EA has announced that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Star Wars Jedi:Fallen Order’s creative director, Stig Asmussen, is leaving Respawn Entertainment.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, EA gave this statement:
“After careful thought and consideration, Stig Asmussen has decided to leave Respawn to pursue other adventures, and we wish him the best of luck.
Veteran Respawn leaders will be stepping up to guide the team as they continue their work on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.”
Stig Asmussen got his start in the video game industry in 1999, as the 3D artist for arcade and home console classic, Gauntlet: Dark Legacy. Prior to joining Respawn Entertainment, Stig was best known for his work on the God of War games, all done under Santa Monica Studio. He had spent eight years at Santa Monica Studio, and about nine years at Respawn, having been confirmed to have worked there since at least 2014.
There was no indication until now that Stig had been unhappy at Respawn, or that he was interested in moving on. In fact, we had reported on two separate instances where Stig said he expected to make a third game for the Star Wars Jedi franchise, with Cal Kestis in it. He made these statements in March, and then in April, heavily implying that his team at Respawn had already planned out how to end Cal Kestis’ story.
As for the Star Wars video game franchise, EA’s mismanagement and cancellation of multiple projects did lead Disney to open up the floodgates for multiple developers to get to make their own Star Wars video games.
However, those issues did not seem to affect Respawn. After the success of the two Star Wars Jedi games, we can look forward to two more projects under their hands.
One is an untitled Star Wars FPS. It should be noted that a Star Wars Battlefront 3 was pitched by DICE, but rejected by Disney. Tom Henderson tweeted in 2021 that the rejection was because “it takes 20% more sales to make the same money.”
This unnamed FPS will presumably be highly differentiated from DICE’s Battlefront, but heading the Respawn project is Peter Hirschmann. Peter was at Pandemic Studios many years before, and worked on the two Battlefront games that Pandemic Studios made.
The other project is an untitled Star Wars strategy game, being developed by Bit Reactor. Bit Reactor is composed of many former Firaxis staff, and so their project is expected to be an XCOM-like strategy title. Respawn is also involved in this project to some degree.
Whatever the reasons for Stig’s departure, we wish him well in his future projects and hope to see him in the games industry in the future.
