Star Wars Jedi series director Stig Asmussen is leaving Respawn

Director of both Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Survivor Stig Asmussen is leaving Respawn Entertainment.

As initially reported by Bloomberg, Asmussen has apparently made the decision to leave Respawn, with EA later confirming that this is the case in a statement (thanks, PC Gamer). "Stig Asmussen has decided to leave Respawn to pursue other adventures, and we wish him the best of luck," reads the brief statement. Aside from the point about pursuing "other adventures," Asmussen's decision to leave the developer after almost 10 years there wasn't shared.

It's a slightly surprising move from Asmussen considering earlier this year he said he wanted Star Wars Jedi to become a trilogy. "I always wanted to see this as a trilogy," Asmussen said at the time. "How can we take Cal and the crew to new places beyond what we were doing in the first game? We had a pretty decent idea of timeframe where we wanted Survivor to take place, what the stakes were going to be, what the tone of the game was going to be, what Cal was going to be up against, and how the crew was going to factor into that. And there's ideas of what we could do beyond that as well."

There's even the chance that the threequel is already in development, as evidenced by some job listings earlier this year. Whether or not that's still the case, if it ever was, is obviously up in the air, but Asmussen leaving doesn't mean the game would suddenly be cancelled. According to EA, "Veteran Respawn leaders will be stepping up to guide the team as they continue their work on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor," so it sounds like things are in safe hands.

Prior to his time at Respawn, Asmussen had worked on the God of War series in various roles, including lead environment artist, art director, and eventually game director for the third entry in the series.