedi Meditation Chambers are replayable, almost all the side quests you encounter as rumors are unplayable.
While you are still able to recruit characters to the cantina and most beast bosses are still available, pretty much everything else is listed as already completed. Even the bounty hunter mini-bosses are unavailable after Caij’s introduction to the story, so you can’t replay Caij’s own boss battle and watch the fantastic cutscene that occurs after defeating her. That is for new games only, which makes you feel as though New Game Plus isn’t the definitive experience of the game that it should be.
The third game in the Star Wars Jedi series needs to have a perfect New Game Plus mode. It needs to carry over cosmetics, skill points and collectibles like before, but also needs to be careful not to lock out the player from any storylines or combat encounters that we enjoyed on our first playthrough. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor‘s New Game Plus mode is one of few blemishes on an otherwise excellent video game, so it would be nice if the next game avoided a similar scenario.
It’ll be a few more years before we see the next game in the Star Wars Jedi series, but hopefully it will come good on these story developments and gameplay improvements.
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.
