Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order Almost Didn't Include Jedi

thegamer.com:

The release of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is fast-approaching, and director Stug Asumssen has been speaking about what it's like to work with a franchise as massive as Star Wars and what it's like to work with owner Lucasfilms. It turns out, the company is very protective of certain elements of the Star Wars universe, so much so that it almost refused to have any Jedi feature in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order which released back in 2019.

Speaking in an interview with the Guardian (thanks GameSpot), Asmussen reveals that Lucasfilm was extremely hesitant to let Cal Kestis be a Jedi, instead suggesting the character could be "a force user" instead. It even suggested that the character could be a bounty hunter or a smuggler, intensley questioning developer Respawn Entertainment on why Cal needed to be a Jedi for the title to work.

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"It’s a big process," says Asmussen. "We wanted to do third-person action adventure, and we wanted to have a Jedi with lightsabers. And then they’re like – wait. At that point, to Lucasfilm, the Jedi are like the holy grail. I mean, it’s something that they’re probably the most protective of, except for maybe Baby Yoda."

"So we had to kind of earn that. We had to go through a whole process of, why do you want it to be a Jedi? What do you want to do with the Jedi? They were really uncomfortable with Jedi, and they said, 'Let’s reset this. Let’s call this character a force user.'"

Things apparently got to a point where Asmussen almost decided to walk away from the entire project over Lucasfilm's proposed changes, adamant that the character that went on to become Cal Kestis needed to be a Jedi. Thankfully, trust between Respawn and Lucasfilm gradually grew