I don’t think anyone would argue the idea that a Jedi makes for a pretty badass playable video game protagonist. They’ve got a lightsaber, force powers, they’re quick, and can jump really high. All great innate attributes for an action game set in the Star Wars universe. But one challenge about having a Jedi main character is that they’re only really known to use lightsabers. That presents a bit of an issue, as most good action game heroes have multiple weapons to help keep combat fresh over the course of the game. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order found a solution to this problem by giving Cal two different lightsaber stances, each with their own combat focus and moveset, and with the sequel, Jedi: Survivor, Respawn is looking to up the ante with a total of five different stances that Cal can use over the course of his journey.
To find out more about each of these stances, I talked with Senior Design Director Jason de Heras and Director Stig Asmussen, who walked me through the design philosophy behind each stance and their unique approaches to combat.
Evolving Cal
One of the big focuses throughout the development of Jedi: Survivor has been this concept of “Jedi 2.0,” and how to take Cal from where he was in Jedi: Fallen Order, a young and relatively inexperienced padawan trying to find his place and identity, to where he is now in Jedi: Survivor: a much more confident and capable Jedi Knight who’s also five years wiser. Asmussen said that the team wanted this change reflected in Cal not just in the story, but through his combat as well. As a result, Cal is a much more capable fighter right from the start of Jedi: Survivor, with three saber stances available right from the beginning of the game: Single blade, double-bladed, and dual blade.
“We felt like it was important to give the player a greater arsenal right off the bat. So we had two fully realized stances in the first game, and we had a stance where you had a twin blade, which was something that we wanted to fully realize in the first game, but we basically ran out of time and it ended up becoming a special move,” Asmussen said.
He continued by saying that the moment where you got the dual sabers in Fallen Order was a really cool moment, but it never really got the focus that they had wanted it to have. And so, day one, they made a determination that they were going to finish the Dual Blade stance.
Dual, Single, and Double Bladed Stances
De Heras said that the team really used the Dual Blade stance as the jumping off point, because they already knew the roles single- and double-bladed stances would play in combat, and so they wanted to start by trying to make the Dual Blades feel unique.
“And that’s where we started thinking: Let’s make twin a little more technical. Still approachable – anybody can pick up and play – but there’s a lot more, I guess, combat nuance to it,” he said.
That combat nuance comes in several forms. For one, you’re a bit of a glass cannon. You take more damage, but you attack faster and have a wider array of unique combos, some of which require you to pause a beat before continuing the combo. In addition to that, Dual Blade stance is the only one where you’re able to dodge or guard cancel the startup animations of an attack. Other stances have you commit to your attacks very much like you would have to in a game like Dark Souls, where once you press the attack button, you have to wait until your attack animation finishes before you can get out of the way. But in Twin Blade stance, you can rely more on your reflexes and freely get out of the way when danger is incoming.
“With Twin, we kind of let you ride the line between recklessness and aggression, but you pay for it if you’re making mistakes,” said de Heras.
The single blade stance is the all-rounder stance of Jedi: Survivor. It’s got medium range and medium power and a jack-of-all-trades approach to the skills that utilize it. It’s relatively fast, so there’s not the same amount of commitment to each attack compared to slower stances; you can throw your lightsaber out for a mid ranged attack, and it’s special ability is a strong thrusting attack that can be charged to deal heavy stamina damage to single enemies.
Like in Fallen Order, the double bladed stance is the go-to stance for crowd control. If there’s a large group of weak B1 Droids crowding an area, it’s never a bad idea to bring out that double blade and start dancing your way through the crowd. It’s largely focused on close ranged damage, spread out all around Cal. Its downside is that there’s a lot of start-up time to its attacks, making it a weapon that you really need to be careful with when putting it to use against faster enemies.
The Cross Guard and Blaster Stance
There will also be two brand-new stances that you’ll be able to wield in Jedi: Survivor, and while Respawn wanted to keep a lot of the cards relating to these two stances close to their chest, we do know that one of them is called the Cross Guard stance, and utilizes a hilted lightsaber much like the one that Kylo Ren uses; and the other is called the Blaster stance, which is a fighting style that incorporates both a lightsaber and a blaster.
De Heras described the Cross Guard stance as a high-risk stance that deals the most damage, but is also the slowest and has the least amount of range.
“We wanted the player to feel really powerful, but that there’s also a big risk, probably even more so than Twin, I would say. You need to understand spacing, because with that stance, we don’t artificially push you towards an enemy. It’s kind of like a fighting game stance a little bit.”
With regards to the Blaster stance, the team wanted something with more range, but also thought that a Jedi using a blaster would be a cool opportunity from a story standpoint as well.
“We thought it would be something that reflects the journey that Cal’s going through, to do something that’s unconventional, something that’s usually frowned upon for a Jedi and kind of putting it in this circumstance where he’s doing whatever it takes in the situation. That’s something that I think through conversations, we were able to really make that work in regards to combat,” said Asmussen. “We wanted something that kind of had push and pull to it where like the way the Blaster is designed, it encourages you to use your saber in order to replenish your ammunition and your gun. It’s almost this rubber band that we’re encouraging the player to engage up close so that they can kind of make decisions when they’re far away as well.”
To be clear, this is still a melee combat game. You won’t be sniping Stormtrooper from a distance with the Blaster stance. As de Heras puts it: “It’s not a shooter, obviously. It’s like a melee gun, even though you’re shooting from long range, there’s a limit to it. We always feed back into that thoughtful combat, and we still want you to hit with the saber.”
Stance Skill Trees
One of the most exciting aspects of these five stances is that they each come with their own skill tree, so each stance will have its own set of upgradeable skills to help you further develop it.
“We throw out ideas and we throw stuff away if it doesn’t fit the personality of the stance,” de Heras said. “Jack of all trades for single, aggressive and technical for twin, crowd control and commitment for staff. We would come up with ideas for skills, and some skills that were initially for single blade stance, we threw into twin eventually because it kind of lined up where we wanted it to fit in the role of each stance.”
Stances aren’t the only thing that have their own skill tree either. There is a tree for Force powers and one for survival skills that offer flat increases to your health, Force meter, and more. It all amounts to a combat system that offers a ton of flexibility in how you want to build your own version of Cal Kestis. You can only equip two stances at a time, but you can change them at every meditation point and adjust your loadout for whatever the situation calls for. It’s exciting stuff, and I’ll go into more detail about it when my full preview for Star Wars Jedi Survivor comes out later this month.
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