'Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order' is an action game starring a Jedi purge survivor
Respawn Entertainment's long-awaited Star Wars game is about a Jedi on the run. More importantly: it's leaving all the recent Star Wars game baggage behind.
That's a big deal, and the news Respawn's Star Wars Celebration actually led with. Before they even got to detailing anything about the game's story and setting, they confirmed that Fallen Order is a story-driven single-player game with no loot boxes, no multiplayer, and no microtransactions.
The game is described as a third-person "melee game," with you playing as a Force-wielding, lightsaber-swinging Jedi named Cal Kestis. Respawn's first trailer skips gameplay in favor of story-focused cutscenes, featuring the young, on-the-run Jedi running through his three rules for survival in a post-Order 66 galaxy.
When the story opens, Cal works for a scrapper's guild, salvaging wrecks from the galaxy-spanning Clone Wars in exchange for cold, hard credits. He's just trying eke out an existence and lay low now that all of his fellow Jedi have been wiped out.
The panel confirmed that Cameron Monaghan is the voice and face behind Cal Kestis. Monaghan is perhaps best known for his roles on Shameless and Gotham.
Respawn is known best as the studio behind the Titanfall series, with the second entry in that series being an item of interest here. Titanfall 2 was notably the first game in that series to include a single-player story mode, and that side of the game was hailed by critics and fans alike for its inventive gameplay and jaw-dropping level design.
As a series, Titanfall is all about fast movement and high-flying action. You don't need to think too hard to imagine how that particular flavor of action could be applied to more of a Jedi-centric Star Wars setting.
Fallen Order is publisher Electronic Arts second attempt at a story-driven Star Wars game, after 2017's Star Wars: Battlefront II. Though in that earlier example, the story mode was added to a game that is fundamentally built around competitive online play. So while the writing was very strong and the set pieces impressed, the story mode as a whole didn't sell the fantasy of a Star Wars adventure as effectively as it could have.
Hopefully, Respawn's up-front focus on telling a story in a galaxy far, far away means better things await in Fallen Order. We'll find out when it arrives on Nov. 15, 2019.
Adam Rosenberg is a Senior Games Reporter for Mashable, where he plays all the games. Every single one. From AAA blockbusters to indie darlings to mobile favorites and browser-based oddities, he consumes as much as he can, whenever he can.Adam brings more than a decade of experience working in the space to the Mashable Games team. He previously headed up all games coverage at Digital Trends, and prior to that was a long-time, full-time freelancer, writing for a diverse lineup of outlets that includes Rolling Stone, MTV, G4, Joystiq, IGN, Official Xbox Magazine, EGM, 1UP, UGO and others.Born and raised in the beautiful suburbs of New York, Adam has spent his life in and around the city. He's a New York University graduate with a double major in Journalism and Cinema Studios. He's also a certified audio engineer. Currently, Adam resides in Crown Heights with his dog and his partner's two cats. He's a lover of fine food, adorable animals, video games, all things geeky and shiny gadgets.
