Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Launches in a Poor State
The latest Star Wars game, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, launched last week to impressive critic scores- with it receiving an 86 average Metascore. That puts it above the original game and on par with other 2023 releases including Octopath Traveller II and Hogwarts Legacy. By just looking at the critic reviews, you may consider the latest project from Respawn Entertainment to be a rousing success. However, taking a look at user scores tells a different story. With a 4.6 average on PS5 and an even lower 2.0 on PC, it’s clear that something went very wrong with the game at launch.
While many games have been the victims of unwarranted review bombing in recent years, this doesn’t appear to be the case here. Instead, Jedi: Survivor is another example of poor optimization. From framerate issues to textures not loading and even game-breaking bugs, the latest Star Wars game has launched in an unplayable state for many people. Metacritic User DeVito 8704 sums up a lot of players’ thoughts on PC with the following review:
“I never give zero ratings for games, however, Jedi Survivor is absolutely unplayable in its current state. Even the loading screens, when you first turn the game on, can't even go by without stuttering. The fact that EA released this broken game is a disgrace. This game needed at least another 6 months of development.”
While performance is slightly better on consoles, the game still suffers from stuttering and crashes almost as often as the PC port. For a AAA game in 2023, this shouldn’t be accepted, but it’s, unfortunately, becoming more expected. In 2023 alone, we’ve seen Wild Hearts and The Last of Us Part 1 launch in poorly optimized states which has made these fantastic games nearly unplayable for PC players.
With all of the negative reviews regarding the optimization of Jedi: Survivor, a lot of the positive features of the game are being overlooked. From those who have been able to avoid most of these performance issues, it appears that the game is a vast improvement on the original. With updated combat and grander spaces to explore, Jedi: Survivor certainly doesn’t reinvent the wheel crafted by its predecessor but it fine-tunes it to the extent where it is a big step up from Fallen Order. Its just a shame that it’s nearly unplayable at launch.
With all of the backlash received upon launch, the official EA Star Wars Twitter account put out the following statement in an attempt to quell the flames:
The term ‘certain specific configurations' has frustrated a lot of fans, who see this statement as them being blamed for not having specific PC settings that are needed to run Jedi: Survivor. This statement seems to have caused more controversy than before on account of the widespread issues that a majority of PC players have faced. Whether the upcoming patches in the next few weeks will fix these issues or not remains to be seen, but EA will have to act quickly to reduce the long-term damage to the Star Wars Jedi brand. With how hard it is to optimize games on PC, however, I wouldn’t expect these fixes to come any time soon.
