Respawn Entertainment’s upcoming title Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order now has an entry on the PlayStation Store. The entry describes the basic premise of the story: a Jedi Padawan who survived Order 66 must hone his abilities, attaining mastery of his Force powers as well as the use of a lightsaber. He’s gotta do all that, and he’s also gotta continually evade Imperial agents if he wants to keep his head. In addition to this, there’s info on pre-order bonuses and a Deluxe Edition (yuck to both), as well as an interesting little bullet point: “Online Play (Optional).”
Perhaps it’s not immediately clear why this is significant. So let’s dig into that. Fallen Order has garnered some attention lately because of a story trailer released on April 13, as well as an announcement during Star Wars Celebration that the game would be a solely single-player experience, forgoing both multiplayer and microtransactions. People have been quite positive about this announcement, especially considering EA’s storied controversies with Star Wars releases.
So in a game which is notably single-player and definitely not multiplayer, the presence of “Online Play (Optional)” is something of a puzzle. Granted, online components to single player experiences are nothing new. Leaderboards have existed since the dawn of time, and even Dark Souls players who never summon people for help still encounter messages and the phantoms of the Chosen Undead of alternate Lordrans. If there’s something similar to the latter, there could be an interesting connection between the protagonist’s Force abilities and the way these are expressed mechanically. But that’s probably not the case. Anything said now is pure speculation, but some things are more likely than others.
And if we look at another single-player campaign by Respawn, that of Titanfall 2, we see that the gameplay is level-based. And while Titanfall 2 doesn’t feature anything like this, it wouldn’t be outlandish to see a leaderboard, a scoring system, or statistics (stuff like runtime, headshots, etc.) after each level of Fallen Order, where you can compare your performance to that of other players. I would imagine that we’ll see one of these three things (or a combination) as opposed to something novel or particularly in-depth. But I’ve been wrong before.
So we’ve got a couple of things to chew on, and there are certainly those among us who will reserve excitement until there’s a gameplay trailer to dissect. In any event, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is slated for a November 15 release, and will be available for Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.
What do you think of Fallen Order potentially having online elements? What game would you want it to be most like?