Star Wars Jedi: Survivor will only be available to play on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S when the game launches on April 28, 2023, and now it’s become a lot more clear as to why the developers at Respawn Entertainment opted to cut PS4 and Xbox One owners out of the experience. Speaking to PLAY Magazine for its March 2023 issue, game director Stig Asmussen gave his thoughts as to why Star Wars Jedi: Survivor won’t be released on last-gen consoles, explaining that older hardware simply couldn’t deliver the sort of worlds and improvements to gameplay that the latest tech can provide. Some of the improvements over 2019’s Fallen Order that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor players can expect to see include larger maps, greater enemy variety, and more.
From a MP1ST report:
[PS5 ALLOWS US] TO CREATE MUCH LARGER MAPS, WITH MORE DETAIL, GREATER DENSITY, BROADER ENEMY/NPC VARIETY, AND OVERALL FIDELITY. WE DIDN’T WANT TO BREAK WHAT WE DID IN THE FIRST GAME… WE WANTED TO EVOLVE/ENHANCE THE EXPERIENCE.
Jedi: Fallen Order was a fantastic upgrade that really brought the game into its own. “[That version] was a good proving ground while we were considering how to enhance Survivor…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. But the process did help us define how we wanted to approach ray tracing on our modified version of the Unreal 4 engine.
You’ll experience the benefit of the more powerful hardware throughout Survivor. Bottom line, we learned quickly that we could take advantage of the faster processors, larger/faster memory, better loading times, etc, to create much larger maps, with more detail, greater density, broader enemy/NPC variety, and overall fidelity. 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. 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.