Cal Kestis’ journey to restore peace to the galaxy continues with Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. The sequel to the 2019 hit game finds Kestis building a team including old and new friends, namely Merrin, Greez, Cere, and single father Rebel Bode, as they look for a new home to rebuild the Jedi Order outside of the Empire’s reach.
During his quest, Cal comes across Dagan Gera, a Jedi from the High Republic era who’s been kept in a bacta tank for over 200 years on the remote planet Koboh. Initially looking to enlist him in his quest, Cal learns of Dagan’s turn to the dark side due to his obsession with the planet Tanalorr, having been imprisoned in the bacta tank by fellow Jedi Santari Khri after she cut off his arm to prevent him from acquiring a device to reach it. Dagan subsequently becomes a key antagonist in Jedi: Survivor‘s story, constantly taunting Cal’s failures as a Jedi and holding on to the past.
10 Ways Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Is Better Than Fallen Order
While Jedi: Fallen Order was an amazing game, its sequel Jedi: Survivor, has managed to make some massive improvements that make it frankly better.
In honor of the game’s nominations at The Game Awards 2023, Screen Rant interviewed Lead Writer Danny Homan and Senior Writer Pete Stewart to discuss Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Dagan’s emotional story, the parallels between him and Cal, and fleshing out the High Republic’s canon.
Danny Homan & Pete Stewart Talk Star Wars Jedi: Survivor‘s Dagan
Screen Rant: I adored Jedi: Survivor, I sunk in well over 60 hours from the second I got the game, and I’ve just been raving about it ever since. Diving into Dagan Gera’s story, he is such a fascinating character, and I love that it ties into the High Republic, something that doesn’t get explored very often. Can you walk me through the inception of this character?
Danny Homan: Yeah, Dagan is an interesting foil for Cal. I think one of the things that the team was really excited about, in terms of exploring the High Republic, is that it wasn’t that explored in canonical Star Wars. So, we have this good opportunity to help worldbuild what the Jedi Order was long ago, and to have Cal reflect on what the Jedi used to be, and through Dagan Gera, find a character who maybe could have become a role model for Cal had not circumstances intervened. So, just playing the relationship between the two of them was a really rewarding experience for us.
Pete Stewart: Yeah, I think before even Dagan as a character existed, we knew what we wanted was a reflection of the dark path Cal could go down if Tanalorr became the same thing to Cal as it did to Dagan. The High Republic things slotted in really, really neatly, and added to other themes, like Danny was saying. It’s like, “Put Cal in a place where through psychometry and through walking through ruins and stuff, he can experience the glory days of the Jedi,” right? It’s the thing that he didn’t get to see, even when he was in the Order, they were a fading power. So, we put Cal in a really uncomfortable situation and showed him what he could become, and it’s hopefully like a mirror for him as he goes through the game.
Danny Homan: Just adding to that, the Santari Khri-Dagan relationship is such an interesting mirror to Cal and Merrin. They’re always grappling with their own personal ambitions, how you support someone that you’re close to, and there’s obviously a lot of complicated emotions up in there.
That reminds me a lot of Cere and Cal’s relationship in Fallen Order. You mentioned there not being much canonical storytelling for the High Republic, and I did actually want to touch on that. With the EU, there’s so much lore there that can be explored. How did you go about finding the right way to blend some of that High Republic lore while still fleshing out the world and staying true to Dagan’s story?
Pete Stewart: I think one of the beauties of the High Republic is it having been 200 years before before Cal came to Koboh is that you’re dealing with a really interesting thing of like, “What does space look like after something has happened to it,” right? So, the High Republic is everywhere on Koboh, but the moon is broken because of the emergence, and Koboh is completely terraformed from what it used to be, because of these things that happened during the High Republic, but we’re seeing people moving in, and building on top of these ruins, and forgetting about history, and that was really fascinating from a world building point of view.
Like the way Greez reacts to hearing the phrase Tanalorr, “Oh, it’s mystical. It’s a Treasure Planet, no one’s ever been there.” It’s a bit different in Star Wars in the way we think about history, because we know, 200 years ago, we have quite detailed stuff, it feels like we’re walking over a dark age. And that’s just really, really fascinating in the same way that the beginning of the sequel trilogy, you see Rey walking through the shells of AT-ATs and Star Destroyers, and we’re like, “Oh, cool, this time is dead, but people still inhabit the space that occupied.”
Danny Homan: So much of Star Wars is the myths and traditions that stick with us, and how they inform our present and our present struggle. So, while Cal might have assumed that the High Republic was a golden age where nothing went wrong, and the Jedi were always true. As you know, over the course of the events in Survivor, through psychometry, he comes to learn that every Jedi faces their struggle against the dark side, even the legendary Dagan Gera.
With Dagan’s ambitions in his pursuit of Tanalorr, how did you go about deciding when that villainous turn would come? How did you go about finding the right balance of introducing players to this character, and then still making him somewhat of a sympathetic villain?
Danny Homan: Yeah, it’s a great question. For story weight and purpose, Cal discovering Tanalorr and then complicating that, within relatively short order, felt right, because as we know from Cal and his journeys, when something good comes around, there’s always something bad on the horizon, too. That’s just the times that he lives in, these dark times of the galaxy. On the other side, we wanted to make sure that Dagan wasn’t a static character whose fixation on Tanalorr remained just the same throughout.
As you get to the end, and you confront Dagan for the final time, there’s that moment where he looks to Cal, he’s got the Stormtrooper helmet, he’s like, “You failed. You are not a Jedi, you pale in comparison to the Jedi of my day.” That’s such an important story moment for Cal, because so much of his character is about reconciling the path, continuing the traditions of the Jedi, so for a legendary Jedi to look at him and say, “This was on your watch,” it’s such an emotionally heart-wrenching experience for Cal.
Pete Stewart: I think there was a time — it’s still there — in the story where Dagan has fully fallen before you find him in the bacta tank, red saber and everything, and clearly he’s descending by the time he gets put into bacta. But it became really powerful for us, not just for the visual level of it, and the wow factor, but him bleeding the crystal in front of you and making that choice right there, and then in the present day, he hears everything Cal has to say, “The Jedi are gone, the Empire is here, it’s just us,” and he still decides to go all in on the thing. That just speaks to his obsession, speaks to how far he has fallen, and then also we get to see a really radical scene where he bleeds his lightsaber there, which hadn’t been seen before, so it’s just really cool.
It feels like there’s almost no external audio, and it’s just the voice actors coming through. I’m curious if that was the intent. Was the music purposely left out in order to give these characters their spotlight, especially someone like Dagan?
Danny Homan: This is such an intense moment, this confrontation between two Jedi from different periods of time, that I think the music can drop out so that you can hear every bit of delivery, because there’s so much subtext and so much pain in each of these confrontations between Cal and Dagan. So, I think it’s just a natural part of the process where you step back and go like, “Oh, we need everyone to focus on every single delicious word, because this is a confrontation worth hearing.”
Pete Stewart: I think there’s also some really cool things going on between Dagan and Cal, both in the first time they meet and the last time they meet. Like him bleeding the crystal is such an audio moment, drawing all of the air out of a room before it bursts out again. And at the end, he hypnotizes Cal, he sends him into a trance state, and you need to feel the weird upside-down-ness of the audio in that moment, as well. So, I think we’re just playing with the tools we had to create this sideways experience for the player.
Given that you have mo-cap actors doing a lot of this production, how practical were some of these fights between Cal and Dagan, especially the one at the end where they go upside down and Dagan is just casually walking around on the ceiling while Cal is trying to get his footing?
Danny Homan: Yeah, our actors do a lot of the P-cap, even veering into some of the stunts and things. Cameron Monaghan is not only a really studied actor, but he’s really astute on these kinds of sequences too, so he’s very involved. Whenever you can have the actor embody not only just the dialogue in the scene, but the high action as well, and to really put that character into the experience, I think that’s when you get really electrically charged moments like this one.
Pete Stewart: Yeah, I think when Cal is lifted by his leg up and thrown into the ceiling, it’s probably an animation to create that. [Laughs] But, there’s some really cool moments, like when you first fight Dagan and, at the end, there’s a sequence in the cinematic where his saber goes up into the air, and Cal is up in the air and Dagan jumps up really high, grabs it and then comes back down again. That’s a physical stunt that was done on the stage. Probably not by Cody, because that’s an intense level of athleticism, but yeah, a lot of those really cool acrobatic moments are physical stunts that we then transpose. But, when weird stuff happens, it’s more than likely the animators have some fun in the sequencer.
Danny Homan: And we do a lot of action Mo-capping at the end of our days of sets. So, the actors are still there, and still getting to see that too, so we know whether they’re involved in it or not. They’re internalizing the drama, and the action, and pure intensity of those moments, and they’re kind of using that to inform their performances.
In the first fight with Dagan, if I recall correctly, you get his health bar halfway down, and then Rayvis shows up and interrupts. How do you go about determining, from the writers’ perspective, when exactly a fight like that should be broken up with something story-driven?
Danny Homan: Yeah, that’s another great question. We’ll give you our perspective, but we can also give our design director, Jason, a chance to kind of further explain that, because really, the answer is story and design work hand-in-hand to make these clashes feel really give-an- take and to kind of carry both the story and also the gameplay together. Sometimes, you have a clash, so that the boss can switch to a different kind of tactic or add new tools to their arsenal, so there’s a practical side of that, as well. But then, of course, these are quite intense battles, so there’s kind of a sense, sometimes, to give the player a moment to kind of regroup and consider what they have to do next.
Pete Stewart: There’s a sense of progression to them, as well, because like you say, you only get halfway through his first health bar on the first fight before the sequence ends. I think when you fight on the Lucrehulk, you get it down to maybe a third or a quarter, or maybe a bit lower, but you’ll feel like you’re progressing. And then finally, in the last one, you get it to zero and that’s when he dies. So, I like that sense of you’re pushing through each time to get better at nearly winning the fight. But, I think it works on the narrative and gameplay level when, visually, you don’t get a health bar to zero, and you’re like, “Ah, I’ve been pipped to it, I’ve been beaten,” like someone’s [trumped] me, and it’s Rayvis in this case.
It’s such a fun twist to suddenly be like, “Wait, no, I was almost done with you!”
Pete Stewart: “I haven’t finished yet!” Yeah. [Laughs]
Dagan and Rayvis is such an interesting dynamic, and a lot of Dagan’s backstory is revealed through Force visions, but then a lot of it is left unknown. How much actual backstory did you guys write for this character, and how much of that actually made it into the game versus just kept in your head as a Bible?
Danny Homan: That’s another great question. To write a well-rounded character, or two characters who, like you said, they have a relationship that goes back hundreds of years and there’s a lot off-screen, there’s a lot implied, but in our room, we definitely talk through the sense of how they met, the circumstances. And like you said, we get bits and pieces of that in echoes, but if you look at a scene, like when Rayvis and Dagan are talking in the Lucrehulk that Cal overhears, you can read between the lines and know that their relationship goes back, and there’s a lot of pain and joy in it as well. Rayvis isn’t sure what his next move is going to be. Dagan obviously values Rayvis maybe more than he has valued other people in his life. There’s a genuine camaraderie there, that’s not just about a power relationship.
Pete Stewart: Yeah, I love that when he says, “I consider our oath fulfilled,” and then Dagan gets as close as he can to being like, “Oh, no, don’t. Don’t go, buddy.” [Laughs]
Danny Homan: “Whoa, whoa, whoa, not so fast, we have history.” [Chuckles]
Pete Stewart: “I’ll have to think of another idea to keep you around.” But yeah, I think it varies depending on the character and their utility in the story, but most of the time, I think there will be more information that we know that won’t be revealed in the game. Not that it’s not crucial information, clearly, otherwise it would be in the game. But like, we have our timeline, for instance, where we know when characters were born, and where they were born, and not every piece of information needs to be put into the game. But, when you understand how the table is set, where to go to get certain pieces of food and drink, that’s how we approach that kind of stuff.
Do you have a favorite bit of information in regard to Dagan that didn’t make its way into the game?
Pete Stewart: I’m gonna keep my mouth shut. [Laughs] Unless you have something, Danny?
Danny Homan: For me, it’s less about what did or didn’t make the game, but where it makes it in the game. Because there’s often, in how we work in our room and our revision process, we might have information that’s in a cinematic, and then as we go through revisions, and kind of get things ready for a shooting script, we realize that we have to take something away. But, the value of being a video game and not linear media, like TV or film, is we often have other places to put that stuff, so that all that juicy info that we couldn’t maybe get into a cinematic becomes parts of an echo, or parts of the databank. That’s part of the joy is that. There’s lots of different ways to tell stories in games, and I think character backstories and histories is one of those things that we get to impart on the player if they seek that out.
I’m not normally one to read all that extra information, but I did with Jedi: Survivor, because I was so hooked with these characters. One thing I always find interesting about boss battles is the quips that bosses will often throw at the player, and sometimes it can feel out of context in the middle of a fight. How do you two approach that with Dagan for these three epic, emotional, climactic fights?
Pete Stewart: You’re right, it’s a difficult needle to thread writing, like Buck VO. But essentially, we look at each fight, because Dagan has three fights, and he has three categories of voice lines for each. So, I don’t think there’s any overlap between them, or if there is, there’s just very few. The tone of each one is mapped to the tone of the fight, so the first one, it’s a little bit disorientated, but he’s still with it, and he’s kind of figured out his purpose again. Second one comes on the back of the cinematic in Lucrehulk, where he’s realized his purpose, he tries to destroy Zee after you think he’s gonna reprogram her.
And then, he can see his vision is re-crystallizing into something else that becomes the new dream, and he talks about a new war to Rayvis. And at the end, he’s a bit broken, because he’s just seen Santari Khri, who just 200 years ago left him, like where he’s just been broken up with over a video call, right? [Chuckles] And he’s pretty upset, but he’s so close to his goal, so he’s a little bit feral, almost, so we just approach it like that.
So we have the tone, and then we just get writing, and then the tricky part is, “How often do they fire? How many lines we want for each category?” like this. It’s fiddly, you go back, and you tweak, and you tweak and tweak, and he’d eventually still have to tell me to stop doing that, because I’ll do it forever. But, it’s just a long process, and we usually start it before the boss fight really exists in any form in the game, and then adjust as the boss phase starts to take shape, and we work with combat design to get to a final product.
I wanted to explore Khri and Dagan’s relationship. Jedi typically are seen as just comrades, there’s not typically any kind of romantic thing there, but there felt like something deeper between them in comparison to say someone like Cere and Cal. Was it ever in your minds, or how you view their relationship within the story?
Danny Homan: I think it’s fair to say that Dagan and Khri share a significant relationship. Not necessarily romantic, but just in that they are both ambitious, they both have vision, they’re both kind of leaders in their respective crafts, whether it’s exploration or sciences, and they share a dream together. As Merrin says in Survivor, that’s a dream that they feel like could only come to fruition if they work together. And you see in one of our psychometric flashbacks that Dagan had a moment where Khri feels like her project is going to be pulled from her, Dagan steps forward and says, like, “I’ll take the risk.”
And part of it’s out of ego, but I think part of it is out of genuine compassion and understanding Khri has her own ambitions. And I think that is a mirror to Cal and Merrin, and to a lot of relationships in Survivor, and this kind of theme of how those closest to you can let you down, but also build you up. It’s never one or the other. Khri has to confront Dagan, because she senses that he’s gone too far, and she’s trying to help bring him back towards the light side even then. But, of course, by then he’s a bit too consumed by his own ego and his own drive for Tanalorr to hear her words.
Pete Stewart: Yeah, Dagan is clearly drawn to the people that share his vision, so he’s drawn to Rayvis after defeating him, and he’s drawn to Khri because they’re both scientists seeking out what the next thing is. And then, like Danny says, a difference occurs when Khri keeps her cool, even if she is perhaps calling out some of the flaws in the Jedi Order’s logic, she’s like, “Well, them’s the rules, and I’m not going to be the person that goes against the Council.” Whereas Dagan is like, “I’ve gone over the edge.” [Chuckles] That’s where it changes, but he is drawn to the people, and forms a really strong bond with Khri, because they both share this passion and this dream. But the split occurs where she stays true to what she believes in and Dagan loses himself.
It is a pretty heartbreaking decision when that split happens, and she has to take his arm. Since we’re talking about mirroring characters, Cal takes quite a beating in that final fight against Dagan. Losing arms is a pretty common thing in the Star Wars universe, I’m curious if there was ever a thought to actually have that happen to Cal by Dagan?
Danny Homan: Short answer, I don’t know. That’s a good question. I’m not sure if that was ever something considered. I think the opportunity we saw in that final clash was more that wonderful point where Dagan has declared,”Hey, not only do I want Tanalorr for my own ego and my own drive, but I’m going to use it to do what you should have done, which is to finally build an army and take the fight to the Empire.” That scene is, I think, rich, because Cal hears Dagan’s words, and the wound to Cal is an emotional wound. “Maybe he’s right, maybe I should have fought harder. Maybe I need to use Tanalorr for more.” And, of course, that’s one of the revelations that causes the final kind of friction point between he and Bode.
Pete Stewart: Well, I also wouldn’t want Cal to be stealing Greez’s thunder. He’s rocking the metal arm now, and I think Greez has just gotten used to it, you know? I don’t remember either. I don’t think I recall a time where we considered a dismemberment for Cal. So, yeah, that’s my knowledge.
I’m curious how much you guys actually worked with Cody to find this character, and if he brought anything to it that maybe you didn’t already see from the writer’s perspective?
Danny Homan: We work hand-in-hand with our actors, they get early drafts of the scripts, we do table reads, we get notes. And then, during our performance-capture shoots, where they’re kind of working with the actors as they rehearse, to final recording. Really every step of the way, I think our performances in Survivor were so strong, because there’s just a really open, positive collaborative relationship between us and our peers, where they can’t deliver the performance we need until they really understand the core thing that characters are going through.
That was the same with Cody. I remember the day that we shot the scene, the intro to the final fight between Cal and Dagan, which is really, in a lot of ways, Cody’s scene, because it is Dagan self-obsessed with Tanalorr, driving the nails into Cal’s heart and calling him a failure. When we finished that shot with Cody, there was just electricity in the room, because he had felt and channeled so incredibly this feeling of being able to look at a Jedi who is lost and confused and say, “You’re a failure, and you’re no Jedi to me.” That’s something that really comes from collaboration.
Pete Stewart: I remember the very beginning, we had our first final table read, so everyone will read through the script, and we hear the shocks, and the cries, and the delight and the tragedy of everyone figuring out what’s happening for the first time. But then, immediately after that, we did a roundtable where all the actors sat, and then Tom Keegan, the performance director, would sit and dig in. All of the actors sat there, and dug into the roles and really started to, for quite a long time, we would sit there and dissect what they thought the script was saying to them, what the characters were saying to them. I think that was so valuable, because then everyone left understanding more than just words on a page, and the meaning behind it and what the characters were going through. You see that in the performances, it really pays dividends.
It sounds like another rich collaborative experience for you both. Now, we’ve talked a lot about that final confrontation between Cal and Dagan, where he’s calling him a failure. If Dagan had not been so obsessed with Tanalorr, do you think he actually could have had something of a redemptive arc within this universe, whether it be in this game or in a follow-up?
Danny Homan: I don’t know about a redemptive arc, because I think it feels like at this point, Dagan, even if he were to fight the Empire, would be fueled by his own ambitions and for his own purpose. I think he’s too far there. But so much of the story of Survivor is Cal meeting potential allies who he could really become brothers with, first Dagan, then, of course, with Bode, and kind of the tragedy of both those characters is the potential that has been wasted by their falls to the dark side. I think that’s so instructive for Cal, this idea that he’s seeking out allies in this impossible fight, and on a few occasions, he’s confronting the reality that humans are frail, and the dark side is something that draws people, so there’s fights on galactic levels, and also just on a personal level.
Pete Stewart: So many of the relationships we cast Cal against in Survivor are pinging off the themes of duty and desire. So, for me, at least, I couldn’t see a path to Dagan being redeemed, because we needed to see this duty versus desire played out to extremes. So, it’s to see Dagan choosing desire, and that consuming him, and destroying him. Or, as we see, the same thing with Bode, who chooses duty as a father, and that consumes him and destroys him.
Cal needs to be in the middle of these things, and feeling this pull in either direction, so I think the things that happened had to happen. I think Dagan surviving perhaps cheapens — not cheapens it, it softens what Cal is going through, the intensity of it is softened a little bit, for me, at least. Even though, as I’ve said before, I love envisioning happily ever afters for characters where they don’t have to die, but that’s just not the story we’re telling. It’s not the galaxy we’re telling it in, right?
Dagan dies before really getting to go back to Tanalorr in the present storyline. Did you ever toy with the idea of him actually reaching the planet and maybe having the final confrontation with him there, or was it always he was never supposed to get there?
Danny Homan: It’s an interesting question, because there’s something delicious about confronting Dagan at the moment where he’s about to be ready to go to Tanalorr, and then Cal’s confrontation with Bode later after Bode successfully arrived on Tanalorr. So, in some ways, Bode kind of continues that desire, so you get to see Cal confronts both Dagan before, then Bode afterwards. So, he kind of gets the full picture of Tanalorr as an object of desire that is kind of, as Pete was mentioning, represents this apple that is potentially poisonous that can twist people and make them fall from grace.
Pete Stewart: Yeah, the final fight with Dagan is also one of the final opportunities to cement Cal and Bode as the boys, the real friends, real brothers and comrades in arms. Them working together to defeat Dagan really cements that moment, because we always had it in our head that the final fight was Bode on Tanalorr, and in a lot of ways, Dagon is the foil that gives Bode, amongst other things, cover. So, having the inheritor of his obsession being Bode was always something that we felt quite strongly about. And Bode being the inheritor of that legacy, and standing in the ruins of Tanalorr against Cal was a pretty strong throughline throughout the game.
Well, I love the way it played out. Again, part of me would have loved to have seen it, but at the same time, as someone who was very anti-Dagan after his villainous turn, I was like, “Yes! No, you don’t get it.”
Pete Stewart: [Chuckles] Yeah, there’s something really great about that. It’s something really tasty about the actual bad guy, the arch bad guy, being denied what he wants, it just feels good.
We talked about the moral tug-of-war between duty and desire, and how it affects Cal. Cal has a little bit of a turn to the dark side as he chases down Bode. Was there ever a thought to introduce some of those dark Force powers for Cal during Dagan’s tenure in the story?
Danny Homan: I don’t think so, and I think the reason why is Bode’s betrayal hits Cal at a level deeper than almost anything he’s felt so far. That pain has to be so great, because Cal is surrounded by loved ones who are there to protect him and to guide him. He has that conversation with Merrin after leaving the shattered moon after the Rayvis confrontation, where Cal confesses that he’s worried he could go down Dagon’s path, and Merrin says, “If you do, we’ll be there to make sure you right your course.”
But the Bode betrayal, I think, hurts Cal the most because, again, you can imagine a future in which Cal and Bode successfully take on the Empire. They have a genuine brotherhood that I think Cal has been looking for a very long time, and so that betrayal hits him at a deeper level than I think he’s experienced before. And that is, unfortunately, the thing that tipped the scale and makes him dip into to a path that he hoped he would never take.
Pete Stewart: Yeah, I wouldn’t say he’s on a knife edge, but I think he’s wobbling along, pushing down any thoughts that he has, but they come up now. And then, he gets angry, and he’s caught in choices that don’t have endings that he loves. Like when he beats Rayvis and Rayvis demands that he kills him, Cal’s like, “I don’t really want to, but you’re never going to stop.” These sorts of dilemmas he gets put into, but he comes out of it as much as possible with his morality intact.
But then, like Danny says, Bode’s [betrayal unlocks] a primal rage. You think you’ve really got someone that you love, and that’s taken, that’s the thing that Dagon didn’t have. I don’t think Cal ever saw Dagon and envisioned — like, at the beginning, he’s was like, “We could fight the Empire together.” But then that’s it after that. It’s like, “Oh, you’re a tragedy, but also, you’re in my way, and you’ll do terrible things if I don’t stop you.” Whereas Bode, maybe he won’t do terrible things if Cal doesn’t stop him, but he has done terrible things like to Cere and co., and it’s just right in the heart.
I’d love to actually hear how involved you guys were with the overall atmosphere of the first Dagan scene, because one thing I love about the flashbacks in that sequence, and then even his first getting out of the bacta tank, is the lighting, the delivery of his lines, all feel like they nicely keep that villain turn up until the very last second when, like we were talking earlier, he bleeds the crystal. How much of that was your guys’ involvement? How much of that was the actual direction and voice capture?
Danny Homan: It’s really everything. I think it’s worth mentioning our cinematic director, Dori Arazi, who previously worked on God of War, who is an expert at his craft, and really talented at tone, and kind of shifting the various moods of that scene. It’s a difficult, delicate scene, right? There’s a lot going on there, there’s a moment of hope, and then it cascades into fear, and it’s something that really takes, as you mentioned, [perfect] sound design, it’s lighting, it’s cinematography, and it’s writing kind of all coming together.
Now that the mainline Star Wars franchise is looking to explore the High Republic with things like The Acolyte, how involved are things like Jedi: Survivor in helping flesh out some of the main canon for this universe?
Danny Homan: It’s a difficult question to answer. I think the story of our involvement in the High Republic was one of working with Lucasfilm, and a lot of collaboration of worldbuilding together. I think from our perspective, the fan reaction to the High Republic was something that I think surprised me a little bit, because it just seemed like people were so fascinated with it, and these are really interesting part of Star Wars history that I didn’t really know much about, prior to this project.
But I think it speaks to the collaboration, and a lot of the details we were able to put in there — Pete mentioned them earlier — there’s wonderful echoes and scans and databank entries that kind of give some interesting contours to the High Republic, as we know it, on Koboh, which is a site of disaster and tragedy. So, for our involvement in fleshing out parts of the High Republic, it was a really cool opportunity to get to show both the rise and the fall of this part of the High Republic.
Pete Stewart: Yeah, there was a real joy that I found when I was envisioning, “What if the echoes and scans in the meditation chambers, Khri’s meditation chambers, are all trying to create a slice of life.” When you put them all together, you can see, “Oh, this person met this person for a secret rendezvous in a different part of the planet,” and then these two masters are talking about this pattern that you see somewhere else, and just building this tableau of what life was like.
And like archaeologists dusting away ruins, that was really rewarding, and working with Lucasfilm on that, again, was really rewarding because it didn’t feel like there was any huge limiters or guardrails to how we wanted to tell it. As to the impact on the wider public canon, I can’t really say, but what I did notice today or yesterday, the High Republic primer, or art book or something, is out and Dagan and Santari are in it, and that’s really rewarding. It feels really cool to see that the work that we did is being represented in a larger sort of world.
Danny Homan: As game developers, we not only write, but we build story and worldbuild with all the other disciplines at our studio. I think part of why we see games coming into prominence, or having a little more eye on them, is that we build the levels, we fill every nook and cranny with interesting storytelling, and characters, and tone, and if that inspires other people, that’s great. What an honor.
For my final question, given how much dialogue there is, and how many secrets and databanks are hidden in this game, how big did the script for this turn out to be?
Danny Homan: It’s hard to say. We have cinematics, we have gameplay scripts, we’ve got barks, we’ve got hundreds and hundreds of pages of our cantina content. One thing that we thought a lot about on our team is, especially with the story we’re telling — which is a hard story, this is a difficult story in Star Wars canon, it’s a story of betrayal and loss. We spent a lot of effort making sure that players, even after the credits rolled, could go back and talk to characters, and experience Bode’s perspective on his journey.
Games are a marathon, they’re a multi-year development process, which takes a lot of time and energy for us as devs. But we know that our community has such an emotional investment in our characters, in our worlds, so for us, it’s worth that effort, so that, on the tail end, when the game comes out, we can see players talking to characters after the credits have rolled, and finding every echo, or every scan. It’s really rewarding to see how much love it seems like players fell on to with Jedi: Survivor.
Pete Stewart: I don’t know an exact number, although I do remember towards the end of the project, us clocking in, and it was like over half a million words. Probably way more than that in our databases, but I do remember the scripts document we had for the cantina creaking due to its size, so that’s a testament to the amount of content that we created both for critical and side content.
About Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
The story of Cal Kestis continues in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, a third person galaxy-spanning action-adventure game from Respawn Entertainment, developed in collaboration with Lucasfilm Games. This narratively-driven, single player title picks up five years after the events of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and follows Cal’s increasingly desperate fight as the galaxy descends further into darkness. Pushed to the edges of the galaxy by the Empire, Cal will find himself surrounded by threats new and familiar. As one of the last surviving Jedi Knights, Cal is driven to make a stand during the galaxy’s darkest times – but how far is he willing to go to protect himself, his crew, and the legacy of the Jedi Order?
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
Following up after the events of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor continues the journey of Cal Kestis after surviving the aftermath of Order 66 and the mass execution of the Jedi. Five years after barely escaping the clutches of Darth Vader and the Galactic Empire, Cal continues to live on the run with his robot companion, BD-1. Players will now assume the role of Cal Kestis as no longer a Padawan but a Jedi Master.
- Franchise
- Star Wars Jedi
- Platform(s)
- PC , Xbox Series X , PlayStation 5
- Released
- April 28, 2023
- Developer(s)
- Respawn Entertainment
- Publisher(s)
- Electronic Arts
- Genre(s)
- Adventure , Sci-Fi , Action
- ESRB
- T
- How Long To Beat
- 14 hours
- Prequel
- Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
