Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Developer Reveals New Difficulty Option (Exclusive)

By Cade Onder

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor will have a new difficulty option. One of the things some people were taken aback by in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is that it's a fairly difficult game. It takes a lot of cues from games like Dark Souls with how it structures its gameplay, but it is still a very casual game that is meant to be accessible to a wide audience. So long as you can have some patience and understand that you can't hack and slash your way through every encounter like in The Force Unleashed, you'll likely be able to get a quick hang of it. 

With that said, there is a new difficulty option for those looking to have an easier, but still somewhat balanced experience. The easiest difficulty option is described as one that is just for those looking to enjoy the story and not be challenged by the gameplay, but some people find that a bit too easy and the "Jedi Knight" difficulty a little too hard. So, Respawn has added a new "Padawan" difficulty. The developer also explained how it has tried to balance how lightsabers feel across all of the different difficulties.

"We want this game to work for casual Star Wars fans and hardcore gamers as well," said design director Jeff Majors in an interview with ComicBook. "So we've got Grandmaster for them, and we go all the way down to story mode. We added a Padawan difficulty mode in between Knight and Story this time, which gives us a little bit more nuance for different players. But as far as the lethality goes, one of our tenets of our difficulty modes is we don't ever add more hits, more health to enemies based on difficulty. The difficulty is not derived from "Now the lightsaber takes 10 hits to kill this Stormtrooper. If you make contact with them, they're all going to take the same amount of hits [regardless of difficulty]. That's really important to us in terms of the lethality."

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As of right now, it remains to be see what the major differences will be in the Padawan difficulty, though it's great to see Respawn trying to make the game more fitting for all kinds of players. From what we played at a preview event, the game does feel a little easier to control without sacrificing what makes it engaging and challenging. 

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor will release on April 28th for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC. Are you hoping for any changes to the game's difficulty? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @Cade_Onder.

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