Respawn Entertainment has put up several job ads relating to a new entry in its Star Wars Jedi series, following the well-received Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. It’s currently looking for a principal game writer, senior VFX artist, and audio engineer, all of which roles are listed specifically as being for Star Wars Jedi.
There isn’t any real detail on the game in the job info blurb, beyond that they’ll help Respawn “create an incredible Star Wars experience for our players in a fun, third-person action-adventure setting.” The audio engineer listing does confirm it’s being built using Unreal Engine 5 however, both mentioning joining the “Jedi team using Unreal Engine 5” and referencing the software multiple times subsequently.
‘Successful Star Wars series to get third entry’ isn’t the most shocking news in the world, of course, and Respawn’s Stig Asmussen said as much shortly before Jedi: Survivor’s release. Asked whether any new game would move from Unreal Engine 4 to 5 he told IGN “it’s a pretty safe assumption […] I’m not going to say it’s going to be easy. I mean, we have a lot of proprietary things that we’ve warped the engine into doing what it does for Jedi right now, and we would have to retool some of that to get it to work on any new engine.”
Asmussen went on to say “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 of 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.”
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor had a short delay in the runup to release, and launched on PC in a pretty bad way: Respawn’s since released several patches targeting the performance issues, but the PC version’s metacritic score of 78 remains some way below the console versions in the high 80s.
As well as the Jedi series, Respawn is working on a Star Wars FPS (being led by Peter Hirschmann, co-creator of Medal of Honor), and there are dozens of roles being advertised for that and Apex Legends. Clearly Lucasfilm Games likes the cut of Respawn’s jib because there’s also a Star Wars strategy game in early development over there, though there’s nothing on that yet, even though we all hope it’ll be a new and genuinely good Star Wars: Battlefront.
