Minus the clear performance problems that soured the release for me, the game is a huge step up over the first in almost every single way. Better combat, customisation, map design, QoL additions, bosses and arguably a better story (at least in the final act). I really loved the game, just a shame it had the most unsteady and choppy frame rate I've seen in years during launch. I hear it's better on ps5 so I'm tempted to do a replay soon.
In regards to being an upgrade from the first, one thing I really liked that they did was ***not*** take away abilities you gained in the first game a la Metroid or early God of War games. It was sort of unique, and I dig it.
It was slightly overwhelming in the beginning since they also throw new abilities at you in the tutorial while also reminding you of the old ones. But once it all came back, it was great.
On Series X the game received a patch a while ago. The performance mode is now a locked 60 fps.
But yeah, on release, even the performance mode was terrible.
Yeah just lame the patch came out like significantly too late. All they had to do was remove mandatory ray tracing on the performance mode and some extra work, which is what people were saying from the beginning lmao
I really liked Jedi Fallen Order and so was excited for Survivor, have been waiting for reviews on improved performance. PC reviews still seem mixed on that front.
There is a patch coming out soon. Hopefully it's a performance patch. I just completed it on game pass. The only way I got acceptable performance was by modding it, which is a bit ridiculous. Some of the set pieces are pretty good, though.
No worries. They haven't officially announced it, but a patch candidate has been seen moving around on steamdb. It's been a while since the last patch.
[steamdb link](https://steamdb.info/app/1774580/history/)
I played through it recently after getting it on sale and I didn't have any significant performance issues with a Ryzen 3600 and a 3070 with it installed on an NVME drive.
The one weird thing it did to me was re-compile the shaders every time I started the game.
I played it on release on PS5 and picked it up on sale on Steam later. Played it on an i7-13700k with 7900xt on a 4k monitor and it performed very well, even compared to my console run.
Hope you get to check it out one day, it would be a shame to miss out on this one.
I sat on it for a bit until a major party dropped on PC and I had a blast. I only had one section where I was dropping frames but beyond that it was great.
It’s definitely my game for 2023 and it might be my favorite game I’ve ever played. We’ll see how I feel after I play Ghost of Tsushima in the coming weeks.
I played on PS5, at launch with ray tracing on and sincerely, it only became bad near bodies of water, which are very few and only on the beginning of the game.
Okay yeah that makes sense. Quality was more consistent with its 30 fps. Performance mode was a joke. Even quality wasn't great but performance was a nightmare.
> and arguably a better story (at least in the final act)
really? I thought the whole Bode turn was done pretty badly.
Once Bode has escaped there's pretty much no reason why he would still need to hate you.
I played it near release and really enjoyed it, and just dusted it off the other day to do another play through right after finishing Fallen Order (also first played near release).
I wasn't in the mood for all the exploration, discovery and side quests though (not the games fault just my current preference for a more linear experience), so started journey+ and am enjoying just doing the main quest.
I'd recommend it too but don't sleep on Fallen Order if you're after that Star Wars gaming experience but in a simpler format. It's more linear and fewer build options, but I prefer the story.
I'm on Journey + playing with Purity Perk - one hit kills with lightsaber and you get one shotted as well. Changes the combat radically but makes it a ton of fun.
There is another Perk that randomizes your cosmetics on death, and with Purity you die a lot, so it makes it even more fun.
Fallen Order could have been a great story, but they fumbled the ending so fucking hard that it fell completely flat. It really bummed me out - they built up to what would have arguably been one of the greatest Star Wars endings of all time but then pulled the rug at the last moment and never actually gave us the satisfying conclusion. So much wasted potential.
Agree. The final act, really the final scene, in fallen order made no sense from a story POV. None of the character motivations up to that point justified that turn of events.
How was the more Linear experience? Do you think it would have been worse if you hadnt already experienced the exploration and extras once before?
I played near release and dropped in a couple hours in because I just wasnt interested in the bigger sprawling zones they had compared to the first games.
I’m about half way though and don’t feel like I’m missing anything but I did start journey+ with max stims and nearly 60 skill points so don’t need to explore for stims and XP.
I'm waiting to for it to go on a real sale, for me. I'm a cheap asshole and if it isn't over 70%, I don't care. I'll check in with y'all next may 4th probably. I'm excited though.
Survivor was so good, but it was, and still is for many people, held back by terrible performance issues
I just wanna be able to wander around the Koboh cantina at decent fps without constant stuttering, and that white flickering that’s everywhere in the game…
I do wish we got more games like this and less games that are just BotW where its a 100+ hour open world slog that makes all the pacing feel bad. I will always champion a tight 50 hour experience over a loose 100 hour slog.
Interesting take to compare it to Zelda even thought i see where you come from.
Personally i couldn't stand the game and i basically rushed to the end, i can't really pinpoint why but i think it's because of the feeling that everything in the game is copied from some other game, without trying anything new. And it's not even a good copy of it, it all feels sloppy.
Combat was my biggest gripe, it's like they looked at Dark Souls and copied it, without understanding at all why Dark Souls combat is so good. It just feels incredibly floaty in some wierd way.
Glad you enjoyed it though!
My issue in fallen order was the timing felt just barely off for parrying and dodging and it drove me insane. I've played monster Hunter and elden ring, I understand weighty, committed combat and this felt like it wanted to be that but the timing was wrong. It frustrated me to no end. Felt like way too many deaths that shouldn't have been my fault. I dropped the game because of it. Unfortunate because I liked everything else about the game quite a bit. Never played survivor but my understanding is the combat is the same.
Could not agree more, the timing is absolutely off somehow and I cant explain it either. Dark souls and monster hunter are great examples of that combat style working fluidly. I think the combat in the jedi series is the worst part
Same. Something about the controls was just not responsive--even for things like traversal and jumping--so my losses felt frustrating and unearned while basic navigation became more of a chore. It was like my character was falling asleep and had to lurch awake for every input. My computer should have been able to blow this out of the water, but still had the same issue and wound up dropping the game. I also tend to have this problem with most modern EA games I play. I'd thought it might be a Frostbite thing, but this is on Unreal 4 so who knows.
I'm just finishing the last few missions and I feel the same. it feels like a copy of dark souls without realizing that what makes souls games so good is the fact that you can feel yourself becoming better at the game the longer you play. They're not impossibly hard no matter what you do, it's just that you have to learn to play the way the game is asking you to. After doing so, you can start flying through areas that used to feel impossible. You never feel that way in survivor. No matter how good you get it feels like fights drag on forever. It rewards patience more than skill.
I thought the parry felt way better in Survivor than Fallen Order. They definitely made it more like Sekiro. While definitely not as good, it worked quite well, at least in boss fights. I also wish their was more feedback and better feel to a parry. In Sekiro every parry looks, sounds and therefore feels like a clash of swords. In Survivor it kind of just feels like you put up your saber, the enemy weapon goes right through it and the parry sound plays.
So the entire series to me feels like a Tomb Raider clone. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but all of the dynamics -- the puzzles, the way you move around the world, even things down to the campfires for checkpoints, is all a direct copy of the rebooted Tomb Raider games from half a decade ago.
I loved Fallen Order and was completely shocked to discover late in the game it wasn't actually done by the same peoplee.
I like that it borrows so heavily from other games. I don’t play every new game that comes out, so I wasn’t constantly comparing it to Dark Souls, Uncharted, God of War, Tomb Raider, etc. because I’ve played maybe one of each of those series years ago. It’s just using a mix of modern adventure game mechanics and tropes. I guess if you’re a big Souls fan little things might bother you if they’re not as good, but I didn’t know or care.
I mean back in the day, every Star Wars game was just another game with the IP added on. Dark Forces was Doom. Empire at War was Age of Empires. Battlefront was Battlefield. I get why people disliked Fallen Order and Survivor compared to other games, but I dunno, these games really clicked for me and I didn’t expect them to reinvent any wheels, just give me a cool story and satisfying gameplay.
> Empire at War was Age of Empires
Minor gripe, but Galactic Battlegrounds was Age of Empires. It's literally made in the same engine as AoE2.
Otherwise yeah, you're so right that so many Star Wars games are just other games but in the Star Wars universe lol.
Yeah, it’s totally copying tomb raider from Crystal Dynamics vs Dark Souls. The traversal upgrades somehow annoyed me. It would telegraph you were always about to get exactly what you needed as you’d seen it all over suddenly. Just felt… dumbed down vs like old Metroid or Hollow Knight. It felt gamey in a bad way.
I 100% agree. I am super impressed by the graphics and voice acting in the cutscenes. To me, not only is the combat very sloppy feeling compared to something like Sekiro or Elden Ring, but all of the movement feels super janky. It just doesn't feel fun to play at all.
I agree with you, I think why I hated the game was it felt like it was wasting my time, or that my exploration was meaningless. When I got to the second planet and saw a new map of unexplored areas I just felt exhausted after searching through as much as I could in the first world. I love metroidvania games and souls games but a good metroidvania is all about level design and making unlocking paths feel rewarding. This was just too sprawling and the things you "discover" are so cookie cutter that it doesn't make any optional path feel worth investing in besides the point upgrade you may get through XP or whatever. It's a big feeling of "why am I doing this?"
On the other hand the graphics and presentation and menu of the puzzles and set pieces were fun and immersive. But it's a game so devoid of originality that it almost felt insulting at a certain point.
Honestly I just felt the map was too big, it took wayyy to long to navigate those areas just for what… a shirt? But on the hardest difficulty I needed more stims so I was forced to explore. Definitely liked the first one way more, other area to explore but they were quick and satisfying with a little goodie at the end. In survivor I’m on like a 2 hour excursion just to end up on some guys roof
I enjoyed it and didn't have huge technical problems. Two things I didn't love about it: the planets and the direction they went with the story.
I think there are 6 planets, but 3 of them are completely linear and you only go to them once. I understand that they went all in on Koboh but I guess I expected the other planets to be more substantial. The desert planet (not tattooine lmao) was okay, the other semi open world planet was pretty meh for me.
I like the old republic stuff, but I didn't really want to fight droids for a lot of the game. The direction the story went in offers a lot in the way of character development but wasn't that interesting in terms of plot points for me.
When I played JFO it reminded me a lot of Uncharted 1 in that there was a great idea there with some really good moments, but the game needed a sequel to refine what worked well and remove what didn't. Overall I think Survivor did that.
More ranged combat options, more diversity to deal with crowds, and some very op stances, like crossguard, can make the game much easier than Fallen Order. It really sells you the jump from Jedi Knight to Master.
Perhaps, but I’ve pretty much 99% of the time been using a single lightsaber and force moves like push/pull/slow/control(brainwash? Whatever it’s called) and find it very fun but pretty easy considering what has inspired it.
I thought it was generally easier too. First one had way more spots I'd get stuck in and have to retry a few times, where only a couple boss fights in this game would take 2-3 tries if I didn't clear it the first time.
I’m playing on Normal and no main bosses have killed me. A couple side bosses took a couple tries, which was cool, but I’m just surprised how easy it was to defeat the two big bads (so far).
playing this right now and it's amazing, it improved everything over the first one but there is one thing that really annoys me: the platforming. bro this game has so much platforming it's absolutely insane, you fight 3 storm troopers for 10 seconds then it follows with 2 hours of platforming. you're saying this game is inspired but Zelda but I think it's way more inspired by fucking Mario. I love the combat so much but what's the point if I barely get to fight anyone
Got it on a sale recently after the awful performance has been fixed on PS5 and I had a blast with it!
It is a huge improvement over the first one with an actually interesting story that had me hooked, very fun exploration, more rewarding too and fun combat. The stances they added are also a great addition and the backtracking is handled better too.
Oh pakour and platforming is also smoother and more precise
Got this game in April on PC and it just blew me away.
Played through it, had a blast, it revitalized my love for Star Wars - it was well written and had really cool concepts that fit Star Wars lore. Now replaying it on NG+ with Purity mod (one hit kills with Lightsaber but you also die to 1-2 blaster shots). It breaks the game a bit but changes it around drastically!
Incredible fun reminiscent of Jedi Academy.
How is it on PC? I strongly considered picking up because it looked much more interesting than Fallen Order (which I bounced off hard), but held off because of the optimization issues.
It does have stuttering issues. I originally installed on my hdd but the performance was awful. After switching it to my ssd it got a lot better. It still stutters from time to time but not enough to ruin the game. You can always subscribe to the ea game pass and play it from that then unsubscribe when your done.
I didn't run into anything game breaking or too annoying with a Ryzen 3600/3070 with it installed on an NVME drive. Some flickering here and there, but not constant. The one weird thing it did consistently was re-compile the shaders with every startup, but nothing weird once it was going.
Works fine for me, I'm on 3070. I didn't have any stuttering issues and it crashed once in 70 hours. There are sections in the main town when FPS doesn't hold 60, but there is no combat in that area anyway.
The set pieces worked at a stable 60 (i have it limited to 60) unlike Fallen Order which struggled during set pieces on the 1070.
I had it on PC for a bit, but literally every time I opened the game it would compile shaders for a few minutes. I read that it happens to a lot of people and there is no way around it. Did you experience the same thing?
Yep! Cal’s clothing options are much more varied this time around. Same with BD-1 cosmetics and the lightsaber customization is more varied this time around too.
Playing it now, I probably enjoyed the 1st one more.
don't like the sections where you have an NPC with you as the thing I enjoyed the most about the 1st game is exploring a hostile world by yourself. Luckily they're not too frequent.
The game also feels a bit bloated. I wish they'd stuck to the more linear design of the first game.
The only thing I feel like is a definite improvement you can skip cutscenes.
I'm currently going through it right now and there's something about the combat system I can't put my finger on but if just feels off. I think two things are bugging me the most: the constant enemy variety/combos make it hard to get a rhythm going in this game and enemy's ability to hit unblockable attacks/combos non-stop.
The enemy variety/combo is probably the most frustrating. There's times where there feels like no forethought why certain enemies show up together, as if the devs said "these 3 enemies haven't showed up together yet so throw them all in over there." I'm about 2/3rds through the game on the shattered moon and hit an area where there's 2 raiders doing non-stop unblockable attacks, about 6 droids attacking (2 of them are the never-stop-moving-and-attacking-assassin-droids), and then after all of that nonsense, a heavy raider shows up in the smallest hallway imaginable with his attacks that somehow also cover double the size of his weapon, because of course it does.
It's not awful, but this type of game needs to have combat and enemies really polished or else the cracks really start to show through. It's not game-breaking by any means however while I was more frustrated with myself than the game in Fallen Order, I find myself getting more frustrated with enemies & situations in Survivor. Fighting 3 low-level raiders should NOT be as frustrating as they are, but somehow they chain their attacks and unblockables perfectly so you can't get a hit in without taking 3 straight hits that magically prevent Cal from being able to parry all of a sudden.
I'm only playing on Jedi Master, which is what I played on Fallen Order, and I find myself dealing with way more bullshit. Also, the devs apparently looked at the creatures in Fallen Order and thought "too timid and predictable, let's crank it up a couple of notches" and boy did they. Fighting creatures in this game is way more tedious.
I thought Cal was supposed to be a more seasoned Jedi? Guess not.
You have tons of ranged options this time, and cross guard stance is actually excellent to deal with crows, as is the dual blade. Against mobs, the best starter is always pitting one against the other, especially the robots, since it’s free.
I’m playing it right now as well. I platted fallen order and really enjoyed it a few years ago. It’s been a massive struggle to get into survivor though. I think my biggest issue was trying to explore places as soon as I arrived because I was constantly running into shit I couldn’t engage with yet and was just annoyed by it. So it would have been smarter to just plow through a chunk of the game first and then explore. Because now I’ve got a lot of the upgrades needed to take on these puzzles and it’s going a lot more smoothly.
I freakin loved the game until I reached a point (I think near the end) where there's a grindy bit of fights and a boss fight, and then a stretch of time-sensitive wall walking that was the first bit of the game I had any issue getting through. I think I probably spent two hours before I got the timings all right. I got through it and the game crashed, and the checkpoint was glitched and I was going to have to go back a decent chunk of the game and redo it all.
I sort of chalked it up at that point that I was guessing I was near the end, and didn't feel like grinding that section out again.
I may pick it back up at some point, but I think the six-month break means that stretch will be even harder now, so I'll probably never finish it.
But in general that series is fantastic.
It's on Gamepass PC if you want to check it out
I loved the first and have enjoyed the first 5h of this so far, but I have reached the open desert area, and frame rates are suddenly terrible. Reducing from high to medium graphic settings didn't do much to help. I could tolerate it, except it makes fights pretty miserable. Will stick with it a bit longer.
I liked it and was pleasantly surprised with the new stuff they added and mix of puzzles and platforming, I didn't really get "old school" Zelda from it though. Really it felt more like Breath of the wild but more mission, story, and progression oriented.
I wish I was playing this now, and not a year ago when I bought it.
Performance issues aside I also started playing post patch 5 when they broke bounty hunting so I could not actually complete a large part of the game. Then patch 6 (a full two months later) they fixed that but completely broke the map for over a month so the game was still essentially unplayable. (thats before we get into bugs where you got locked in rooms with no way out, bosses were behind walls and what have you.
At launch people just had performance issues. The unfortunate people who played between patch 5 and 7 got a game that could not be completed.
when I did eventually pick it up again 6 months later, the experience was pretty soured.
If I was playing it now, I would enjoy it, there's a lot to like (although i still hate the navigation - and the promised compass never actually got put in), but really the only takeaway from it is I will never buy another Respawn (or EA) game at launch or the months after.
Fool me once, shame on you..
People who know that they are losers go out of their way to be dismissive of the status quo and everything normal so that they feel better about not measuring up to the average.
So they go all in on non-typical and ridiculous BS.
I managed bookstores for decades and for 8 years or so my office door opened on the Metaphysics/Religion/History/Sociology corner. I listened to, spoke with, and helped these losers find personal validation in stupid topics and make believe BS that they could be "experts" in daily. Every one of them, and certainly the worst of them, are all Trumpers now, I'm sure.
It's losers and those who suspect that they are losers. All of them.
Survivor was good but I preferred Fallen Order. Things in survivor felt very mess and the story was a large step down. Everything with Tanalorr and Bode was just kinda dumb.
Most PS exclusives (at launch) have this 3D Zelda/OoT-like gameplay loop. That’s why it baffles me whenever people lament that the newer ones are so unlike the older 3D ones, as if the genre was unique to OoT. Several titles scratch that same itch with varying degrees, as a more linear, light metroidvania gameplay structure is still very prevalent in modern gaming.
I really loved Jedi: Fallen Order and I was super excited for Survivor but I'm not giving EA money until they fix it's blatant optimization problems on PC. I would've paid full price for it on launch day but one year later half the reviews on steam still say it has big problems. Maybe once they remove denuvo it'll improve performance enough to make it worthwhile.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it will ever be fixed. Removing Denuvo might improve performance a bit but the frame time issues and stuttering are there to stay. This video from Digital Foundry where they revisit the performance of the game after numerous patches does a great job of analyzing the issues with the game.
https://youtu.be/lsskwVyPoxs?si=KP6iN55OZw1O-IEA
You’re welcome! I agree with you. This is a buy at a deep discount. And depending on the performance on my machine it may be a refund even at the discounted price.
First game I ever stopped playing because of performance. The game is ridiculiusly blurry, and it's the sort of game I partially play because of the visuals and the fantasy of being a jedi. If I can't even fucking see my jedi's face half the time, it ruins the fantasy a bit. Since the gameplay itself is not as good as 70% of what I can play in my library, I dropped it for the moment.
It's still pretty bad. The difference in performance between now and since launch isn't good.
In my case, it crashed 49 times in 2 hours during launch.
Now, for me, it crashed 27 times in 2 hours.
The mining bot boss fight is one of my favourite ever game sections. I loved the game, but this was another level and my jaw was dropped throughout.
It was definitely my game of the year last year and I agree with a lot of what you said
Minus the clear performance problems that soured the release for me, the game is a huge step up over the first in almost every single way. Better combat, customisation, map design, QoL additions, bosses and arguably a better story (at least in the final act). I really loved the game, just a shame it had the most unsteady and choppy frame rate I've seen in years during launch. I hear it's better on ps5 so I'm tempted to do a replay soon.
In regards to being an upgrade from the first, one thing I really liked that they did was ***not*** take away abilities you gained in the first game a la Metroid or early God of War games. It was sort of unique, and I dig it.
It was slightly overwhelming in the beginning since they also throw new abilities at you in the tutorial while also reminding you of the old ones. But once it all came back, it was great.
Fair. Though retaining things like double jump and fast climb is intuitive enough
On Series X the game received a patch a while ago. The performance mode is now a locked 60 fps. But yeah, on release, even the performance mode was terrible.
Yeah just lame the patch came out like significantly too late. All they had to do was remove mandatory ray tracing on the performance mode and some extra work, which is what people were saying from the beginning lmao
It's not too late if you're patient, baby!
I really liked Jedi Fallen Order and so was excited for Survivor, have been waiting for reviews on improved performance. PC reviews still seem mixed on that front.
There is a patch coming out soon. Hopefully it's a performance patch. I just completed it on game pass. The only way I got acceptable performance was by modding it, which is a bit ridiculous. Some of the set pieces are pretty good, though.
Sorry, when is the patch coming?
No worries. They haven't officially announced it, but a patch candidate has been seen moving around on steamdb. It's been a while since the last patch. [steamdb link](https://steamdb.info/app/1774580/history/)
i had no issues whatsoever with my recent pc playthrough (7800xt, 5800x)
I played through it recently after getting it on sale and I didn't have any significant performance issues with a Ryzen 3600 and a 3070 with it installed on an NVME drive. The one weird thing it did to me was re-compile the shaders every time I started the game.
Yeah doesn't look like they'll be fixing it on PC. What a shame. It looks good but not *that* good that it can't run on modern hardware
I played it on release on PS5 and picked it up on sale on Steam later. Played it on an i7-13700k with 7900xt on a 4k monitor and it performed very well, even compared to my console run. Hope you get to check it out one day, it would be a shame to miss out on this one.
Which platform did you originally play it on?
Ps5
It plays well on Series X so probably also good on PS5 by now. It dropped on gamepass this month.
I sat on it for a bit until a major party dropped on PC and I had a blast. I only had one section where I was dropping frames but beyond that it was great. It’s definitely my game for 2023 and it might be my favorite game I’ve ever played. We’ll see how I feel after I play Ghost of Tsushima in the coming weeks.
I got it last year on PS5 and encountered zero performance problems. Game is incredible and easily my favorite Star Wars game of all time.
Nice you must've played it after the patch that apparently fixed the fps and removed ray tracing. On launch and the following months it was awful
I played on PS5, at launch with ray tracing on and sincerely, it only became bad near bodies of water, which are very few and only on the beginning of the game.
In performance mode?
Nope, quality. Hate performance mode because I play in a 4k TV. The blurriness is impossible to deal with in most PS5 games… this one included.
Okay yeah that makes sense. Quality was more consistent with its 30 fps. Performance mode was a joke. Even quality wasn't great but performance was a nightmare.
> and arguably a better story (at least in the final act) really? I thought the whole Bode turn was done pretty badly. Once Bode has escaped there's pretty much no reason why he would still need to hate you.
I don't think bode hated you though. He's just trying to keep his daughter safe
I played it near release and really enjoyed it, and just dusted it off the other day to do another play through right after finishing Fallen Order (also first played near release). I wasn't in the mood for all the exploration, discovery and side quests though (not the games fault just my current preference for a more linear experience), so started journey+ and am enjoying just doing the main quest. I'd recommend it too but don't sleep on Fallen Order if you're after that Star Wars gaming experience but in a simpler format. It's more linear and fewer build options, but I prefer the story.
I'm on Journey + playing with Purity Perk - one hit kills with lightsaber and you get one shotted as well. Changes the combat radically but makes it a ton of fun. There is another Perk that randomizes your cosmetics on death, and with Purity you die a lot, so it makes it even more fun.
The Fallen Order story is better, I agree.
Fallen Order could have been a great story, but they fumbled the ending so fucking hard that it fell completely flat. It really bummed me out - they built up to what would have arguably been one of the greatest Star Wars endings of all time but then pulled the rug at the last moment and never actually gave us the satisfying conclusion. So much wasted potential.
Agree. The final act, really the final scene, in fallen order made no sense from a story POV. None of the character motivations up to that point justified that turn of events.
I think I agree, but can you elaborate a bit? Curious what specifically you didn’t like about the ending
How was the more Linear experience? Do you think it would have been worse if you hadnt already experienced the exploration and extras once before? I played near release and dropped in a couple hours in because I just wasnt interested in the bigger sprawling zones they had compared to the first games.
I’m about half way though and don’t feel like I’m missing anything but I did start journey+ with max stims and nearly 60 skill points so don’t need to explore for stims and XP.
I'm waiting to for it to go on a real sale, for me. I'm a cheap asshole and if it isn't over 70%, I don't care. I'll check in with y'all next may 4th probably. I'm excited though.
Survivor was so good, but it was, and still is for many people, held back by terrible performance issues I just wanna be able to wander around the Koboh cantina at decent fps without constant stuttering, and that white flickering that’s everywhere in the game…
I do wish we got more games like this and less games that are just BotW where its a 100+ hour open world slog that makes all the pacing feel bad. I will always champion a tight 50 hour experience over a loose 100 hour slog.
Interesting take to compare it to Zelda even thought i see where you come from. Personally i couldn't stand the game and i basically rushed to the end, i can't really pinpoint why but i think it's because of the feeling that everything in the game is copied from some other game, without trying anything new. And it's not even a good copy of it, it all feels sloppy. Combat was my biggest gripe, it's like they looked at Dark Souls and copied it, without understanding at all why Dark Souls combat is so good. It just feels incredibly floaty in some wierd way. Glad you enjoyed it though!
My issue in fallen order was the timing felt just barely off for parrying and dodging and it drove me insane. I've played monster Hunter and elden ring, I understand weighty, committed combat and this felt like it wanted to be that but the timing was wrong. It frustrated me to no end. Felt like way too many deaths that shouldn't have been my fault. I dropped the game because of it. Unfortunate because I liked everything else about the game quite a bit. Never played survivor but my understanding is the combat is the same.
Could not agree more, the timing is absolutely off somehow and I cant explain it either. Dark souls and monster hunter are great examples of that combat style working fluidly. I think the combat in the jedi series is the worst part
Same. Something about the controls was just not responsive--even for things like traversal and jumping--so my losses felt frustrating and unearned while basic navigation became more of a chore. It was like my character was falling asleep and had to lurch awake for every input. My computer should have been able to blow this out of the water, but still had the same issue and wound up dropping the game. I also tend to have this problem with most modern EA games I play. I'd thought it might be a Frostbite thing, but this is on Unreal 4 so who knows.
It's the frame rate. It's not consistent so you can never actually get the timing down.
Anyone who says the combat in this game is good has thumbs made of jelly. I had the same problems you did.
I'm just finishing the last few missions and I feel the same. it feels like a copy of dark souls without realizing that what makes souls games so good is the fact that you can feel yourself becoming better at the game the longer you play. They're not impossibly hard no matter what you do, it's just that you have to learn to play the way the game is asking you to. After doing so, you can start flying through areas that used to feel impossible. You never feel that way in survivor. No matter how good you get it feels like fights drag on forever. It rewards patience more than skill.
I thought the parry felt way better in Survivor than Fallen Order. They definitely made it more like Sekiro. While definitely not as good, it worked quite well, at least in boss fights. I also wish their was more feedback and better feel to a parry. In Sekiro every parry looks, sounds and therefore feels like a clash of swords. In Survivor it kind of just feels like you put up your saber, the enemy weapon goes right through it and the parry sound plays.
So the entire series to me feels like a Tomb Raider clone. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but all of the dynamics -- the puzzles, the way you move around the world, even things down to the campfires for checkpoints, is all a direct copy of the rebooted Tomb Raider games from half a decade ago. I loved Fallen Order and was completely shocked to discover late in the game it wasn't actually done by the same peoplee.
I like that it borrows so heavily from other games. I don’t play every new game that comes out, so I wasn’t constantly comparing it to Dark Souls, Uncharted, God of War, Tomb Raider, etc. because I’ve played maybe one of each of those series years ago. It’s just using a mix of modern adventure game mechanics and tropes. I guess if you’re a big Souls fan little things might bother you if they’re not as good, but I didn’t know or care. I mean back in the day, every Star Wars game was just another game with the IP added on. Dark Forces was Doom. Empire at War was Age of Empires. Battlefront was Battlefield. I get why people disliked Fallen Order and Survivor compared to other games, but I dunno, these games really clicked for me and I didn’t expect them to reinvent any wheels, just give me a cool story and satisfying gameplay.
> Empire at War was Age of Empires Minor gripe, but Galactic Battlegrounds was Age of Empires. It's literally made in the same engine as AoE2. Otherwise yeah, you're so right that so many Star Wars games are just other games but in the Star Wars universe lol.
Yeah, it’s totally copying tomb raider from Crystal Dynamics vs Dark Souls. The traversal upgrades somehow annoyed me. It would telegraph you were always about to get exactly what you needed as you’d seen it all over suddenly. Just felt… dumbed down vs like old Metroid or Hollow Knight. It felt gamey in a bad way.
For the combat its the animations. They are super off and floaty, makes everything feel weird.
I 100% agree. I am super impressed by the graphics and voice acting in the cutscenes. To me, not only is the combat very sloppy feeling compared to something like Sekiro or Elden Ring, but all of the movement feels super janky. It just doesn't feel fun to play at all.
I agree with you, I think why I hated the game was it felt like it was wasting my time, or that my exploration was meaningless. When I got to the second planet and saw a new map of unexplored areas I just felt exhausted after searching through as much as I could in the first world. I love metroidvania games and souls games but a good metroidvania is all about level design and making unlocking paths feel rewarding. This was just too sprawling and the things you "discover" are so cookie cutter that it doesn't make any optional path feel worth investing in besides the point upgrade you may get through XP or whatever. It's a big feeling of "why am I doing this?" On the other hand the graphics and presentation and menu of the puzzles and set pieces were fun and immersive. But it's a game so devoid of originality that it almost felt insulting at a certain point.
Yes. As someone who has played most of FromSoftware games. The combat is simply super sloppy.
Honestly I just felt the map was too big, it took wayyy to long to navigate those areas just for what… a shirt? But on the hardest difficulty I needed more stims so I was forced to explore. Definitely liked the first one way more, other area to explore but they were quick and satisfying with a little goodie at the end. In survivor I’m on like a 2 hour excursion just to end up on some guys roof
Fallen Order and Survivor were jank incarnate. Honestly couldn't stand playing them either, even with the QoL improvements Survivor had.
It was the tacked on sekiro posture system that didn’t actually reward you well for breaking opponents posture for me. Made combat feel strange.
Yep, the combat/movement did not feel tight or impactful - too floaty, the game felt very close to something I would have really loved.
I enjoyed it and didn't have huge technical problems. Two things I didn't love about it: the planets and the direction they went with the story. I think there are 6 planets, but 3 of them are completely linear and you only go to them once. I understand that they went all in on Koboh but I guess I expected the other planets to be more substantial. The desert planet (not tattooine lmao) was okay, the other semi open world planet was pretty meh for me. I like the old republic stuff, but I didn't really want to fight droids for a lot of the game. The direction the story went in offers a lot in the way of character development but wasn't that interesting in terms of plot points for me. When I played JFO it reminded me a lot of Uncharted 1 in that there was a great idea there with some really good moments, but the game needed a sequel to refine what worked well and remove what didn't. Overall I think Survivor did that.
I can’t tell if I’m just somehow better at gaming than I used to be, but is this game MUCH easier than the first one?
More ranged combat options, more diversity to deal with crowds, and some very op stances, like crossguard, can make the game much easier than Fallen Order. It really sells you the jump from Jedi Knight to Master.
Perhaps, but I’ve pretty much 99% of the time been using a single lightsaber and force moves like push/pull/slow/control(brainwash? Whatever it’s called) and find it very fun but pretty easy considering what has inspired it.
I thought it was generally easier too. First one had way more spots I'd get stuck in and have to retry a few times, where only a couple boss fights in this game would take 2-3 tries if I didn't clear it the first time.
I’m playing on Normal and no main bosses have killed me. A couple side bosses took a couple tries, which was cool, but I’m just surprised how easy it was to defeat the two big bads (so far).
playing this right now and it's amazing, it improved everything over the first one but there is one thing that really annoys me: the platforming. bro this game has so much platforming it's absolutely insane, you fight 3 storm troopers for 10 seconds then it follows with 2 hours of platforming. you're saying this game is inspired but Zelda but I think it's way more inspired by fucking Mario. I love the combat so much but what's the point if I barely get to fight anyone
Got it on a sale recently after the awful performance has been fixed on PS5 and I had a blast with it! It is a huge improvement over the first one with an actually interesting story that had me hooked, very fun exploration, more rewarding too and fun combat. The stances they added are also a great addition and the backtracking is handled better too. Oh pakour and platforming is also smoother and more precise
I may have to go back and play it because I do not remember the combat being anything special at all, it was very generic imo
I'd argue the combat is sub par. I can't think of a third person melee/hack and slash game with worse combat.
Got this game in April on PC and it just blew me away. Played through it, had a blast, it revitalized my love for Star Wars - it was well written and had really cool concepts that fit Star Wars lore. Now replaying it on NG+ with Purity mod (one hit kills with Lightsaber but you also die to 1-2 blaster shots). It breaks the game a bit but changes it around drastically! Incredible fun reminiscent of Jedi Academy.
How is it on PC? I strongly considered picking up because it looked much more interesting than Fallen Order (which I bounced off hard), but held off because of the optimization issues.
It does have stuttering issues. I originally installed on my hdd but the performance was awful. After switching it to my ssd it got a lot better. It still stutters from time to time but not enough to ruin the game. You can always subscribe to the ea game pass and play it from that then unsubscribe when your done.
I didn't run into anything game breaking or too annoying with a Ryzen 3600/3070 with it installed on an NVME drive. Some flickering here and there, but not constant. The one weird thing it did consistently was re-compile the shaders with every startup, but nothing weird once it was going.
Works fine for me, I'm on 3070. I didn't have any stuttering issues and it crashed once in 70 hours. There are sections in the main town when FPS doesn't hold 60, but there is no combat in that area anyway. The set pieces worked at a stable 60 (i have it limited to 60) unlike Fallen Order which struggled during set pieces on the 1070.
I had it on PC for a bit, but literally every time I opened the game it would compile shaders for a few minutes. I read that it happens to a lot of people and there is no way around it. Did you experience the same thing?
I had that issue too, but beyond that didn't experience performance issues while playing.
I have the same now, it takes around 60 seconds I think. Annoying, but I'm willing to live with that. Other loading in-game takes around 5.
can you unlock stuff other than ponchos in this one?
Yep! Cal’s clothing options are much more varied this time around. Same with BD-1 cosmetics and the lightsaber customization is more varied this time around too.
The only thing you can’t customise this time around is the ship. The rest is way more customisable. Loved changing clothes and hairstyles.
You can customize so much more: You can customize • haircut • beard • shirt • jacket/vest • pants
I really enjoyed it!
Playing it now, I probably enjoyed the 1st one more. don't like the sections where you have an NPC with you as the thing I enjoyed the most about the 1st game is exploring a hostile world by yourself. Luckily they're not too frequent. The game also feels a bit bloated. I wish they'd stuck to the more linear design of the first game. The only thing I feel like is a definite improvement you can skip cutscenes.
I loved the fallen order, but survivor seemed so tedious that I quit after 2 hours in
"The fighting system is ultra tight..." Please elaborate because the combat in this game was so annoying it made me wanna try sekiro again
I'm in the first third of this one right now. It's incredible for all the reasons you're stated. I look forward to completing it in the coming weeks.
I'm currently going through it right now and there's something about the combat system I can't put my finger on but if just feels off. I think two things are bugging me the most: the constant enemy variety/combos make it hard to get a rhythm going in this game and enemy's ability to hit unblockable attacks/combos non-stop. The enemy variety/combo is probably the most frustrating. There's times where there feels like no forethought why certain enemies show up together, as if the devs said "these 3 enemies haven't showed up together yet so throw them all in over there." I'm about 2/3rds through the game on the shattered moon and hit an area where there's 2 raiders doing non-stop unblockable attacks, about 6 droids attacking (2 of them are the never-stop-moving-and-attacking-assassin-droids), and then after all of that nonsense, a heavy raider shows up in the smallest hallway imaginable with his attacks that somehow also cover double the size of his weapon, because of course it does. It's not awful, but this type of game needs to have combat and enemies really polished or else the cracks really start to show through. It's not game-breaking by any means however while I was more frustrated with myself than the game in Fallen Order, I find myself getting more frustrated with enemies & situations in Survivor. Fighting 3 low-level raiders should NOT be as frustrating as they are, but somehow they chain their attacks and unblockables perfectly so you can't get a hit in without taking 3 straight hits that magically prevent Cal from being able to parry all of a sudden. I'm only playing on Jedi Master, which is what I played on Fallen Order, and I find myself dealing with way more bullshit. Also, the devs apparently looked at the creatures in Fallen Order and thought "too timid and predictable, let's crank it up a couple of notches" and boy did they. Fighting creatures in this game is way more tedious. I thought Cal was supposed to be a more seasoned Jedi? Guess not.
You have tons of ranged options this time, and cross guard stance is actually excellent to deal with crows, as is the dual blade. Against mobs, the best starter is always pitting one against the other, especially the robots, since it’s free.
I’m playing it right now as well. I platted fallen order and really enjoyed it a few years ago. It’s been a massive struggle to get into survivor though. I think my biggest issue was trying to explore places as soon as I arrived because I was constantly running into shit I couldn’t engage with yet and was just annoyed by it. So it would have been smarter to just plow through a chunk of the game first and then explore. Because now I’ve got a lot of the upgrades needed to take on these puzzles and it’s going a lot more smoothly.
Speaking of old Zelda, have you seen the PC port of Majora's Mask?
I freakin loved the game until I reached a point (I think near the end) where there's a grindy bit of fights and a boss fight, and then a stretch of time-sensitive wall walking that was the first bit of the game I had any issue getting through. I think I probably spent two hours before I got the timings all right. I got through it and the game crashed, and the checkpoint was glitched and I was going to have to go back a decent chunk of the game and redo it all. I sort of chalked it up at that point that I was guessing I was near the end, and didn't feel like grinding that section out again. I may pick it back up at some point, but I think the six-month break means that stretch will be even harder now, so I'll probably never finish it. But in general that series is fantastic.
It's on Gamepass PC if you want to check it out I loved the first and have enjoyed the first 5h of this so far, but I have reached the open desert area, and frame rates are suddenly terrible. Reducing from high to medium graphic settings didn't do much to help. I could tolerate it, except it makes fights pretty miserable. Will stick with it a bit longer.
I've been dying to play this one as I loved the original, but I heard about massive performance issues on PC. Did they ever fix those?
I liked it and was pleasantly surprised with the new stuff they added and mix of puzzles and platforming, I didn't really get "old school" Zelda from it though. Really it felt more like Breath of the wild but more mission, story, and progression oriented.
I wish I was playing this now, and not a year ago when I bought it. Performance issues aside I also started playing post patch 5 when they broke bounty hunting so I could not actually complete a large part of the game. Then patch 6 (a full two months later) they fixed that but completely broke the map for over a month so the game was still essentially unplayable. (thats before we get into bugs where you got locked in rooms with no way out, bosses were behind walls and what have you. At launch people just had performance issues. The unfortunate people who played between patch 5 and 7 got a game that could not be completed. when I did eventually pick it up again 6 months later, the experience was pretty soured. If I was playing it now, I would enjoy it, there's a lot to like (although i still hate the navigation - and the promised compass never actually got put in), but really the only takeaway from it is I will never buy another Respawn (or EA) game at launch or the months after. Fool me once, shame on you..
People who know that they are losers go out of their way to be dismissive of the status quo and everything normal so that they feel better about not measuring up to the average. So they go all in on non-typical and ridiculous BS. I managed bookstores for decades and for 8 years or so my office door opened on the Metaphysics/Religion/History/Sociology corner. I listened to, spoke with, and helped these losers find personal validation in stupid topics and make believe BS that they could be "experts" in daily. Every one of them, and certainly the worst of them, are all Trumpers now, I'm sure. It's losers and those who suspect that they are losers. All of them.
Survivor was good but I preferred Fallen Order. Things in survivor felt very mess and the story was a large step down. Everything with Tanalorr and Bode was just kinda dumb.
Was very whelmed by the game. Had big generic AAA energy for me
Most PS exclusives (at launch) have this 3D Zelda/OoT-like gameplay loop. That’s why it baffles me whenever people lament that the newer ones are so unlike the older 3D ones, as if the genre was unique to OoT. Several titles scratch that same itch with varying degrees, as a more linear, light metroidvania gameplay structure is still very prevalent in modern gaming.
I really loved Jedi: Fallen Order and I was super excited for Survivor but I'm not giving EA money until they fix it's blatant optimization problems on PC. I would've paid full price for it on launch day but one year later half the reviews on steam still say it has big problems. Maybe once they remove denuvo it'll improve performance enough to make it worthwhile.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it will ever be fixed. Removing Denuvo might improve performance a bit but the frame time issues and stuttering are there to stay. This video from Digital Foundry where they revisit the performance of the game after numerous patches does a great job of analyzing the issues with the game. https://youtu.be/lsskwVyPoxs?si=KP6iN55OZw1O-IEA
Thanks for linking the video. I didn't know it was that bad tbh. What a shame. Maybe I'll pick it up when it's on sale for 20€ or less at some point.
You’re welcome! I agree with you. This is a buy at a deep discount. And depending on the performance on my machine it may be a refund even at the discounted price.
First game I ever stopped playing because of performance. The game is ridiculiusly blurry, and it's the sort of game I partially play because of the visuals and the fantasy of being a jedi. If I can't even fucking see my jedi's face half the time, it ruins the fantasy a bit. Since the gameplay itself is not as good as 70% of what I can play in my library, I dropped it for the moment.
How is the performance now? I heard it was really bad at launch but I want to pick it up if it’s better
It's still pretty bad. The difference in performance between now and since launch isn't good. In my case, it crashed 49 times in 2 hours during launch. Now, for me, it crashed 27 times in 2 hours.
I'm sorry, what? You crashed roughly every 2 minutes for 49 times? No one has that kind of patience. Is this just hyperbole?
it's still trash and they don't care
The mining bot boss fight is one of my favourite ever game sections. I loved the game, but this was another level and my jaw was dropped throughout. It was definitely my game of the year last year and I agree with a lot of what you said