Soulslike games are known for their sometimes incredibly challenging gameplay, though some Soulslike games take things in their own direction. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order has a strong skill curve, but if fans are just wanting to enjoy the game, there are difficulty options unlike a lot of Souls games. "The Star Wars audience is huge," director Stig Asmussen explained in a recent Game ZXC interview when discussing how difficulty factors into Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. "We can't make something for a very narrow expert crowd; we have to make something that is palatable to pretty much anybody."
Therefore, the novice Souls player can have just as much fun in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor as the expert, but one thing experts have, largely to themselves, are challenge runs. The base difficulty of some Souls games is not enough for all players, and there has been plenty of challenge runs done in the past such as beating a game at level one, not rolling in a playthrough, and so on. One of the most popular is the no-hit run, where players attempt to beat a game without taking any damage whatsoever. In fact, one major moment in the larger Souls community was when The Happy Hob completed back-to-back no-hit challenge runs in every FromSoftware game between Demon's Souls and Elden Ring.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order has been beaten with no-hit runs in the past, but Asmussen couldn't comment for sure whether it was possible in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. If it is, it'll be interesting to see fans run it and eventually perhaps run the two games back to back. However, Asmussen did share an interesting story about how no-hit runs really began in the franchise, with that dating back to the vertical slice of Fallen Order. Asmussen revealed that this vertical slice saw players land on Zeffo, unlock Force Push, fight the AT-ST, and the demo itself more or less opens up from there.
"But very early on, when we were building that demo," director Asmussen said, "we were a small team at that point, like maybe 25 or 30 people." This small team of developers, however, were clearly Soulslike game fans.
"A good probably 10% of the team was trying to do no-hit runs just on that. It's not something that we set out to design at that point consciously, but we thought it was pretty cool. It's something that we made sure was possible in the first game."
Not only does this behind-the-scenes story give valuable insight into the first game's development, but it's interesting to see how deeply rooted challenge runs like these are rooted in the community, player and dev side. Asmussen may not have been able to confirm whether no-hit runs were possible in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, but if there's one thing for certain, the community will find out.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor launches on April 28, 2023, for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
