Electronic Arts has had to set expectations after a little bit of misinformation started spreading about Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.
Andy McNamara, who is global director of integrated communications at EA, made this tweet in response to a claim that Coruscant was going to be made an open world:
“To be clear, Stig never claimed Coruscant was a “freely explorable open world.” He only confirmed it as one of the destinations in the game. Survivor has amazing planets to explore and our biggest environments to date but wanted to be clear on what was said. Thx!”
Andy was of course being mindful that gamers can often get carried away with narratives among the community. While gamers as a community is in general a positive, there are certain unsavory aspects of it that gamers themselves need to be careful about getting tied up in. Game companies also often have to protect their own employees from the bad parts of this culture.
What I am referring to here in specific is how a narrative about a game can grow and grow, even if it has no basis in reality, if the game company just allows it to keep going.
So there may be people who will keep going now about how EA promised Star Wars Jedi: Survivor would be an open world Coruscant that was never promised.
Tracing the source of the confusion, it may all be stemming from some very choice wording from IGN. In a preview for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, they stated that after finishing certain missions in Koboh, the world would ‘open up’ for the player.
What that IGN preview may have meant is that Cal Kestis’ stay in Koboh may start off with some linear missions, but afterwards, Cal could stay and look for some side quests, or just explore parts of the planet that he initially saw but didn’t get a chance to look around in.
While some linear games can offer more openness, in the sense of giving players more area to explore, or more choice in choosing sidequests, we have to be careful about that wording because the words open world have such loaded meaning behind them.
From the looks of things, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor still isn’t the open world Star Wars game that fans are looking for. However, given how good Star Wars: Fallen Order was pulled off, and how previews are coming along, Respawn still seems to have produced a brilliant new Star Wars game.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor will be releasing on PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series X|S on April 28, 2023.
