During an event hosted by EA last week in Los Angeles, Wccftech and other press outlets and creators got to preview one of the year's most anticipated games, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor by Respawn.

　　Following the hands-on session (you can read my impressions here), I've had the chance to speak with Respawn's Jeff Magers (Design Director) and Blair Brown (Senior Producer) to talk about the key additions and improvements that have been made to this sequel. As a reminder, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is out on April 28th for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X.

　　This interview has been edited and condensed to improve clarity.

　　I wanted to ask what the most notable new gameplay feature would be if you guys had to pick one.

　　Jeff Magers: I think the most notable one is the Lightsaber stances. Our combat system has greatly expanded. In Fallen Order, we had the single-blade and the double-bladed stances. Then towards the end, you got a special move with the split saber.

　　We wanted to expand on that and make that dual blade a full-fledged stance like the other two, which are also greatly improved, by the way. On top of that, we added the blaster stance as well as the cross guard, so we have five stances for players to choose from in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and you could fully play the game in any one of those stances. There's no hard lock and key enemies or anything like that that will force you into one stance over another. It's about player expression and play style to pick the two that you want to roll with at any given time.

　　What's cool about it is it makes you enter combat scenarios in completely different ways. It makes you approach things differently. If you play with two stances versus two other ones, you will discover new ways to play the game that if you play multiple times, you'll learn things about the game that are different in each place.

　　Blair Brown: For me, it's customization. We took it from the first game, which was very late in the project. We're like, we need some rewards for exploring. We added the Ponchos and stuff like that and the BD-1 skins. In Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, we made customization a full pillar on equal footing as the story and combat. As you probably noticed, there's a lot more customization for Cal between his outfits, his hair, and his beard. BD-1 has interchangeable parts, not just paint jobs. And then the saber customization, we've also elevated it quite a bit this time.

　　Jeff Magers: What that does is it gives rich rewards. We've also added gameplay rewards for exploration. We've got this perk system that allows you to actually customize Cal's combat play style in deeper ways.

　　As far as the gear customization goes, are there going to be any tangential gameplay benefits, or is it just going to be purely cosmetic based on players' preferences?

　　Jeff Magers: The cosmetics still are purely cosmetic. We want players to be able to customize their character in the way that they identify with or excite them without being tied to a gameplay function.

　　Since we didn't get to try the Blaster Stance in today's demo, is it where Cal is solely using the ranged weapon, or is he doing a dual wield where he also has a Lightsaber in one hand and the Blaster in the other?

　　Jeff Magers: Our game is about Lightsaber combat, so of course the Blasters stance is a Blaster-based Lightsaber stance. It's Blaster plus Lightsaber. We're not gonna go into too much detail about it today, though.

　　Are you able to talk about the length of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor? How long would it be if people took just the critical path versus trying to collect every Priorite Shard and all the other collectibles throughout the world?

　　Jeff Magers: We can't put a number on that. What we can say is that it's greatly expanded from Fallen Order. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is a good deal bigger than Fallen Order, so hopefully, players will be able to find a lot to explore and enjoy for a long time.

　　Blair Brown: Yeah. Both the story and the exploration are much, much bigger than the last game.

　　I've already seen some callbacks to characters encountered in the previous game. Do you feel that the new game is going to work purely standalone, or do players get more enjoyment if they've already played Fallen Order beforehand?

　　Blair Brown: You can definitely play Star Wars Jedi: Survivor without having played Fallen Order or ever really experiencing any Star Wars games. But I think, yeah, you will understand a lot more of Cal's motivations if you played the previous title. But we made it a point when we were developing the game that this could be a jumping off point for new people. The band has been broken up from the last game, and you're re-meeting these characters. For new players, it will be like, oh, who's this fuzzy little four-armed guy? While Fallen Order players will be like, oh my God, here's Greez; what has he been up to? And I think they'll both get something out of it.

　　One thing that I was kind of curious about is if the art designers have designed two separate models for Cal during story cut scenes or aboard his ship versus the regular gameplay, as games often do.

　　Blair Brown: It's all the same model, I think. We have a model system that we can dynamically change based on camera distance.

　　What kind of features will be supported on next-generation consoles?

　　Blair Brown: We've got haptic feedback on PlayStation 5 and ray tracing on both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.

　　Is there anything else you'd like to highlight about Star Wars Jedi: Survivor?

　　Blair Brown: I think, for me, it's the greatly expanded exploration. We're not an open world game, but the exploration is a lot more expanded in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor compared to Fallen Order while still having a Star Wars story. It's Cal's story that you can hop on the main path and go right through the story. But I'm hoping confident players will poke around, see something interesting, follow that thread, explore, and find something cool.

　　Jeff Magers: I think making a true sequel gave us an opportunity to really focus on the things that we wanted to elevate and make better. With Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, we've got a real chance to make this true sequel, to take what we liked about what we did in the last game and update it and upgrade it.

　　It's more accessible in terms of the difficulties we can choose from because we added another one and we polished the rest and made them feel a bit better. There's a lot of improvements. like the map has been improved, we have fast travel now. Overall, for those who haven't played the previous one or a lot of games in general, we ease them nicely into this one, so they shouldn't have any problems.

　　As someone who's played this game a ton of times, I think that players will be happy with the changes to the exploration. the map as well. One optional feature for the map, for example, is navigation assist. We've got our difficulty modes on the combat, but navigating the map was difficult for some players too, so we added this navigation assist. What that does is, if you turn it on, instead of just showing the main objective way out in the distance, when you open the map, it will highlight the nearest gate on the map that will lead to that objective. It kind of bread crumbs to the objective for players. If you'd like to use that, you can turn it on; that's one improvement we've made for navigation accessibility.

　　Is there any note system where you can leave an icon on the map as a personal reminder?

　　Jeff Magers: Sure. One of the new features is BD-1's binocular mode. With that, you can put a point in the world through the binoculars or through the map and they'll talk to each other. So if you put a beacon through the binoculars, they'll show up on the map and vice versa.

　　Thank you for your time.