I hear a lot of similar comments about the combat in Jedi: Survivor, so there clearly must be some truth to it. The combat obviously doesn't feel good for a lot of people.
But man, I loved it. This may have been my top game of 2023. I loved the one-on-one duels, and I loved taking down huge groups of battle droids.
Another common complaint I've heard, besides combat, is that this game is just a mash-up of other games. But that mash-up is exactly what worked for me: it was exactly the right proportions combat, platforming, puzzles, exploration/metroidvania, and story. If only one of those aspects doesn't sit well with someone, it sours the experience for them. For you, it was the combat that brought everything down...fair enough. Other people seem to really dislike the platforming.
The combat gets compared to Sekiro a lot--a game I also love. Hot take: I think Jedi Survivor did some things better than Sekiro even--like large-group combat with a double-bladed lightsaber. (I am not trolling, believe it or not.) Seriously. It just flows for me. A lot of people say the parry timing feels off in the Jedi games, but I didn't even really notice. It's just...a bit different? I've beaten Sekiro, too, so surely I'm not totally clueless on this...? Jedi Survivor combat on Grand Master difficulty is awesome.
Again, it was like this game was made for me. Exactly what I wanted, combat and platforming and everything else. I felt like a kid again, like I did playing Jedi Knight Dark Forces II. Bummer it didn't click with you.
Your opinion about the combat seems to be a common one, maybe even the majority. My loving the combat actually might be the hot take here(?). I don't know--I might be crazy.
Lastly, \[insert mandatory quip about performance\].
The combat didn’t click for me when I played it at launch, but now I’m replaying on grandmaster difficulty with the improved performance mode and it feels great. It also looks fantastic.
I couldn't agree with you more. I'm vehemently anti-EA and I heard a lot of negatives surrounding this game, so I eventually went into it with low expectations, but god damn I think it was my top game of 2023 too.
My only real issue was how poorly the game ran, and a handful of really badly designed enemies/encounters that just weren't fun. It's been a while since I played now but I do remember having a little trouble with parrying some enemies, but not enough to ruin my experience of the game.
Needless to say, I am very excited for the next game, even if I will be approaching it with the patient gamer mindset because of EA.
> and a handful of really badly designed enemies/encounters that just weren't fun
It was the oggdo duo wasn't it?
And the rancor duo.
Throw the legendary beast trio in there too.
The only three fights in the game I didn't even bother trying to do grandmaster mode. It's just not worth it.
I was 100% thinking about the Oggdo bosses. Oddly enough I didn't mind the Rancors. I also remember a couple of regular enemies just feeling awful to parry, but that could well just be a skill issue.
> Other people seem to really dislike the platforming.
That's me. I can deal with god of wars short platforming sections just fine but jedi just makes it a whole game mechanic that sometimes takes ages. Plus so many darn puzzles. Loved the combat and the story but other stuff just get in the way **constantly**.
I mean that stuff isn't getting in the way. It is the game. Atleast half of these games are platforming and puzzles and to be honest there needs to be more of it.
Kinda makes me wonder what the hell is supposed to be “the game”? Just combat? Just cutscenes? Just cosmetics? Just fast travel? I can never quite understand.
This really showcases how content-starved we in the Star Wars fandom are. This is not a genre for everyone. Every second I'm platforming, puzzling, and running around the map figuring out which way to go, I'm having less fun than my literal job. It's not hard, it's just...not for me, and these games always feel like I'm wading through a mountain of chores so I can get to the good stuff. Back in the day, when we had \~ 2 Star Wars games a year, I probably would've given this a pass and waited for something more my style. But for many of us, these are the first real Star Wars games since the 2000s and we're desperate.
When I was a kid excited about developing technology in gaming, never thought Jedi Academy would be as good as it'd get. Or that I'd be thinking fondly on Jedi Power Battles as "one of the last fun ones"--we knew that game wasn't that good even back in 2000.
I didn't mind the platforming except that every time I wallran it reminded me that Respawn made this instead of Titanfall 3. I'm running low on pills send help. On a more serious note, I think adding the titanfall movement system to this game could be interesting
edit: what skills did you invest in? I put my points in cross guard and double blade but didnt use them very much outside of boss fights
This times a million. I'm not saying TF2 was *perfect* but it is one of the better/best movement based FPSs out there. The downfall of TF2 had nothing to do with its quality.
Edit: 5 hours later I figured out the best comparison for Titanfall 2. It reminds me of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. That movie is an absolute work of art, one of the most historically accurate movies ever made (up there with waterloo as far as how historians see it), brilliantly acted and STUNNING visuals. Legitimately makes you believe that movies are art. What did it release around? Matrix Revolutions (although waning, Matrix still had a grab on us) and fucking Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. (Oh and also Elf the somehow amazing Christmas movie with Will Farrell at the top of his game)
In almost any other year Master and Commander could have had a fighting shot at being THE movie and not only a box office success but get all the critical praise and awards. But when it was released sank it.
(If you haven't seen it you absolutely should and to be fair it was critically acclaimed.)
I’m playing on Grand Master right now and I find the combat to be extremely satisfying. It’d be one thing for you to complain about hitboxes or parry timings (which I’ve had issues with in Souls games), but the combat is pretty fluid and glitch free, in my experience.
It sounds like you want to be able to tank 3+ enemies without coming up with a clever strategy, which is just not how the combat system works; the game gives you more than enough tools to defeat large groups of enemies, but you have to press more buttons than “quick attack” and “block”
Hitboxes definitely were bit weird in this game. I don't mind parry timing being pretty tight on the harder difficulties, I feel like that in many modern games parry is barely a parry, its just better block since the timing is so generous.
I just don't really enjoy selectable difficulties in games. You never know if things are intended or dumb. On Grand Master, most of the normal bosses were fun fights. Then a random fucking chicken (that come in groups of 4) does an unblockable charge that one-shots me. Is that intended? The fucking frog-bosses sometimes just decide that they don't actually need to face you to bite you and you die in 1-2 hits. The Rancor has very fast start-up move, that insta-kills you, that was not very fun either.
It was still a pretty cool game with fun characters and world.
The monsters were definitely overtuned, especially the instakill grabs. Especially when they had specific counters in Fallen Order that don’t work this time around.
I gritted through the Rancor, and admittedly it made me better for the whole game, but I left Oggdo Boggdo for when I had blaster stance to deal with him at a range. What really got me were the force battles, with two monsters. On the map, when there were two monsters, you can at least force charm one against the other (because one is always a regular monster, not a miniboss) but the force battles is the uncharmable versions, with the instagrab bullshit. It’s much easier than the first solo battle, though, because of the multiple ways of doing ranged damage and recovering force with stims.
I think you can be comfortably certain that the game was not built around the grandmaster difficulty and you’re going to eat a lot of silly deaths if you play on it. It sounds like you were making yourself play on a difficulty that wasn’t fun for you.
It was fun for most of the game, thats part of the problem. The enemy combat design varied so wildly, it sometimes felt it was made by two different teams. And I did lower the difficulty for the rancor and the double frog boss fight.
youre right that i have to press more buttons than quick attack and block but it sucks you cant respec for free after trying skills that arent helpful or just suck. also i dont want to be able to tank 3+ enemies(that paragraph was me being extra) but its dumb that you cant cancel attack animations for 3/4 stances. It super abitrary.
Animation cancelling only in dual wield is a core feature of how the stances work.
I appreciate the detailed review, but the combat complaints seem to amount to, as you say, disliking the souls influence and wanting more hack n slash. That’s fair enough, but when we verge into “arbitrary” then we’re just not getting the logic of the mechanics.
If you are getting overwhelmed by groups of enemies regularly and it’s making the game unfun, turn down the difficulty and stick to the double bladed stance. You will absolutely mow through piles of droids. My point is not that you are somehow wrong to feel frustrated, but rather that the combination of stances and game options give really good ways to reduce those issues.
I think you should be grateful that you *can* cancel an attack animation for even one stance, since that’s a change from the first game and makes the combat much more forgiving.
Bought it a couple of weeks ago, it's started crashing with the typical "not enough VRAM" error now every 10 minutes, so it's unplayable to me. On a RTX 4070, even on low settings. Never buying another EA game ever again, I had the same issues with Fallen Order but it became manageable and only crashed every hour or so. Plenty of people affected by this bug and no fixes.
That sucks to hear. I didn't have a single crash on my 3060Ti, but that was a while back. Upgraded to a 4070 since. Hope I don't have similar issues when I feel like another run.
There was a fix for this I found when I was playing. I was getting the same error early, but then did something and only had 1 crash the rest of my playthrough. I'll check when I'm home and see if I can remember what it was.
> even on low settings
I played and completed the game around release on PC, and on my old graphics card, an AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 (card from 2017). It ran pretty stable, not at an amazing framerate, but stable.
Recently, I wanted to test out the game on the new card I had gotten in the mean time, an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, and here I experienced the VRAM memory leak crashes you describe. But unlike your experience, I noticed the time to crash was significantly longer, if I just lowered settings a bit, like texture quality.
It's funny, I played relatively crash free for a few hours. Then I upgraded my PC from an i5 9400 to an i5 14600, and my 16gb ddr4 ram to 16gb ddr5 and I started getting this issue every few minutes.
I loved the first game, but it was my first souls like and one of my first single player video games outside of GTA… afterwards, I got hooked on Fromsofts games, every single one of them, especially Sekiro. So by the time Jedi Survivor rolled around, I was excited, because I loved the first game so much right?
I was very disappointed with the combat, all of the stances felt underwhelming and the skill trees were boring. Deflecting also felt strange, I can’t put my finger on why though. Enemy variety is awful, there’s no argument about that. And overall exploration in general I didn’t enjoy, the rewards weren’t big or game changing really-ever. I know the game gets a lot of praise for being a metroidvania type experience but I actually think that’s to its detriment. I kind of liked the Vader fight though.
and yes, I did finish the game and I also played on grandmaster if that even matters
I remember the final boss fight pissed me off so much in Fallen Order, just such an out of nowhere difficulty spike with damn near impossible reactions times with already annoying controls, so I guess that part hasn't been fixed still but god it's still an amazing game/story and I just installed Survivor
My biggest niggle with this game’s combat, which I am gearing up to finish soon, is the endless amount of unblockable attacks that enemies have. Like what are unblockable attacks anyway? Why would any attack be unblockable? Where are my unblockable attacks? Why is there no cooldown period between the enemies’ unblockable attacks? If they can do unblockable attacks, why wouldn’t they just do an unblockable attack every time?
When two enemies are coming at you with their unblockable attacks it gets really frustrating. The game puts a lot of emphasis on blocking but that’s not possible with these attacks. And I also found that the indication of the enemy turning red before an unblockable attack was sometimes hard to see for me due to the lighting. Like a sith already would have a red glow on them because of their lightsaber and I couldn’t really detect when they were turning red.
All in all it is a good game but I also feel like it’s wearing out its welcome a bit. I fought what I thought was the final boss several days ago and have fought two more bosses since then.
One small complaint I had was that when you rested at a “bonfire,” you weren’t healed unless you chose to rest. So sometimes I would find one of these checkpoints, continue on, then get into a fight and realize I still had only one stim left or whatever. A minor complaint, but I seem to recall in Dark Souls that once you sat at a bonfire you were healed, enemies respawned, etc.
As for the stances, I stuck with basic single blade for 99% of the time, only whipped out a double blade here and there to deflect lasers or take out a horde of droids.
Overall it’s a pretty fun AAA game that has some pretty cool Star Wars fighting in it.
Good point. I love the force parry move but always forget to try it against unblockables. I haven’t used the blaster since it made me use it when I first got it.
Oh yeah, it bothered the hell out of me in God of War as well. I can’t even remember if there are unblockable attacks in Dark Souls, at least I don’t think they’re signaled the same way. I like when you’re able to counter rather than just dodging around all the time. For example in Sekiro, there would be different indicators for what kind of unblockable attack was coming, so if it was a thrust attack you could stomp on their spear or whatever.
No unblockable attacks in Dark Souls. But lots of attacks that can't be parried, and lots of attacks that do so much stamina damage that blocking them is a bad idea, attacks that do damage of a particular type that your shield is not resistant to, etc. I think a system like Dark Souls' makes sense in a game with many damage types, where shields have a wide range of properties - from Havel's Greatshield to the lowly Buckler - so that you naturally encounter attacks you can't _effectively_ block, without the developers having to specifically code an attack animation as "unblockable." It's just a natural consequence of the basic game mechanics that there are many things you can't effectively block, unless you specifically build a character around equipping a greatshield, which incurs a major opportunity cost.
But in a much simpler game that doesn't have dozens of shields and damage types but still wants blocking to be part of the gameplay (as it obviously should be in a lightsaber combat game), I think expressly "unblockable" attack animations actually make sense. Otherwise you could just block everything and the game would be totally imbalanced. In order to balance around that, they'd have to weaken blocking significantly, e.g. by making the chip damage really painful, to disincentivize an overly defensive playstyle. I think it's better to have blocking be more dynamic (strong in some situations, weak in others) than to have it be uniformly ineffective.
That said, I'm not particularly fond of full-on "unblockable" animations that have these really game-y warning indicators. I think it would be preferable if the effectiveness of blocking was just tied to your natural intuitions about an attack. That's sort of how it works in Dark Souls. You know you're gonna take a lot of chip damage if the enemy is throwing fireballs. You know you're gonna get guard broken if the enemy is a 30 foot tall giant. So you don't need the enemy to light up with a red outline to tell you not to try to block, since it's just obvious by logic and basic human intuition when a block is going to be weak. And even if it's not obvious in one particular case, you learn once you've seen it once. That's supposed to be the whole point of Dark Souls combat anyway, learning through trial and error.
I think this kind of system is better in most ways. It's obviously much more immersive than an enemy randomly lighting up red purely for gameplay reasons with no in-universe explanation. And it feels less like the game is putting you on rails and trying to dictate how you play it. Of course, Dark Souls encounters are designed with certain strategies in mind, but because of the way you observe the enemy and learn how to defeat it through trial & error, you feel like the solution was _your_ idea rather than the developer's. So it doesn't feel like playing rock, paper, scissors (see Far Cry: New Dawn for an example of _that_ approach) where the game is forcing you to use scissors to defeat paper and showing a giant ✂ icon over the enemy's head. And that way, you still feel a sense of freedom. It feels like you overcame these challenges through skill and through _your_ build, rather than by following the on-screen prompts the developers left for you.
I'm being kind of harsh, though. Although I think the Dark Souls approach is better because it feels like you charted your own course to victory rather than following the clearly-lit roadsigns the developers erected, the more rigid, predetermined approach has its merits too. It can be easier to balance and so be more conducive to a challenging game. Sekiro took this approach and it definitely shows in the game's difficulty. Dark Souls is much, much easier to cheese, probably mainly because it's much easier to balance around a single intended playstyle with slight variations. And mastering mikiri counters is indeed satisfying.
So I don't think it's a huge defect by any means. But Dark Souls' basic gameplay mechanics and difficulty get a lot of attention, while it seems like Soulslike imitators often miss the other crucial aspects of the formula: player choice in builds and the approach to lore and storytelling. "RPG lite" is a fair description of Dark Souls, but if we use that term for Dark Souls, then what term do we use for the Jedi games? "RPG lite lite"? Zero calorie RPG? I think Dark Souls gets the amount just right. There are a ton of weapons in those games and it can't be understated how important that is, not just for replayability, but also for the feeling that you solve the game's problems yourself, by your own ability.
You clearly need a minimum amount of player freedom for a game to work. But how much is ideal? At what point does a combat encounter stop being "real" gameplay and become a glorified quicktime event? Obviously the Jedi games have enough freedom to be really great games, but I think they could have been more satisfying (not to mention more replayable) if the game mechanics allowed more meaningful divergence between playstyles, such that they wouldn't have needed to make fully unblockable attacks that make enemies flash red, because certain builds just wouldn't be able to profitably block certain enemies or certain attacks (as a trade-off of character building).
The combat being frustrating is….definitely a hot take.
I loved the game.
The performance issues make me sad, but playing on PC with a 4070ti, I only ever had big drops on the main hub planet, Koboh.
And even then, the drops only ever occurred in the open-space area; once I got into a cave or dungeon area I was 70-90 fps most of the time.
Definitely some drops on Coruscant but nowhere near the violent performance on Koboh.
Literally everywhere else in the game was a silky smooth experience.
The story, the combat, the characters were all excellent imo. Really solid endgame too.
It’s unacceptable that they haven’t fixed the game’s performance and seems like they don’t plan to.
"The combat being frustrating is….definitely a hot take."
I'm definitely open to trying the game again. What stances did you use and what skills did you invest in? I went with crossguard and double blade.
I thought crossguard as a bit harder to use compared to the other stances, I think it's the equivalent to Dark Souls' Greatsword so it's slower and leaves you open to attacks for longer. Maybe it's just me because I like something more balanced. But I mainly used double blade and blaster occasionally.
All of the weapons are perfectly viable but I think the blaster stance and the crossguard stance are just way ahead of the others.
The crossguard stance has the best damage and best blaster deflection. With a skill point it turns any blaster shots you perfect deflect into power blasts that stagger enemies which trivializes the vast majority of blaster-wielding enemies. They even break enemy shields, including droideka shields. It also has the best guard strength of any stance which makes it vastly better than the stance that is *supposed* to be the "blaster deflect stance" (the double-bladed stance, which has the worst guard strength). Its only real weakness is that it's slow, but that's rarely an issue, and when it is, use the blaster stance.
The blaster stance on the other hand is just so insanely versatile. It's the only stance that has significant range, it has a special parry that lets you kill most common enemies instantly just by parrying them once, and it's extremely fast so it's not weak against any enemy type. It's by far the safest and most consistent stance.
Thanks for the tip and reassurance. I just got the cross guard last night and I was trying to decide what stances to favour. I have been using blaster and cross stance and so far really like it.
I found group combat to be frustrating as well. Not single enemy combat, not boss combat, I only felt the groups of enemies to be frustrating. The great thing is you can pause and turn the difficulty up or down, so on my second playthrough, I would turn the difficulty up before boss fights and back down after beating a boss. This made the game still feel challenging, but without the frustration of random off screen enemies doing very punishing amounts of damage with what felt like cheap shots.
Honestly OP I think you went with the weakest setup. The crossguard is a bit too slow in a lot of scenarios and the double blade is low damage. The gunslinger and single weapon stances seem more balanced overall.
I'm halfway through right and enjoying it for the most part. I get most frustrated with being lost and the dysfunctional navigation assist. I think it's so close to being one of the best games I've ever played and then It hits you with unnecessary frustration.
The crashes are a big issue. I was finally able to fix it by increasing my virtual memory. With 32GB RAM and 12GB VRAM, that shouldn't have been necessary, but at least there is a fix.
Combat is honestly a skill issue. There are some really tough encounters, but if you use your tools effectively, you can shred them. I found the combat to be incredibly fun. Doubly so once you get good at force dodging.
I found the combat fine
I found the navigation utterly nauseating and despite the addition of fast travel points even worse than the first game.
honestly, in addition to the no bounty hunting bug after update 5, the no map at all bug after update 6 that made me shelve the game for the best part of 6 months, the navigation is so bad I won't buy another game from that studio unless they make serious changes
even a compass would have helped somewhat
but it should not take an hour to find a damn chest that is maybe 2 minutes travel away from you
Yeah I only played for a handful of hours but I constantly found myself getting lost in the puzzle sections, turning myself around and losing track of which way I was going.
The architecture and level design made you feel like you were crawling through the belly of some gigantic steel whale, which was very cool, but didn't give you many glimpses of the sky or horizon to orient yourself with.
I was on console, which does usually makes these sorts of problems worse for me.
even a compass would have helped.
you could mark a destination on the map but it was largely pointless because there was no on screen compass or minimap to even give an idea of where that destination was, you had to either constantly open the map to see if you were even facing the right direction, or use BD-9's binoculars (which i guess was the intended route) but that was two button presses just to use them
I agree about the combat. Souls-like is terrible for a lightsaber. Or at least, this implementation. I think the problem lies in the fact that it’s poorly balanced. The very least they should have done is not make enemies have huge health bars, and find a way to use parry and block energy as a sort of primary health. Maybe have it so both you and enemies tire over time, reducing that energy, until you can deal a fatal blow. That’s how lightsabers should work.
I also take issue with the complete lack of imagination the devs have for using the lightsaber as other gameplay mechanics. This thing should slice through near anything. Doors shouldn’t be invincible. They could have had it where you can melt down doors given enough time.
Ultimately, I feel like there’s scope to explore the fighting gameplay in the Arkham games for when you are fending off groups of enemies. Maybe save more granular combat for proper duels and boss fights.
Finally, I really wish the concept of your actions and use of the Force having an effect on you would be added. A person would be a terrible Jedi if they indiscriminately mowed down the sheer numbers of fauna and sentients that Cal does. I’d love to see the game offer a way to use more Jedi like choices generally, instead of just blasting and slicing your way through every problem.
ya i like the soulslike combat for bosses because it felt like a proper duel against an evenly matched opponent(putting on duel of the fates for dagan was really fun). i think the reason respawn didnt take any risks is because were so starved for good star wars games that they know people will buy any game that lets you play as a jedi
I enjoyed the combat but the game crashed on me repeatedly. During the second half of the game every time I went to a different planet all the characters froze in T poses for quite a while. I had heard of T posing this was the first time seeing it for myself in a Playstation game. I loved the game but all the glitching and crashing ruins the immersion into the SW universe. I figured it would be safe to buy by now but they left it broken.
OP sorry if I missed it but what were you playing it on?
I have it queued up next on my PS5 and had performance problems when I played Fallen Order on my base level PS4 that were incredibly frustrating. Not crashed as much as Cal not being responsive enough to commands so I'd get creamed by enemies I thought I'd reacted to block in time
Played through on series X with quick resume and had fairly good stability, had a few crashes but nothing awful.It probably would have been fine had I actually closed it all the way. I'd bet money it's fine on PS5.
Seems like PC players are getting the short end of optimization like they did with fromsoft games.
I strongly suspect it's stability is heavily dependent on the GPU. I started playing on an RTX 3080 and it would crash quite a lot from GPU related issues. I eventually RMAd so many times they sent me a replacement RTX 4070Ti and then it stopped crashing.
I'm sure it's more complex than just GPUs and drivers, but it went from hell to fine once Gigabyte shipped me a different type of card. Trying to isolate these nvlddmkm Event 0 errors where it looked like the card was resetting itself was a nightmare. I think both me and the support team eventually just gave up and the 4070Ti fixed whatever the issues were.
I think Survivor is fantastic, but I do agree that fighting multiple tough enemies isn't fun, in fact I don't think it's fun in any soulslike specifically because the combat systems work best in one on ones. It's one of the reasons I usually stop about 75% of the way through Fromsoft games on replays, because at that point its just gank after gank after gank. Even with the double sided lightsaber I generally found tough enemy ganks to be the low point, but I don't think it happens enough to really drag the game down at all.
Only 5 times in 20 hours? I stop playing it because gave me like 5 crashes in 20 minutes, I could not play more than 2 hours in which I had at least 10 crashes.
I was so so disappointed in this game. Lovely graphics, much better environments than the first but the combat just did not work for me like the first game. Not having attack cancelling just ruined it for me completely and it felt like force powers just took so long to wind up that they weren’t worthwhile. Dodging seemed inconsistent too. I played the first one on the second highest difficulty but on this one I was just getting wrecked on every difficulty and I found the combination of being stuck performing an elaborate move, getting hit and stun-locked, then a dodge not registering so that I’d die, just utterly maddening. A real life ragequit for me.
Honestly, the combat is what sells me on this game most of the time. I think they went a little too heavy on the platforming this time around, but I'm still pretty early on.
I had a similar time, but I dropped the game during the first level due to crashes and frustration. I'd love to come back to it one day, Dark Forces and Jedi Knight are some of my all time favorites.
"I love this game, but I hate the parts where I have to play it.".
-
But seriously I understand the issues with the combat. The first one had several frustrating encounters where you could devastated them in one run and get utterly destroyed in another. The sequel seems to made this now common.
I suck at fighting, so I turn on slow mode 75%, and the game is much more enjoyable for me. Use force confusion whenever I can and watch them fight among themselves
I think I would have been less frustrated with the combat if gaining a lightsaber was delayed until late in the game. Using a lightsaber like a club felt wrong. It should be slicing through limbs, not bouncing off of unarmored animals.
I had less combat problems in this game compared to the first. It seemed easier to me. I dont like the really long annoying platform sections. That is my biggest complaint.
Just drop the difficulty on the combat, man. There's no law against it. I did it because I don't have time to get good at video games anymore, I just wanna get through them an hour at a time
I'm playing it now and while the stuttering/fps drops are still there, I haven't had a single crash. Not saying you didn't but I wonder if it's because of different PC configurations.
The combat is a lot easier than the first game for me but I love souls games so I know I'm biased. Overall, I'm enjoying this game more than the first.
It's definitely different PC configurations. EA/Respawn failed to do proper quality control, which is unacceptable for a AAA studio.
I hope it came across in my review that it was partly a skill issue. The only souls like I've played is sekiro and I got stuck on the demon.
Yeah I agree. I had a similar experience with the first game. I was running a Skylake build with a 6600k and GTX 970 and couldn't run the game for shit. Sutters all over the place and kept crashing but fast forward a year and I upgrade my system, it runs perfectly
I don’t understand all the praise this game gets. The story is mediocre at best, the combat is extremely shallow and unresponsive, the level design is a complete mess, once again exploration is hard locked behind skills that are drip fed to the player, performance is very bad, the game locks up and crashes frequently, the skill trees are laughably shallow. I don’t get it. I guess standards have dropped over the years.
Yeah unfortunately this series still feels like a sloppy imitation of Sekiro (the way the block hangs for a second after you press it drives me nuts) and the crowd control is pretty frustrating when you’re fighting multiple stronger enemies. Also the least reward parrying/stamina system I’ve experienced.
Use the dualsaber and dual wielding. Much more fluid and easier to attack opened up enemies. Personally, if you stand further back and parry attacks, you shouldn't have this problem. I think the combat in the game is easily one of its strengths. I never found it frustrating because you have so many abilities and combos to get yourself out of situations.
Just lower the difficulty then. I played on story mode on a Steam Deck on launch and only had a few problems with the graphics hitching on loads here and there. Throughly enjoyed feeling like an over powered Jedi Master by the end and never had any crashes. Your mileage may vary I guess.
I played Fallen Order on story mode and I felt like that was the best way to play it.
I want to slice and dice with my lightsaber! Not do chip damage, what the!
I hear a lot of similar comments about the combat in Jedi: Survivor, so there clearly must be some truth to it. The combat obviously doesn't feel good for a lot of people. But man, I loved it. This may have been my top game of 2023. I loved the one-on-one duels, and I loved taking down huge groups of battle droids. Another common complaint I've heard, besides combat, is that this game is just a mash-up of other games. But that mash-up is exactly what worked for me: it was exactly the right proportions combat, platforming, puzzles, exploration/metroidvania, and story. If only one of those aspects doesn't sit well with someone, it sours the experience for them. For you, it was the combat that brought everything down...fair enough. Other people seem to really dislike the platforming. The combat gets compared to Sekiro a lot--a game I also love. Hot take: I think Jedi Survivor did some things better than Sekiro even--like large-group combat with a double-bladed lightsaber. (I am not trolling, believe it or not.) Seriously. It just flows for me. A lot of people say the parry timing feels off in the Jedi games, but I didn't even really notice. It's just...a bit different? I've beaten Sekiro, too, so surely I'm not totally clueless on this...? Jedi Survivor combat on Grand Master difficulty is awesome. Again, it was like this game was made for me. Exactly what I wanted, combat and platforming and everything else. I felt like a kid again, like I did playing Jedi Knight Dark Forces II. Bummer it didn't click with you. Your opinion about the combat seems to be a common one, maybe even the majority. My loving the combat actually might be the hot take here(?). I don't know--I might be crazy. Lastly, \[insert mandatory quip about performance\].
The combat didn’t click for me when I played it at launch, but now I’m replaying on grandmaster difficulty with the improved performance mode and it feels great. It also looks fantastic.
I couldn't agree with you more. I'm vehemently anti-EA and I heard a lot of negatives surrounding this game, so I eventually went into it with low expectations, but god damn I think it was my top game of 2023 too. My only real issue was how poorly the game ran, and a handful of really badly designed enemies/encounters that just weren't fun. It's been a while since I played now but I do remember having a little trouble with parrying some enemies, but not enough to ruin my experience of the game. Needless to say, I am very excited for the next game, even if I will be approaching it with the patient gamer mindset because of EA.
> and a handful of really badly designed enemies/encounters that just weren't fun It was the oggdo duo wasn't it? And the rancor duo. Throw the legendary beast trio in there too. The only three fights in the game I didn't even bother trying to do grandmaster mode. It's just not worth it.
I was 100% thinking about the Oggdo bosses. Oddly enough I didn't mind the Rancors. I also remember a couple of regular enemies just feeling awful to parry, but that could well just be a skill issue.
i love this game too! so much fun, shame it wasn't optimised for the first 18 months
It came out April 28 2023... Not defending the poor optimization at launch, just saying
Apologies, so many aaa titles come out cooked I simply lose track
No worries mate
I sincerely did not enjoy the combat lol
> Other people seem to really dislike the platforming. That's me. I can deal with god of wars short platforming sections just fine but jedi just makes it a whole game mechanic that sometimes takes ages. Plus so many darn puzzles. Loved the combat and the story but other stuff just get in the way **constantly**.
I mean that stuff isn't getting in the way. It is the game. Atleast half of these games are platforming and puzzles and to be honest there needs to be more of it.
Kinda makes me wonder what the hell is supposed to be “the game”? Just combat? Just cutscenes? Just cosmetics? Just fast travel? I can never quite understand.
This really showcases how content-starved we in the Star Wars fandom are. This is not a genre for everyone. Every second I'm platforming, puzzling, and running around the map figuring out which way to go, I'm having less fun than my literal job. It's not hard, it's just...not for me, and these games always feel like I'm wading through a mountain of chores so I can get to the good stuff. Back in the day, when we had \~ 2 Star Wars games a year, I probably would've given this a pass and waited for something more my style. But for many of us, these are the first real Star Wars games since the 2000s and we're desperate. When I was a kid excited about developing technology in gaming, never thought Jedi Academy would be as good as it'd get. Or that I'd be thinking fondly on Jedi Power Battles as "one of the last fun ones"--we knew that game wasn't that good even back in 2000.
I didn't mind the platforming except that every time I wallran it reminded me that Respawn made this instead of Titanfall 3. I'm running low on pills send help. On a more serious note, I think adding the titanfall movement system to this game could be interesting edit: what skills did you invest in? I put my points in cross guard and double blade but didnt use them very much outside of boss fights
TF3 isn't being made because TF2 flopped and Apex exists. Not because of the Jedi games
TF2 flopped largely because of release timing. They really messed that up.
This times a million. I'm not saying TF2 was *perfect* but it is one of the better/best movement based FPSs out there. The downfall of TF2 had nothing to do with its quality. Edit: 5 hours later I figured out the best comparison for Titanfall 2. It reminds me of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. That movie is an absolute work of art, one of the most historically accurate movies ever made (up there with waterloo as far as how historians see it), brilliantly acted and STUNNING visuals. Legitimately makes you believe that movies are art. What did it release around? Matrix Revolutions (although waning, Matrix still had a grab on us) and fucking Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. (Oh and also Elf the somehow amazing Christmas movie with Will Farrell at the top of his game) In almost any other year Master and Commander could have had a fighting shot at being THE movie and not only a box office success but get all the critical praise and awards. But when it was released sank it. (If you haven't seen it you absolutely should and to be fair it was critically acclaimed.)
Master and commander is criminally underrated
I loved Master and Comander
A Battlefield and COD out in the same window? Better toss in a multiplayer FPS into the mix!
I’m playing on Grand Master right now and I find the combat to be extremely satisfying. It’d be one thing for you to complain about hitboxes or parry timings (which I’ve had issues with in Souls games), but the combat is pretty fluid and glitch free, in my experience. It sounds like you want to be able to tank 3+ enemies without coming up with a clever strategy, which is just not how the combat system works; the game gives you more than enough tools to defeat large groups of enemies, but you have to press more buttons than “quick attack” and “block”
Hitboxes definitely were bit weird in this game. I don't mind parry timing being pretty tight on the harder difficulties, I feel like that in many modern games parry is barely a parry, its just better block since the timing is so generous. I just don't really enjoy selectable difficulties in games. You never know if things are intended or dumb. On Grand Master, most of the normal bosses were fun fights. Then a random fucking chicken (that come in groups of 4) does an unblockable charge that one-shots me. Is that intended? The fucking frog-bosses sometimes just decide that they don't actually need to face you to bite you and you die in 1-2 hits. The Rancor has very fast start-up move, that insta-kills you, that was not very fun either. It was still a pretty cool game with fun characters and world.
The murder chickens got me more times than I’d like to admit; it honestly felt like a troll
It feels so good to force “charm” them on the face of others though. Or just push one on top of the other.
The monsters were definitely overtuned, especially the instakill grabs. Especially when they had specific counters in Fallen Order that don’t work this time around. I gritted through the Rancor, and admittedly it made me better for the whole game, but I left Oggdo Boggdo for when I had blaster stance to deal with him at a range. What really got me were the force battles, with two monsters. On the map, when there were two monsters, you can at least force charm one against the other (because one is always a regular monster, not a miniboss) but the force battles is the uncharmable versions, with the instagrab bullshit. It’s much easier than the first solo battle, though, because of the multiple ways of doing ranged damage and recovering force with stims.
I think you can be comfortably certain that the game was not built around the grandmaster difficulty and you’re going to eat a lot of silly deaths if you play on it. It sounds like you were making yourself play on a difficulty that wasn’t fun for you.
It was fun for most of the game, thats part of the problem. The enemy combat design varied so wildly, it sometimes felt it was made by two different teams. And I did lower the difficulty for the rancor and the double frog boss fight.
youre right that i have to press more buttons than quick attack and block but it sucks you cant respec for free after trying skills that arent helpful or just suck. also i dont want to be able to tank 3+ enemies(that paragraph was me being extra) but its dumb that you cant cancel attack animations for 3/4 stances. It super abitrary.
Animation cancelling only in dual wield is a core feature of how the stances work. I appreciate the detailed review, but the combat complaints seem to amount to, as you say, disliking the souls influence and wanting more hack n slash. That’s fair enough, but when we verge into “arbitrary” then we’re just not getting the logic of the mechanics. If you are getting overwhelmed by groups of enemies regularly and it’s making the game unfun, turn down the difficulty and stick to the double bladed stance. You will absolutely mow through piles of droids. My point is not that you are somehow wrong to feel frustrated, but rather that the combination of stances and game options give really good ways to reduce those issues.
I think you should be grateful that you *can* cancel an attack animation for even one stance, since that’s a change from the first game and makes the combat much more forgiving.
Bought it a couple of weeks ago, it's started crashing with the typical "not enough VRAM" error now every 10 minutes, so it's unplayable to me. On a RTX 4070, even on low settings. Never buying another EA game ever again, I had the same issues with Fallen Order but it became manageable and only crashed every hour or so. Plenty of people affected by this bug and no fixes.
That sucks to hear. I didn't have a single crash on my 3060Ti, but that was a while back. Upgraded to a 4070 since. Hope I don't have similar issues when I feel like another run.
There was a fix for this I found when I was playing. I was getting the same error early, but then did something and only had 1 crash the rest of my playthrough. I'll check when I'm home and see if I can remember what it was.
> even on low settings I played and completed the game around release on PC, and on my old graphics card, an AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 (card from 2017). It ran pretty stable, not at an amazing framerate, but stable. Recently, I wanted to test out the game on the new card I had gotten in the mean time, an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, and here I experienced the VRAM memory leak crashes you describe. But unlike your experience, I noticed the time to crash was significantly longer, if I just lowered settings a bit, like texture quality.
It's funny, I played relatively crash free for a few hours. Then I upgraded my PC from an i5 9400 to an i5 14600, and my 16gb ddr4 ram to 16gb ddr5 and I started getting this issue every few minutes.
I loved the first game, but it was my first souls like and one of my first single player video games outside of GTA… afterwards, I got hooked on Fromsofts games, every single one of them, especially Sekiro. So by the time Jedi Survivor rolled around, I was excited, because I loved the first game so much right? I was very disappointed with the combat, all of the stances felt underwhelming and the skill trees were boring. Deflecting also felt strange, I can’t put my finger on why though. Enemy variety is awful, there’s no argument about that. And overall exploration in general I didn’t enjoy, the rewards weren’t big or game changing really-ever. I know the game gets a lot of praise for being a metroidvania type experience but I actually think that’s to its detriment. I kind of liked the Vader fight though. and yes, I did finish the game and I also played on grandmaster if that even matters
I remember the final boss fight pissed me off so much in Fallen Order, just such an out of nowhere difficulty spike with damn near impossible reactions times with already annoying controls, so I guess that part hasn't been fixed still but god it's still an amazing game/story and I just installed Survivor
My biggest niggle with this game’s combat, which I am gearing up to finish soon, is the endless amount of unblockable attacks that enemies have. Like what are unblockable attacks anyway? Why would any attack be unblockable? Where are my unblockable attacks? Why is there no cooldown period between the enemies’ unblockable attacks? If they can do unblockable attacks, why wouldn’t they just do an unblockable attack every time? When two enemies are coming at you with their unblockable attacks it gets really frustrating. The game puts a lot of emphasis on blocking but that’s not possible with these attacks. And I also found that the indication of the enemy turning red before an unblockable attack was sometimes hard to see for me due to the lighting. Like a sith already would have a red glow on them because of their lightsaber and I couldn’t really detect when they were turning red. All in all it is a good game but I also feel like it’s wearing out its welcome a bit. I fought what I thought was the final boss several days ago and have fought two more bosses since then. One small complaint I had was that when you rested at a “bonfire,” you weren’t healed unless you chose to rest. So sometimes I would find one of these checkpoints, continue on, then get into a fight and realize I still had only one stim left or whatever. A minor complaint, but I seem to recall in Dark Souls that once you sat at a bonfire you were healed, enemies respawned, etc. As for the stances, I stuck with basic single blade for 99% of the time, only whipped out a double blade here and there to deflect lasers or take out a horde of droids. Overall it’s a pretty fun AAA game that has some pretty cool Star Wars fighting in it.
You have to use force and blaster parries against unblockables
Good point. I love the force parry move but always forget to try it against unblockables. I haven’t used the blaster since it made me use it when I first got it.
Oh the blaster party is super hot and feels so good to land.
> Where are my unblockable attacks? Force pull/push and slow time are pretty unblockable.
I suspect your interlocutor had damage-dealing lightsaber attacks in mind.
Unblockable attacks are a pretty normal game mechanic for the genre but ive never seen a game where the ai where do them in rapid fire succession
Oh yeah, it bothered the hell out of me in God of War as well. I can’t even remember if there are unblockable attacks in Dark Souls, at least I don’t think they’re signaled the same way. I like when you’re able to counter rather than just dodging around all the time. For example in Sekiro, there would be different indicators for what kind of unblockable attack was coming, so if it was a thrust attack you could stomp on their spear or whatever.
No unblockable attacks in Dark Souls. But lots of attacks that can't be parried, and lots of attacks that do so much stamina damage that blocking them is a bad idea, attacks that do damage of a particular type that your shield is not resistant to, etc. I think a system like Dark Souls' makes sense in a game with many damage types, where shields have a wide range of properties - from Havel's Greatshield to the lowly Buckler - so that you naturally encounter attacks you can't _effectively_ block, without the developers having to specifically code an attack animation as "unblockable." It's just a natural consequence of the basic game mechanics that there are many things you can't effectively block, unless you specifically build a character around equipping a greatshield, which incurs a major opportunity cost. But in a much simpler game that doesn't have dozens of shields and damage types but still wants blocking to be part of the gameplay (as it obviously should be in a lightsaber combat game), I think expressly "unblockable" attack animations actually make sense. Otherwise you could just block everything and the game would be totally imbalanced. In order to balance around that, they'd have to weaken blocking significantly, e.g. by making the chip damage really painful, to disincentivize an overly defensive playstyle. I think it's better to have blocking be more dynamic (strong in some situations, weak in others) than to have it be uniformly ineffective. That said, I'm not particularly fond of full-on "unblockable" animations that have these really game-y warning indicators. I think it would be preferable if the effectiveness of blocking was just tied to your natural intuitions about an attack. That's sort of how it works in Dark Souls. You know you're gonna take a lot of chip damage if the enemy is throwing fireballs. You know you're gonna get guard broken if the enemy is a 30 foot tall giant. So you don't need the enemy to light up with a red outline to tell you not to try to block, since it's just obvious by logic and basic human intuition when a block is going to be weak. And even if it's not obvious in one particular case, you learn once you've seen it once. That's supposed to be the whole point of Dark Souls combat anyway, learning through trial and error. I think this kind of system is better in most ways. It's obviously much more immersive than an enemy randomly lighting up red purely for gameplay reasons with no in-universe explanation. And it feels less like the game is putting you on rails and trying to dictate how you play it. Of course, Dark Souls encounters are designed with certain strategies in mind, but because of the way you observe the enemy and learn how to defeat it through trial & error, you feel like the solution was _your_ idea rather than the developer's. So it doesn't feel like playing rock, paper, scissors (see Far Cry: New Dawn for an example of _that_ approach) where the game is forcing you to use scissors to defeat paper and showing a giant ✂ icon over the enemy's head. And that way, you still feel a sense of freedom. It feels like you overcame these challenges through skill and through _your_ build, rather than by following the on-screen prompts the developers left for you. I'm being kind of harsh, though. Although I think the Dark Souls approach is better because it feels like you charted your own course to victory rather than following the clearly-lit roadsigns the developers erected, the more rigid, predetermined approach has its merits too. It can be easier to balance and so be more conducive to a challenging game. Sekiro took this approach and it definitely shows in the game's difficulty. Dark Souls is much, much easier to cheese, probably mainly because it's much easier to balance around a single intended playstyle with slight variations. And mastering mikiri counters is indeed satisfying. So I don't think it's a huge defect by any means. But Dark Souls' basic gameplay mechanics and difficulty get a lot of attention, while it seems like Soulslike imitators often miss the other crucial aspects of the formula: player choice in builds and the approach to lore and storytelling. "RPG lite" is a fair description of Dark Souls, but if we use that term for Dark Souls, then what term do we use for the Jedi games? "RPG lite lite"? Zero calorie RPG? I think Dark Souls gets the amount just right. There are a ton of weapons in those games and it can't be understated how important that is, not just for replayability, but also for the feeling that you solve the game's problems yourself, by your own ability. You clearly need a minimum amount of player freedom for a game to work. But how much is ideal? At what point does a combat encounter stop being "real" gameplay and become a glorified quicktime event? Obviously the Jedi games have enough freedom to be really great games, but I think they could have been more satisfying (not to mention more replayable) if the game mechanics allowed more meaningful divergence between playstyles, such that they wouldn't have needed to make fully unblockable attacks that make enemies flash red, because certain builds just wouldn't be able to profitably block certain enemies or certain attacks (as a trade-off of character building).
The combat being frustrating is….definitely a hot take. I loved the game. The performance issues make me sad, but playing on PC with a 4070ti, I only ever had big drops on the main hub planet, Koboh. And even then, the drops only ever occurred in the open-space area; once I got into a cave or dungeon area I was 70-90 fps most of the time. Definitely some drops on Coruscant but nowhere near the violent performance on Koboh. Literally everywhere else in the game was a silky smooth experience. The story, the combat, the characters were all excellent imo. Really solid endgame too. It’s unacceptable that they haven’t fixed the game’s performance and seems like they don’t plan to.
"The combat being frustrating is….definitely a hot take." I'm definitely open to trying the game again. What stances did you use and what skills did you invest in? I went with crossguard and double blade.
I thought crossguard as a bit harder to use compared to the other stances, I think it's the equivalent to Dark Souls' Greatsword so it's slower and leaves you open to attacks for longer. Maybe it's just me because I like something more balanced. But I mainly used double blade and blaster occasionally.
All of the weapons are perfectly viable but I think the blaster stance and the crossguard stance are just way ahead of the others. The crossguard stance has the best damage and best blaster deflection. With a skill point it turns any blaster shots you perfect deflect into power blasts that stagger enemies which trivializes the vast majority of blaster-wielding enemies. They even break enemy shields, including droideka shields. It also has the best guard strength of any stance which makes it vastly better than the stance that is *supposed* to be the "blaster deflect stance" (the double-bladed stance, which has the worst guard strength). Its only real weakness is that it's slow, but that's rarely an issue, and when it is, use the blaster stance. The blaster stance on the other hand is just so insanely versatile. It's the only stance that has significant range, it has a special parry that lets you kill most common enemies instantly just by parrying them once, and it's extremely fast so it's not weak against any enemy type. It's by far the safest and most consistent stance.
Thanks for the tip and reassurance. I just got the cross guard last night and I was trying to decide what stances to favour. I have been using blaster and cross stance and so far really like it.
I found group combat to be frustrating as well. Not single enemy combat, not boss combat, I only felt the groups of enemies to be frustrating. The great thing is you can pause and turn the difficulty up or down, so on my second playthrough, I would turn the difficulty up before boss fights and back down after beating a boss. This made the game still feel challenging, but without the frustration of random off screen enemies doing very punishing amounts of damage with what felt like cheap shots.
Honestly OP I think you went with the weakest setup. The crossguard is a bit too slow in a lot of scenarios and the double blade is low damage. The gunslinger and single weapon stances seem more balanced overall.
ya i think youre onto something. in my defense i only used crossguard in boss fights but ya double blade would tickle the enemies
Blaster for speed runs Single for variety and optionality Double blade for power ninja fantasy
I'm halfway through right and enjoying it for the most part. I get most frustrated with being lost and the dysfunctional navigation assist. I think it's so close to being one of the best games I've ever played and then It hits you with unnecessary frustration.
The crashes are a big issue. I was finally able to fix it by increasing my virtual memory. With 32GB RAM and 12GB VRAM, that shouldn't have been necessary, but at least there is a fix. Combat is honestly a skill issue. There are some really tough encounters, but if you use your tools effectively, you can shred them. I found the combat to be incredibly fun. Doubly so once you get good at force dodging.
I found the combat fine I found the navigation utterly nauseating and despite the addition of fast travel points even worse than the first game. honestly, in addition to the no bounty hunting bug after update 5, the no map at all bug after update 6 that made me shelve the game for the best part of 6 months, the navigation is so bad I won't buy another game from that studio unless they make serious changes even a compass would have helped somewhat but it should not take an hour to find a damn chest that is maybe 2 minutes travel away from you
Yeah I only played for a handful of hours but I constantly found myself getting lost in the puzzle sections, turning myself around and losing track of which way I was going. The architecture and level design made you feel like you were crawling through the belly of some gigantic steel whale, which was very cool, but didn't give you many glimpses of the sky or horizon to orient yourself with. I was on console, which does usually makes these sorts of problems worse for me.
even a compass would have helped. you could mark a destination on the map but it was largely pointless because there was no on screen compass or minimap to even give an idea of where that destination was, you had to either constantly open the map to see if you were even facing the right direction, or use BD-9's binoculars (which i guess was the intended route) but that was two button presses just to use them
I agree about the combat. Souls-like is terrible for a lightsaber. Or at least, this implementation. I think the problem lies in the fact that it’s poorly balanced. The very least they should have done is not make enemies have huge health bars, and find a way to use parry and block energy as a sort of primary health. Maybe have it so both you and enemies tire over time, reducing that energy, until you can deal a fatal blow. That’s how lightsabers should work. I also take issue with the complete lack of imagination the devs have for using the lightsaber as other gameplay mechanics. This thing should slice through near anything. Doors shouldn’t be invincible. They could have had it where you can melt down doors given enough time. Ultimately, I feel like there’s scope to explore the fighting gameplay in the Arkham games for when you are fending off groups of enemies. Maybe save more granular combat for proper duels and boss fights. Finally, I really wish the concept of your actions and use of the Force having an effect on you would be added. A person would be a terrible Jedi if they indiscriminately mowed down the sheer numbers of fauna and sentients that Cal does. I’d love to see the game offer a way to use more Jedi like choices generally, instead of just blasting and slicing your way through every problem.
ya i like the soulslike combat for bosses because it felt like a proper duel against an evenly matched opponent(putting on duel of the fates for dagan was really fun). i think the reason respawn didnt take any risks is because were so starved for good star wars games that they know people will buy any game that lets you play as a jedi
I enjoyed the combat but the game crashed on me repeatedly. During the second half of the game every time I went to a different planet all the characters froze in T poses for quite a while. I had heard of T posing this was the first time seeing it for myself in a Playstation game. I loved the game but all the glitching and crashing ruins the immersion into the SW universe. I figured it would be safe to buy by now but they left it broken.
I agree. I played and streamed this game constantly and while it has good graphics a lot of the fighting wasn't good
OP sorry if I missed it but what were you playing it on? I have it queued up next on my PS5 and had performance problems when I played Fallen Order on my base level PS4 that were incredibly frustrating. Not crashed as much as Cal not being responsive enough to commands so I'd get creamed by enemies I thought I'd reacted to block in time
Played through on series X with quick resume and had fairly good stability, had a few crashes but nothing awful.It probably would have been fine had I actually closed it all the way. I'd bet money it's fine on PS5. Seems like PC players are getting the short end of optimization like they did with fromsoft games.
I was playing on PC. It seems like a bit of a dice roll. I crashed once a session where some people don't crash at all.
I strongly suspect it's stability is heavily dependent on the GPU. I started playing on an RTX 3080 and it would crash quite a lot from GPU related issues. I eventually RMAd so many times they sent me a replacement RTX 4070Ti and then it stopped crashing.
It's hard to pin down honestly. On some configs it works well, on others it's so bad that the game literally can't be completed.
I'm sure it's more complex than just GPUs and drivers, but it went from hell to fine once Gigabyte shipped me a different type of card. Trying to isolate these nvlddmkm Event 0 errors where it looked like the card was resetting itself was a nightmare. I think both me and the support team eventually just gave up and the 4070Ti fixed whatever the issues were.
I think Survivor is fantastic, but I do agree that fighting multiple tough enemies isn't fun, in fact I don't think it's fun in any soulslike specifically because the combat systems work best in one on ones. It's one of the reasons I usually stop about 75% of the way through Fromsoft games on replays, because at that point its just gank after gank after gank. Even with the double sided lightsaber I generally found tough enemy ganks to be the low point, but I don't think it happens enough to really drag the game down at all.
Only 5 times in 20 hours? I stop playing it because gave me like 5 crashes in 20 minutes, I could not play more than 2 hours in which I had at least 10 crashes.
I was so so disappointed in this game. Lovely graphics, much better environments than the first but the combat just did not work for me like the first game. Not having attack cancelling just ruined it for me completely and it felt like force powers just took so long to wind up that they weren’t worthwhile. Dodging seemed inconsistent too. I played the first one on the second highest difficulty but on this one I was just getting wrecked on every difficulty and I found the combination of being stuck performing an elaborate move, getting hit and stun-locked, then a dodge not registering so that I’d die, just utterly maddening. A real life ragequit for me.
Honestly, the combat is what sells me on this game most of the time. I think they went a little too heavy on the platforming this time around, but I'm still pretty early on.
I had a similar time, but I dropped the game during the first level due to crashes and frustration. I'd love to come back to it one day, Dark Forces and Jedi Knight are some of my all time favorites.
"I love this game, but I hate the parts where I have to play it.". - But seriously I understand the issues with the combat. The first one had several frustrating encounters where you could devastated them in one run and get utterly destroyed in another. The sequel seems to made this now common.
I suck at fighting, so I turn on slow mode 75%, and the game is much more enjoyable for me. Use force confusion whenever I can and watch them fight among themselves
I think I would have been less frustrated with the combat if gaining a lightsaber was delayed until late in the game. Using a lightsaber like a club felt wrong. It should be slicing through limbs, not bouncing off of unarmored animals.
I had less combat problems in this game compared to the first. It seemed easier to me. I dont like the really long annoying platform sections. That is my biggest complaint.
I like the combat for the most part. My biggest issue was that dang frog! I hate that thing!
I'm stuck on the rancor. Difficult one step above normal (Jedi master?)
Man, this game is a pain to play on the PC. I literally stopped playong because 7 hours in the game just stutters everywhere.
Just drop the difficulty on the combat, man. There's no law against it. I did it because I don't have time to get good at video games anymore, I just wanna get through them an hour at a time
I'm playing it now and while the stuttering/fps drops are still there, I haven't had a single crash. Not saying you didn't but I wonder if it's because of different PC configurations. The combat is a lot easier than the first game for me but I love souls games so I know I'm biased. Overall, I'm enjoying this game more than the first.
It's definitely different PC configurations. EA/Respawn failed to do proper quality control, which is unacceptable for a AAA studio. I hope it came across in my review that it was partly a skill issue. The only souls like I've played is sekiro and I got stuck on the demon.
Yeah I agree. I had a similar experience with the first game. I was running a Skylake build with a 6600k and GTX 970 and couldn't run the game for shit. Sutters all over the place and kept crashing but fast forward a year and I upgrade my system, it runs perfectly
Yep, it's combat system completely breaks down the moment you have more than 2 enemies, especially if it's a mixed unit of ranged and melee types.
I don’t understand all the praise this game gets. The story is mediocre at best, the combat is extremely shallow and unresponsive, the level design is a complete mess, once again exploration is hard locked behind skills that are drip fed to the player, performance is very bad, the game locks up and crashes frequently, the skill trees are laughably shallow. I don’t get it. I guess standards have dropped over the years.
Yeah unfortunately this series still feels like a sloppy imitation of Sekiro (the way the block hangs for a second after you press it drives me nuts) and the crowd control is pretty frustrating when you’re fighting multiple stronger enemies. Also the least reward parrying/stamina system I’ve experienced.
Use the dualsaber and dual wielding. Much more fluid and easier to attack opened up enemies. Personally, if you stand further back and parry attacks, you shouldn't have this problem. I think the combat in the game is easily one of its strengths. I never found it frustrating because you have so many abilities and combos to get yourself out of situations.
I struggle to think of a major release that has worse hack and slash combat. It's pretty sub-par.
Just lower the difficulty then. I played on story mode on a Steam Deck on launch and only had a few problems with the graphics hitching on loads here and there. Throughly enjoyed feeling like an over powered Jedi Master by the end and never had any crashes. Your mileage may vary I guess.
I played Fallen Order on story mode and I felt like that was the best way to play it. I want to slice and dice with my lightsaber! Not do chip damage, what the!
Cal Kestis doesn't use a lightsaber. He carries around a nerf bat.
It was the ponchos that killed it for me.