Star Wars: Dark Forces – is Kyle Katarn getting a comeback? (pic: Lucasfilm)
A job ad has confirmed that Respawn’s secret Star Wars first person shooter is a spiritual sequel to Dark Forces and Jedi Knight.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is out on April 28, and while developer Respawn has been strangely secretive about it there’s every reason to expect it will be good, given the quality of its predecessor Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
Confusingly though, Respawn is actually working on three different Star Wars games at the moment: the Fallen Order series, an unnamed first person shooter, and a strategy game – although the latter is being co-developer by Bit Reactor, which is fronted by the designer of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.
At first it was assumed the first person shooter might have something to do with Battlefront but now it’s clear that it will actually be a spiritual successor to Dark Forces, the first ever Star Wars first person shooter.
Dark Forces was released in 1995, right in the middle of the Doom clone era of games. It was much more technically advanced than most of its peers though and was the first mainstream game to allow you to look up and down, with much more vertical level design than Doom.
Its sequel was very different, as it suddenly decided that its hero, Kyle Katarn, could use the Force and so while it was still primarily a first person shooter there was also the option to use a lightsaber from a third person perspective – which Fallen Order seemed to draw considerable influence from.
The series got a few more sequels but they didn’t make anywhere near as much impact, and the franchise has never been seen again since. However, given how EA resurrected the Battlefront name it wouldn’t be surprising to see the Dark Forces or Jedi Knight name return for the new game.
Respawn’s Peter Hirschmann has already mentioned Dark Forces as an influence, in an interview last year, but in the last few days a number of new job ads have appeared that also all mention the game.
They describe the unnamed shooter as being, ‘inspired by classic titles like Dark Forces and Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2, our story-driven single-player game is being developed from the ground up leveraging the power of Unreal Engine 5.’
This will be the first time that Respawn has used Unreal Engine 5, so hopefully we can expect the graphics to be even better than Survivor.
Although some of the sequels appeared on consoles, Jedi Knight was PC-only and Dark Forces only received a belated PS1 port, which may account for the series’ slide into obscurity.
Like anything before the Disney takeover, the whole series is now non-canon, although the Dark Troopers from the first game did show up under a different context in The Mandalorian.
Hero Kyle Katarn has never been returned to canon, though, primarily because he was originally the guy that stole the plans to the first Death Star, and the movie Rogue One has overwritten all of that.
Legacy characters are frequently reintroduced with a different backstory though and Kyle has already made cameos in a Star Wars card game and mobile game Galaxy Of Heroes.
Whether that means he’ll be the star of the new game is impossible to say, but it is a possibility.
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A job ad has confirmed that Respawn’s secret Star Wars first person shooter is a spiritual sequel to Dark Forces and Jedi Knight.