Following the reveal of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, a sequel to 2019's Fallen Order, director Stig Asmussen has explained the key benefits of developing on current-gen consoles.
In an interview with StarWars.com published shortly after Star Wars Jedi: Survivor's announcement, Asmussen said ray-tracing is one of the most important improvements made possible by new-gen hardware. The director also teased a lighting system that's "well beyond" anything we've seen from the studio before.
"So I think the biggest thing is ray tracing, or lighting," Asmussen said. "That’s allowing us to do real-time lighting, all the time, at a fidelity that’s well beyond anything that we’ve ever produced before. Since it’s real-time, we get to see the changes as we tweak the lights — immediately, essentially. That means that we have more time to polish, that means that we can iterate more, and we can get better results that feel more filmic."
It's unclear if by "filmic," Asmussen was referring to the quality of looking cinematic or simply photorealistic, but it's enticing to hear that the sequel is such a big step up visually compared to its already quite good-looking predecessor.
In the gameplay department, Asmussen said players can expect dramatically improved loading times. "Beyond that, we have these blazing fast drives on these consoles that are allowing us to load tons of content really quickly," he said. "I’ve always worked on streaming games — games that don’t have load screens. The fact that these consoles have such fast storage has made it even easier."
Finally, Asmussen brings up the PS5's DualSense controller as another unique way Star Wars Jedi: Survivor improves upon Fallen Order, although he doesn't go into specifics. "PlayStation 5 has some really interesting haptics on their controller that we’re digging into," he said.
