LogInThe game's director says that the team wanted to enhance player experience in the new game and new-gen hardware allowed them to do so.
Respawn Entertainment, the developer behind Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and the upcoming Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, has explained why the new Star Wars Jedi game will not be available on last-gen consoles.
According to game director Stig Asmussen, the choice of platforms for Survivor, which will be released only for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, unlike its predecessor which was also available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, was not dictated by the game's publisher, Electronic Arts, as one could suggest but instead, it has much to do with gameplay.
In an interview with the PLAY magazine (via MP1st), Asmussen explained that during the development of the PS5 title, there are no restrictions. However, if the game was also set to be released on previous-gen consoles, it would have posed some limitations.
The director noted that the team already had plans for raytracing back when they worked on Fallen Order but eventually, the devs decided against it due to differences in environment art authoring between the generations.
"We actually considered ray tracing for the new-gen Fallen Order because we were already building it into Survivor, but we ultimately scrapped it, because the environment art authoring between the generations was pretty different," he shared. "But the process did help us define how we wanted to approach ray tracing on our modified version of the Unreal 4 engine."
With Survivor, the team wanted to deliver a better experience for players and, while the developers were building the new title upon the success of the previous game, the current-gen hardware allowed them to bring larger maps, more detail, greater enemy/NPC variety, and overall fidelity to the game.
"These features aligned perfectly with how we wanted to push the game. We didn’t want to break what we did in the first game because it was well received, but we wanted to evolve/ enhance the experience," Asmussen said. "This new generation allowed us to do exactly that, and I believe it translates to a true new-gen experience in the Star Wars universe."
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor will arrive on April 28, 2023. Most recently, the game received a new gameplay trailer which you can check out here.
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