At the panel for Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order at Celebration, we got a look at some of the villains that will be present in the story.
You play as a survivor of the Jedi Purge, Cal Kestis, and as the story goes on he is pursued by the Inquisitors. This includes the Second Sister, but it also includes Purge Troopers! We got a look at them during the panel, including someone wearing an actual Purge Trooper outfit!
We have actually seen these troopers before, in Charles Soule’s Darth Vader comic series, but they’ll take on a bigger role in this game. So at the panel, some of the people who worked on this game gave us more information about these troopers:
“So these are new troopers we’re introducing called Purge Troopers. And creating new troopers in Star Wars is always a fun experiment, finding the utility that you’re looking for in the troopers. We’ve seen multiple variations over years of films and TV shows, we have Shoretroopers and Death Troopers and Snow Troopers and Flame Troopers and onwards, and we wanted to develop something for this game.” – Steve Blank (Director of franchise content and strategy in the Lucasfilm story group)
“Yeah, there’s always a lot of rumors floating around in the galaxy of Jedi fightings, especially this time, and it’s actually the Inquisitors’ job to hunt them down, but like Steve was mentioning, there’s so few of them so they actually send these Purge Troopers to investigate. And when they do encounter a Jedi, they call the Inquisitors back in, but these troopers are also specially trained to fight Jedi, so when they do encounter one, they’re really eager to fight them. – Kasumi Shishido (Producer)
“They’re basically kind of born out of the stormtrooper, mechanically. The stormtrooper was the first AI we got stood up in the game that could actually, we could fight against it. One hit with a lightsaber, they go down. So they didn’t provide much of a challenge unless we put them in situations where there’s like dozens of them, which is ok, we might have scenarios like that in our game, but like I said, thoughtful combat, it’s not a button mash, so we need to find something that is more meaty one-on-one fights, so that’s how we came up with specially-trained commando units with Lucasfilm. And it’s kind of been said, but they come into battle and they’re airdropped in as the first responders, and they soften up the Jedi before the Inquisitorious rolls in.” – Stig Asumussen (Game Director)
I really like the idea of Purge Troopers. Their design is pretty awesome – it looks like they’re still wearing some Clone armor – but also their purpose makes a lot of sense. The Second Sister is being described as the game’s primary antagonist, but the Inquisitors are limited. We don’t actually know how many of them Darth Vader has in this program, but they probably aren’t enough to hunt down all of the remaining Jedi. Plus, you’ll have plenty of false reports about Jedi sightings, which would further spread the Inquisitors out pretty sparsely. So it makes a ton of sense to have Purge Troopers (which is an awesome name, by the way) to be the first ones on the scene before the Inquisitors arrive.
It’s always fun and cool to get a look at new classes of troopers, and the Purge Troopers are no different. If anything, they’re even cooler because we know that their purpose is at least in part to hunt down Jedi! And in Jedi: Fallen Order, we’ll get to face off with them!
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