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Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order has been a pleasant surprise for EA. But, the developers at Respawn revealed that the story could have taken a very different turn this week. On the AIAD Game Maker’s podcast, game director Stig Asmussen told the hosts that he had to argue their case to include the Jedi and Force powers in their game. As many creative teams have learned in the past, Lucasfilm doesn’t play around when it comes to their properties. Things have to be a certain level for them to okay a project. (We’ll just ignore Star Wars: Battlefront II in this instance.) Pushing for the different approach clearly paid dividends for the team as the reviews for Fallen Order have been good. The sales of the game have also kept up over time, with the units moving swiftly and bundles available for the holidays. Hearing the story in its entirety is wild, to say the least.

"I pitched, 'Hey what if we do a game about Jedi and Force powers,'" Asmussen began. "They were not super comfortable with that. They threw it back, 'What about blasters or bounty hunters?'"

"The Jedi is the Holy Grail," he explained. "There was a little bit of back and forth, but they could see where I was coming from and said, 'All right, we can start having a conversation about making a game about Force users, but not Jedi.' And then the game comes out and its name is Jedi.”

Asmussen also said at one point he told the brass that if he and the team couldn’t make the game they wanted that they might as well “start building a racing game at this point.” This is a winning formula, as Comicbook.com’s Tanner Dedmon lays out here:

“Fallen Order does find itself constrained at times by its placement in the Star Wars timeline since it’s nestled between established and integral moments in the franchise, but that itself is part of what makes it such a true-to-form Star Wars story. Through encounters trivial and significant, like a shuttle filled with scrappers of various species to the Wookiees at war on Kashyyyk, Fallen Order does an excellent job of showing just how small someone and their story can be in the boundless expanse of Star Wars. It’s a contained adventure that doesn’t have a tremendous impact on the events around it, but it doesn’t have to. It’s a Star Wars story through and through and it’s raised the bar for wherever the Star Wars games go next.”

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is now available for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC platforms.