Designing Accessibility For Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

For Cal Kestis’ return, Respawn Entertainment worked hard to ensure that as many players as possible could embrace the fantasy of being a Jedi Knight in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.

“With Jedi: Survivor, we’ve been able to build on what we learned from Fallen Order,” says  Jonas Lundqvist, Senior Director of Development.  “We were fortunate to receive great feedback from the community when we released the original game back in 2019, enabling us to keep improving the game after launch. That experience, and those learnings, have been hugely important in getting us to where we are today as they’ve influenced our process as well as specific features on Jedi: Survivor, and so we’d like to thank our community for that as together we are opening the game up for more players to enjoy.”

From difficulty options to accessibility-related controls, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor was designed to give players choice over how they play through their galactic journey. These options include:

Control Customization: Players have the ability to remap their controls to suit their needs.

Subtitles & Closed Captions: Jedi: Survivor features numerous toggles for subtitles and closed captions, letting you modify how much detail is in both, as well as letting you decide when you want to see them during your game. You can have them on just for cutscenes or during conversations and battles as well, with directional indicators also togglable.

Visuals: A number of options related to visuals will be available at launch, including HUD scaling, color profile Settings, stabilizing UI dot, color blind options, field of view, camera shake adjustment, and more.

Difficulty Options: Players will have access to five distinct difficulties that allow them to set the level of challenge they want from enemies.

• Story Mode
  • For those who wish to enjoy Cal and crew’s adventure with little resistance from foes. Parry times are generous and damage dealt by enemies minimal.
• Jedi Padawan
  • More of a challenge than Story Mode but gentler than Jedi Knight. Parry times are still somewhat generous though enemies deal a fair amount more damage than they do in Story Mode
• Jedi Knight
  • A challenging adventure. Players will need to hone their reflexes to overcome enemies.
• Jedi Master
  • Offers even more of a challenge than Jedi Knight, with enemy aggressiveness dialed up to keep you on your toes.
• Jedi Grand Master
  • The most difficult option. Parry windows are small and enemies are merciless. This difficulty setting will test your mettle.

We encourage players to choose the difficulty level that will make their gameplay experience most enjoyable, comfortable in the knowledge that there is no difference in the in-game rewards earned and that they can switch between modes during gameplay so long as they are not in combat. 

Gameplay Modifiers: Alongside difficulty options, the game also features many gameplay modifiers that can be adjusted at nearly any point in the game. These options include:

• Camera options for auto-targeting
• Button mash options
• Hold/Pull Toggles
• Navigation Assist (including audio ping)

Slow Mode: One of the options that we’re most excited for our players to discover is our Slow Mode toggle, which allows players to slow down the action of the world in order to ease the challenge of both combat and platforming.

“The Slow Mode has been a particularly exciting feature to work on because of its versatility,” Lundqvist explains. “It primarily started out as a feature that we thought would be helpful in combat, but quickly realized that it could be beneficial for anything that had a timing component. It opens up some of our platforming to be more accessible, allows for different reaction times and  helps make the game generally more accessible to a larger audience.”

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s accessibility features will continue to be added to post-launch, including a high contrast mode and menu narration, with Morgan Baker, EA’s Program Lead for Accessibility explaining,  “At Electronic Arts, we strive to reduce and eliminate unnecessary accessibility barriers so that everyone can enjoy our games. Respawn showcases a true dedication to our accessibility commitments in Jedi: Survivor by considering accessibility from the start, making it a core part of their design process, and listening to the community.’

‘The game offers accessibility not just through options, but also by conscious design choices. For example, artists were mindful of their color palette for certain experiences, and key elements within the map are dual-coded to visually convey the same information in several ways.’”

Baker notes that Jedi:Survivor hosted one of the first in-house playtests at Electronic Arts solely dedicated to accessible design: “By embracing the disability community mantra, ‘Nothing About Us Without Us,’ accessibility champions from Respawn gathered direct community feedback to inform their accessibility design choices and options. We realize that creating accessible player experiences is a never-ending journey though, and I am proud of the team's progress and ceaseless dedication.”

Jedi: Survivor is another step in EA’s journey towards making games accessible to a wider audience, but Baker acknowledges that there’s always more work to be done, “We are far from being finished, but these types of design choices Respawn made are illustrative of how we want to approach making games for all our players.”