'Star Wars Jedi: Survivor' | Big, Bold, and Broken...

Star Wars Jedi Survivor I've been excited to talk about this one this game was very hotly anticipated and it launched to generally positive reviews though it was a technical disaster and I think a lot of the stuff that they introduced while a good idea was not implemented very well however all told I think the game is pretty phenomenal and is definitely worth checking out especially now after all of the patches and updates that have largely improved performance though it's still nowhere near perfect a heads up we're going to be getting into all of the Nitty Gritty talking about story plot twists gameplay everything so if you are worried about spoilers this is not the video for you go play the game come back and it will still be here also I don't have a sponsor or anything for this video but if you are interested check out the merch over at Luke stevenstv.com we have a bunch of cool designs including stickers drawn up of memes from our live stream channel that I mail out here at this desk or if you want a shirt like I wear in these videos you can check those out or if you want to rep with some 16 times the detail merch to make Todd proud you can do that too but with that said let's get into it the first thing I have to mention are the technical issues there were so many videos made when this game launched about the dropping frame rates how the fsr2 upscaling on consoles was just atrocious how the Fidelity quality mode didn't look really any different from the performance mode all of the bugs and glitches soft locks Galore there's a lot that was wrong with Jedi Survivor when it launched and I could rehash all of those issues but frankly I don't think that's why you're coming to this video there are plenty of others deep diving into all of that including videos I've made so I'm gonna be focusing on what the game actually is at its core and mentioning gameplay breaking bugs and issues when we run into them because it's kind of impossible not to discuss however these types of videos tend to be watched by people year years after the fact so for me to go into all of these gameplay breaking bugs that our current now wouldn't be very helpful for people in the future playing on future patches and updates though I do want to State clearly that it matters that the game launched with technical issues because of all the inconsistencies in gameplay that these issues can lead to a player can waste significant amounts of time unsure if they're missing a gameplay mechanic or if the game is functionally broken simply because things aren't working the way they're supposed to but the player doesn't know they're not working the way it's supposed to because they haven't played the damn game yet this is why soft locks and questing glitches matter frame rate drops suck micro stuttering sucks and Poppin certainly can be very distracting but issues like this actively waste your time the most valuable commodity we humans have and maybe it's just a pet peeve of mine but there is nothing I hate more than playing a game being really excited to work my way through it and then reaching a point where I just have no idea how to progress only to find out it wasn't my fault I wasn't being a big dummy like I am sometimes the game was just broken it's so infuriating but setting that aside graphically the game when it's working looks really good I don't have too much to say here other than it seems to be a solid Unreal Engine title when everything is working properly unfortunately most players on consoles will never get to see this game in its full Beauty because it seems to be optimized for this fsr2 upscaling Tech to do most of the heavy lifting to hit frame rate Targets this results in images that are consistently blurry and have tons of artifacting around moving edges hopefully this is improved in future patches as well when you're seeing this however I do just want to say it seems as though there is no on off toggle for Ray traced Lighting in the console versions of the game as of the time of the recording of this video it seems like in performance mode and quality mode it looks the same the game's settings are basically identical it's just rendering at different resolutions and then trying to scale up to different targets hopefully they patch it and change how those performance modes work so it actually runs at a stable 60 and is a little sharper on the quality mode but I guess time will tell I've previously described how very concerned I am with this trend towards leaning into upscaling to counterbalance poor performance in modern games and I've said this because it seems to me that more and more Studios have expressed a lack of prioritization towards optimization instead they're leaning into tools like dlss or fsr2 to pick up the slack according to digital Foundry at quality mode Jedi Survivor often runs at a resolution as low as 972p and then upscales to 4K I understand it's using some Ray traced effects and things that are Cutting Edge but 900p and 1080p were standards back in like the Xbox One early era and it's just amazing to me that we have a game in 2023 that within its engine is having to render in a quality mode at 970p sub 1080p resolutions it's even more wild because it doesn't maintain steady performance but again hopefully that'll eventually be fixed they even pointed out that Jedi fall in order even runs at a higher resolution when on PS5 and even more offensive to the eye is the performance mode as I described according to digital Foundry testing as well this drops to as low as 864 p and tries to upscale using fsr2 to 1440p now I could continue ranting Ad nauseam about this topic which is why other people have done dedicated videos on it but for now I'll just reassert that the performance of this game is unacceptably poor and it's a real shame because much of the rest of the game really is phenomenal and it just goes to show you how terribly performance can harm uh releases long-term reputation it's really too bad because the rest of Jedi Survivor is pretty remarkable but enough about the technical stuff I I've complained enough about resolutions I've complained enough about soft locks and stuff and I hope I've made my point as to why it's important that soft locks be deemed unacceptable in games like this but with that said let's get into the nitty-gritty of how the game actually works following in the vein further of its souls-born Inspirations this time around the Star Wars Jedi series introduces a hub-like area on the planet Kobo that Cal can visit very very frequently the Cantina has NPC's offering quests it has vendors it has mini games places for you to see your Collectibles and all together it's a really nice addition from this Central Hub you're going to explore the rest of Kobo and a few other locations throughout the Galaxy at the end of each major quest line though you're going to return often to this Central Hub once again which I actually found to be a cool grounding point for the story where you can talk to Companions or secondary cast members I actually really liked this Edition compared to Jedi Fallen order which I felt was just sort of a Meandering mess of a game I only wish that things such as the companion system and some of the other ways that you can interact with non-playable characters were a little more fleshed out we're going to talk a little bit more about that later but what I'll say is I think that this was a really good first iteration of the Hub system though I hope in a sequel which I'm sure is going to inevitably come we see this drawn out a little bit more things such as actual bass customization companion selection from a wider variety of characters and smaller quality of life editions such as a trophy room where you can see the severed heads of all of the major world bosses you've taken on would be cool to see other than the Hub World they've also added a handful of other things they've introduced a number of new stances for combat they've significantly altered how the platforming and puzzle sections will work and you can really tell that they put a lot of time and money into big set pieces that are meant to wow you if you watched my recent revisit critique of Jedi Fallen order you'll know that I was kind of frustrated with Jedi Fallen order because it felt like they were taking huge Inspirations from Uncharted as a franchise and yet they largely abandoned those Inspirations after like two and a half three hours of gameplay and then leaned fully into the souls-like genre which I felt like they were less successful at replicating this time around it's almost the opposite it feels like the first half of the game is largely built on this souls-like architecture and then the last half of the game has all of these massive set pieces and boss battles which really upped the ante I personally greatly prefer this style of pacing I would rather things get more epic as the game goes on but maybe you're different I don't know what I'm saying though is that I really liked how they did this there are some sequences later on Jetta for example which are just frankly nothing short of badass there's also awesome moments such as the boss fight against Darth Vader which I was half expecting but I didn't expect to have a full-fledged boss fight with multiple phases against Vader I thought that this was everything I wanted it to be it really was cool or the sequence where you play a Seer fighting off the Imperial Invasion I mean this whole thing was just awesome and listen it's not easy to take what was done in the first game and then make it even crazier and more epic in pretty much every way for the sequel and they managed to do it here I think you can say a lot about Jedi Survivor and we're going to get into some of the things I'm frustrated by here in a bit but I gotta hand it to them they managed to up the ante and up the stakes and the scale in pretty much every way which is quite impressive and whether you love or hate some of the other parts of this game you gotta admit this is freaking cool even little things such as the movement and exploration mechanics have been changed in a way that makes them feel markedly more epic for lack of a better term the grapple hook the mid-air Dash and the way that you can chain all of these abilities to together leads to sequences where you're jumping and swinging around different Platforms in a way that makes you feel like you actually are A supernaturally Gifted Warrior it's just great real good vocabulary there Luke right it's awesome it's great I don't know what else to say it just is fun to play it feels really cool and compared to the clunky movement of Jedi Fallen order every part of this game's improved movement system is a step up though I will say his Running Animation is still a little weird and it sort of looks like he has a baseball bat up his butt when he's running in an open field sorry I had to say it it was a problem in the last game it's a problem here calling it like it is now as for the narrative Jedi Survivor takes place about five years after the events of the first game a lot has happened and the cast of that game has splintered off for their own various reasons Cal has also buddied up to this guy named Bode which is apparently a good friend of his that he's been work working with for years at the time that the game starts this to me was immediately a warning sign that this guy was either going to die in the first 20 minutes of the game or he was going to be like a big bad guy that was introduced at the last minute as a major plot twist because the only time that anybody ever introduces a new best friend character in a story right in the beginning with no prior exposure to them in the previous entry of whatever franchise we're talking about it always results in some sort of plot twist or oh no moment because I think they were going to kill him because the cow's best friend even though we've never seen him before so I kind of called this whole Bode plot twist that we'll get into later but honestly it's okay I mean I'm not like super offended that somebody could guess the plot twist if they're looking out for it I think in general it works pretty well and from what I could Garner from you guys in chat when we were talking about this on the live stream it seems like most people didn't see this plot twist coming so all told I think it was more generally a success the game also experiments a lot narratively speaking with Cal feeling tempted to go towards the dark side I thought this was really interesting and I think it could be really compelling for a sequel as well if we start to explore this even more they even play with this in terms of gameplay by giving you access to what I'm gonna call the dark side ability or embracing the dark side ability I don't know if there's an official name for it that's just what I'm going with basically there's a moment in the game story where you chase down Bode and you have an option to embrace the dark side as he angers you during the fight and you need to do this in order to progress and it's basically an alteration into an ability you already have to slow down time making it easier to avoid enemies shots or attacks flanking them from behind and dealing good damage but now it allows you to deal crazy high damage and it doesn't slow your movement at all either so you can zip around slowing time killing hordes and hordes of enemies very very quickly with the red effect it kind of looks like the God of War 2018 rage mode where you go in you start seeing red everywhere and you can just beat the crap out of people really quickly that's basically what this is I liked it thematically though I didn't like how you just kind of deal with it like for the rest of the game it's not really brought up that Cal is embracing the dark side whenever he does this combat ability like it seems like that should be a problem or something that like people talk to him about maybe you shouldn't do that because it's making you a little crazy maybe he's learned to balance it I don't know if we have like a race situation where he's all the Jedi or something thing but it seems weird that this never went anywhere maybe in a sequel it gets addressed more fully but even in the last boss fight against Bode this is a topic of conversation and this is something that comes up as part of that actual boss fight sequence so I don't know what they're gonna do with this it's compelling though and I think in the next game we're probably gonna see Cal get tempted an awful lot towards the dark side for sure and before anybody says that I know that you could just like not use the Ability if you don't want to for narrative reasons and that's true you just avoid it I don't know I I personally don't like it when games rely on players to self-manage difficulty balancing which is effectively what that would be there are multiple encounters in the game where you are expected to use this crazy Dark Side ability to get through it and if you don't you're gonna have a bad time so I guess you can for role-playing sake but it's not designed in my opinion for you to do that they want you to use it which is why they give you the ability to use it so I I guess take it or leave it it's it's something I'm conflicted on because you can avoid it if you want but it's clear they intend for you to use it it's not like that system in that game vampire where you are given the Clear Choice of consuming the blood of these people which will kill them destroy the humans in this District of the game but you'll gain power and abilities and combat will be easier for you or you can role play and avoid that humans will be better off but you're gonna have a hell of a time trying to get through combat there's not a clear gameplay system like that in place where they give you the option to embrace the dark side or not it's just this is a really powerful gameplay mechanic we intend for you to use or you can just not do it and try to role play that way it's just not built for that anyway I'm rambling moving on the overarching story I didn't find particularly interesting but I did find the menu show within the story more compelling than Jedi Survivor not only do I think that the writing within individual conversations has largely been improved but thematically I think the story is much more varied and the exploration of topics such as insecurity self-doubt and even paternal obligations are welcome additions they also have a handful of plot twists which are always interesting to see because even if you predict one as I mentioned earlier with Bode the others might slip by and catch you by surprise now in discussing the story and lore of this world I do want to be completely transparent I am far from a hardcore Star Wars fan I don't really have any issue with the franchise but I think because my name is Luke I have for a long time suffered from the constant jokes about strangers being my father that being said while I probably missed a number of smaller nods and lore inclusions that were written into the narrative and the world design and the passive storytelling while you're exploring what I was able to gather I really did appreciate the fact that we're given the chance to explore brand new world's previously unseen to Star Wars fans speaking to characters never before encountered and fight villains that fit perfectly within this universe while being original to this series it's all pretty cool it also makes me wonder what such a treatment would be like for another franchise I love Pirates of the Caribbean I'm just saying it's a layup Pirate game super dark gritty narrative open world sailing around fighting Pirates and stuff it could be awesome no joke that's like a giga bucket list game for me if they ever make a AAA open world Pirates of the Caribbean licensed game it doesn't even have to have Jack Sparrow or anything but just a Pirates of the Caribbean game I will lose it okay mark my words if it ever happens I will be crying tears of joy all of this to say I think Jedi survivor's narrative actually exceeds what most people were expecting a lot of us going into this sequel were probably just expecting to fight Darth Vader again perhaps have one of The Supporting Cast killed off and maybe throw in some extra boss fights while stretching to hit a 15 hour mark but what we got instead was a pretty epic tale that is as varied as it is expansive there are certainly moments where I think the game starts to drag in terms of pace about a third of the way through and I would say that the finale Falls a little bit flat for me but I think they generally pulled this off in a pretty impressive way and one of the things that I thought was quite interesting in the story was the discussion of bode as a father his obligation to his daughter and whether or not his saving of his daughter justifies screwing over all of these other characters that he encounters when he decides to betray the Jedi in order to save his daughter multiple characters say quite clearly that this is obviously because he's trying to save his daughter and take her to the safe home planet where the Jedi initially wanted to travel to to be safe from their enemies and as a father I found this really compelling thinking yeah what would I do if I was in that situation and my kid were in danger and I had to betray all of these people in order to do it right like it actually was compelling to me but what I will say is that I don't think it was as compelling to people who don't have kids or are not parents themselves including Cal is not a parent so this question of like oh yeah if somebody you love were in danger would you betray others to protect them sort of a Last of Us question and I think that the player can sympathize with that in in large part but I don't think Cal has the perspective too they could probably do something interesting with companions to achieve a similar effect with Marin of course being a love interest for Cal and maybe there's a point where she's brought into danger and Cal has to betray somebody he cares about or choose between Seer and Merit or something like that but instead it's just never really explored and I think it's largely because they wanted to save that development of the Marin relationship until this game whereas if they had established that relationship in the last game they would have had that opportunity here and even if you hate me for saying it I'm gonna say it bd1 is an adorable little robot creature but I don't think putting bd1 in danger is the same as Bode with his daughter I I get it we love bd1 as a robot but it's not a direct simile I don't think they're comparable so I think they needed some other character to bring that emotion out of Cal so that when Bode betrays everybody for sake of his daughter Cal has something to bounce that off of instead he's just like yeah it's his daughter I feel bad I don't know what to do gonna have to kill him though like it just doesn't really work for me and I think this is part of the reason that in say God of our Ragnarok so many of those story beats hit so hard quick spoiler warning for God of War Ragnarok here's the time stamp if you want to skip this part and just skip right over it but with that being said in God of War Ragnarok at the very end Kratos decides that they're not going to put all of these civilians in danger but rather they're going to be better than the gods that they're fighting against they're going to be better and the only reason that narrative beat hits hard as a major character development for Kratos is because we know where he came from we know all of the themes from the last however many games and now he's been trying to be better than all of the gods that came before him many of whom he's killed and the fact that he has that experience brings all of this together and makes it hit hard whereas for Cal is just sort of this empty character which is getting better but I still don't find him particularly interesting and his lived experience isn't that Vast at least as far as we've seen so we don't know where he's coming from to make these decisions to go after Bode instead of just letting him get away or whatever else and speaking of bode's betrayal further I want to just say I don't think Bode was that out of line for betraying the Jedi in that moment basically as far as we can tell he was willing to let the Jedi go with him to this Sanctuary Planet so long as it was going to be peaceful but instead Seer and all of the other Jedi around Cal start describing how they want to turn it into their home base while they fight against the evil forces chasing them down basically just moving their Center of operation somewhere else where that place will inevitably just become another Target it's only once this is made clear to bode that he decides to cut and run and I don't think he's wrong for doing that if he's trying to protect his daughter I don't totally bi that he can't go anywhere else in the galaxy and be safe with his daughter but who knows maybe that's just something in the Star Wars Universe I'm not aware of I don't see why he couldn't just pick any random Planet go live in the mountains somewhere and be happy that way until she's grown up and he dies of old age and she goes off and does her own thing maybe I'm missing something I guess let me know in the comments but whatever but I think all of this just compounds into feeling as though this whole plot twist and this betrayal is a little bit contrived they put Bode in here because they wanted somebody to betray Cal and everybody and then they wanted you to feel bad about hunting him down and taking him out so they threw in his daughter it just doesn't feel really organic it feels very contrived because frankly it probably is I don't think they wrote The Narrative for this game with Bode as just a good companion and a daughter and then decided at some point during development you know what it makes sense for Beau to betray everybody getting them all killed at this point so let's do that I think they decided before he was going to betray everybody and then wrote the story around it which I know some authors do that it's fine if you do um you got to be a little better at covering your tracks I think if that's what you're doing but here I just don't think it lines up perfectly as for other things that I think were great additions that didn't really play out as well as I think they were hoping them to let's talk about companions in my view these are a real missed opportunity throughout the course of the game your companions I suppose could be whittled down to bd1 bode and Marin bd1 of course is with you all the time including the last game so I wouldn't really consider him a companion as much as like part of Cal effectively in terms of gameplay everything is kind of part of you but Bode and Marin are separate entities that have different play styles that do different things in combat to assist you of course have their own narrative implications while talking and conversing with Cal while you explore levels together and while they're varied and I like them here I don't think they're really fleshed out as far as I'm aware the idea of companions while navigating a linear narrative such as this was originally introduced in the mainstream back with Resident Evil 4. the idea was pretty simple that you would explore levels with a companion that can bounce ideas off of the player character and offering this other perspective can lead to interesting narrative developments instead of just dead static air you know while you're exploring a level or solving a puzzle or something instead of it just being silent or having somebody like Deacon St John in days gone talking to himself all the time or Eloy talking to herself all the time you have another character to have a conversation with which can lead to Exposition can lead to interesting emotional development between the characters it works really really well and there's a reason why it started with something like Resident Evil 4 in the mainstream and now has spilled into Naughty Dog Games Sony Santa Monica games it's all over the place and for good reason because it works the other really cool thing about having a companion exploring levels with you is that it gives you the ability to bond with that companion by way of gameplay where the mere Act of solving a puzzle together or pulling a platform of wood over for Ellie to hop on and then moving it back over here creates a bond between not just the player character and the NPC in question but the player and the NPC because you're helping each other and somewhere deep down in our monkey brains that creates a bond and gets us closer to that character that's why I was so excited when I saw that Jedi Survivor was going to be implementing companions in a much more coherent way than we had in say Jedi Fallen order where in a couple of missions you are with Seer for example but it's not in any noticeable way or like Marin's there but she's not really there with you while you go through levels so I was excited but unfortunately it only really comes out in heavily scripted sequences and other than that you're mostly left to your own devices there are narrative developments that happen and occasionally somebody like Marin may help you navigate a level or you can command bow to shoot down some object to let you jump on it and progress through the level but again these are usually in very precisely placed and heavily scripted sequences and while you're out exploring they are going to be sitting back on the ship or somewhere else entirely doing their own thing and this honestly surprised me while you're exploring Jeddah you don't actually have the option to like go to your ship and select Marin or Bode to come with you while you explore if it's during a specific main story Quest they'll follow you but otherwise they just stay on the ship sitting in a chair doing nothing it's really really bizarre and to me it seems like a total waste of a companion system I really think in a sequel if they fleshed this out a little bit further and gave us the ability to select companions to explore certain levels with us it could be really really interesting especially because this game implements a lot of metroidvania ideas where you need to return to certain areas with different abilities later in the game to be able to explore them and get the goodies hidden behind those locked doors and you could do something very similar with different companion characters almost exactly like they did in the Lego Star Wars games all those years ago where you needed somebody on the Sith side to open up this door with the little red magic outline or this person you needed Jar Jar's double jump to get up this ledge that is all I'm really talking about and I think it could lead to some really interesting moments where you could develop characters Bond Beyond just main story cut scenes or specifically calibrated events within a main story Quest moving on to the gameplay the loop here is very similar to that of its predecessor you will largely be exploring levels that have intricate Pathways shortcuts to be unlocked and opened and many and major boss fights mixed in this time around most of the levels in my mind feel more expansive and at times they even feel more detailed you notice I said at times and that's because there are moments in this game where it does feel like entire sections of the map were just created to pad out gameplay time that was certainly the case in Jedi Fallen order and unfortunately it's the case here as well I do think there is a good amount of bloat here which is unfortunate but it comes with the territory of trying to create big open levels which they tried to do this time around we're going to talk more about those open levels here in just a little bit because I do think that there's a lot to be said about them but first I want to get into the combat system for better or Worse they've doubled down on the Soul's light combat system that we saw in the last game they've also added a handful of new stances so that players can choose which fits best with their play style however this is no ghost of sushima or neo2 they will only allow you to have two different stances equipped at any given time and while it's relatively easy to swap these out back at meditation points it is fairly tedious of these stances we have single saber this is exactly what you would expect it's the standard more classical Star Wars stance that you're probably familiar with there's also dual saber where you can split it in two which allows you to attack very very quickly though with lower damage there's the cross guard stance which is pretty much exactly kylo Ren's setup it offers heavy hits but much slower movement just like using a great sword in Monster Hunter or any other action RPG they also added a blaster stance which as you would expect allows you to dual wield with your lightsaber and a blaster on a cool down and last but not least there's the double-bladed saber which again is something we saw in the last game and is basically just Darth Maul's setup and I was actually shocked playing but each of these feels significantly different the single saber feels different from the Dual saber to the double-bladed saber to the Blaster it it all is very very different I really liked the ability to swap between them and see what worked best for how you play these games some people play these Souls like games like bloodborne where they're just rolling through everything using iframes to avoid damage other players take it very very slow are very tactical with when they enter an engagement and choose to attack and other people are just straight up button Mashers and just want to get in there get dirty hug that booty of that boss and go crazy and the different stance is actually enable you to do whatever you want to do the other perk is that if you play through the whole game maning two stances which most players I think are going to do they're going to pick their favorites and stick to them subsequent run-throughs actually feel markedly different I went through the first run through of the game usually using the Dual wielded double lightsaber mixed with the double-bladed saber for crowd control however when I went back through and I was playing on PC I maimed the cross guard lightsaber which is very very heavy and offers high damage and I tried out the Blaster stance which I didn't mess with a ton in my first playthrough just I I didn't like it I know some people love it dearly I just didn't connect with it but when I went back through the game the second time I actually got to experiment with them and in some ways some of these boss fights felt entirely different it was almost like a new game it was great I know some people don't love that there's only two equippable stances at a time it feels like they give you all this variability but it's super clunky and awkward to use it but frankly I think it's just a necessary evil they want you to specialize in a certain style of combat so they give you the option to swap between them experiment but they make it just inconvenient enough they you need to commit to your main setup while you go through the game and I understand that some people don't like it but I think it actually works quite well now going back to its clear inspiration from the soulsborne games I think it's important to discuss combat difficulty more generally first things first the difficulty you select does not actually affect XP or anything having to do with loot drops nothing like that this is not one of those games where playing on the hardest difficulty drops legendary gear like Fallout 4 for example this is a game where they wanted to make it accessible so whether you're playing on the story mode or on the hardcore Jedi Grand Master mode they want you to be able to level up at the same Pace as you go through the game speaking of these difficulty options there's a story mode Jedi Padawan mode Jedi Knight Jedi Master and Jedi Grand Master these five options can be selected from the main menu or in the games menu when you're actually playing you're not locked into any mode once you select it you can drop it or raise it as you see fit the game defaults to Jedi Knight which is the middle of the pack difficulty option and so that's what I played with on my first run through however on my second run through I decided to try the Jedi Grand Master mode just like I did with Jedi Fallen order just a few months ago in preparation for this game the unfortunate thing is that because the game's performance is really lackluster especially in terms of frame rate consistency at least when I was playing it makes it very very hard to play this game on the harder difficulties because the Perry timings shrink very very small and if you're just a few frames off with your Parry you miss it and you're dead and you have to try the boss fight all over again because most bosses will one shot you it's been said by many people at this point but I think it's because it's true that it's been said so many times soulsborne style games are only fun they're only enjoyable and satisfying they only scratch that itch if they are fair the moment they start to feel unfair it all goes out the window the moment you're in a boss fight that you've been grinding on for hours and hours and then you swing and the hitbox doesn't register properly or they do some big attack and it's way far away from you but for some reason the AOE hits you and smacks you I just hit my my movement goals for the day good lucky me the moment it's not consistent like that it rips you out of it you'll get totally pissed off you'll throw the controller and you just want to be done because you feel cheated because in many ways you were this is how I know I'm getting like heated in a video or like passionately talking is because my watch is like oh you're clearly on a run because why would your heart be beating that fast and why would you be moving so heavily and crazily I need to I need to calm down uh do I have water I need water the point is as the technical performance currently stands I wouldn't recommend going through on Jedi Grand Master though once the performance is steady and reliable on whatever Hardware you're playing on whether it's on Console or on PC I would recommend trying that on subsequent playthroughs honestly there's nothing more satisfying than playing a game like this on the hardest difficulty and just parrying the crap out of bosses blasting through them your gameplay will make you look like some sort of legend or fiend because you're parrying everything not getting hit and demolishing every enemy on screen whereas just playing on like the normal mode or something allows you to make enough mistakes that you never really have to get good at the combat system but speaking of the get good mentality I do just want to address the story mode difficulty real quick because I saw some people on Twitter being kind of nasty to people about this they're like it's clearly a Souls like game you're not supposed to go through on the story mode that's for or whatever and honestly gaming at this point is an international hoppy it's a hobby for men women for kids toddlers adults for the elderly like we all come together in this industry and the last thing we need is to be gatekeeping something as stupid as a video game's difficulty options like touch grass it's okay like I get it you're passionate about it and you feel like you have to earn some sort of respect by playing games on the hardest difficulty but frankly there's just some things that are not that big of a deal if somebody played through this game on the story mode difficulty and had a great time awesome props not everybody wants to grind out games that are super difficult bash their head against the wall trying to get over a boss fight or something I would encourage them to try it on harder difficulties because I think you'll be more satisfied when you overcome that challenge when it's difficult but I'm not gonna shame somebody for playing on a lower difficulty like how much free time do you have like chill out dude it's okay do you need to talk do you need to call someone Jesus speaking of Jesus let's talk about enemies that respawn just as in the last game every time you load back or rest at a meditation Point enemies will respawn where you found them last except for major bosses unfortunately this game Falls victim to one of the many ills that plague this genre of games and it's what I call the sprinting problem I don't know if that's what it's called that's just what I call it basically it's when you sprint around all the enemies instead of fighting them you see the way that XP is paid out in Jedi Survivor you don't have much incentive to fight waves upon waves of enemies respawning and then fighting them again while you re-explore the level or work your way to a different part of the map and while I don't have any data mine stats or anything to demonstrate this point what I will say is that I know for a fact that combat difficulty or the option for difficulty that you choose on the main menu does not affect XP payouts other people have tested this it doesn't and when I was playing through on my PC on the hardest difficulty I chose to just run around all the grunt enemies working my way through major story checkpoints and things like that and in my anecdotal experience I didn't have any trouble leveling up or working through the various levels and main story missions at no point did I feel like oof I am not high enough level for this whether this is because the game uses a dynamic XP system to make sure you're at a certain power level as you head into new story checkpoints or beats or maybe it's just that the game doesn't actually have your typical damage scaling system like in an action RPG but rather it just has flat damage output and then you can boost certain things with different skills that you unlock by using the XP that you collect while fighting all those grunt enemies and mini bosses and things like that honestly speedrunners are probably the people to talk to about this because I'm sure that they have experimented a lot with this and from looking up a few of the speed runs that currently exist there's not many for this game yet but there are a few and while looking at them I'm actually surprised at just how few of them spend time trying to specifically boost damage it doesn't seem like that's really a priority it's just about getting from place to place as quick as you can so I don't think that actual damage scaling is really a fact Factor here and what that means is that in main story missions there are many times where the game will specifically task you with clearing waves of enemies or wiping out everybody in a given room or space before progressing they might do this by having a lock or a door that takes a certain amount of time to open or you need an object that only spawns from The Last Enemy who dies something like that it generally Works to force you to engage with the combat you can't just Sprint through everything but when you're out exploring the world and you're on your own time again there's very little reason to actually actively engage with enemies when you can just run around them and to me that's not great I think that's an issue with the leveling system not accounting for that maybe there could be a way where you have hard level Gates between different areas as you go through the story but then again that might be considered to Advanced for this game and they were trying to keep it kind of short and simple Stu stupid keep it dumbed down and accessible I'm not totally sure all I know is that I don't think as it is it works very well one thing I am very conflicted on are the stems though you see in Jedi fall in order you were able to go through the entire game only collecting one or two stims at specific moments where it's almost impossible to miss them and so you could complete the final boss fight with only a handful of stims at your disposal for healing after taking damage if you wanted to find more you had to go out and actively seek them out in Levels by exploring and maybe this is just me but in my experience stems are much easier to find in Jedi Survivor by the time I reached the end of the story in my first playthrough I had like nine or ten of these things there's a perk you can get which gives you an extra one so I don't know how you would count it but I had like nine or ten of these things and I never felt as though I needed more healing it was way too much healing for what I needed and apparently currently there are 12 in the game plus or minus one depending on how you count it so I went through the entire game not like spending a ton of time exploring side content I did I did do a lot of side quests but I didn't feel like I was searching for these stems like I was when I played through Jedi Fallen order just a few months ago when I did that I was actively searching for where these stem canisters were whereas this time around I felt like I generally just kind of stumbled onto them while going through the main story and maybe that was intentional maybe they just wanted more players to find them and they saw a lot of feedback the players were frustrated there wasn't enough healing by the end of the game and then the dads were like well that's because you didn't explore stupid I don't know I'm not sure if I like this or if I don't what I do know is that it really felt as though there wasn't much challenge by the end of the game because you had so much healing but then again maybe that was part of the design if that's what they were trying to do as for other elements of the combat system the parries I felt were much tighter this time around I don't know that's just me or if it actually has been improved but last time it felt as though they were fairly inconsistent sometimes Perrys would register very very tight and responsively to your actions and other times they wouldn't aside from the technical hitching and frame drops which make Perry's almost impossible to pull off when they do occur this I thought was a market improvement over the last game I also felt that in general there were much fewer saber or Blaster sponge enemies this time around don't get me wrong there are a few bosses some of which we're gonna discuss here in just a little bit that were certainly built to just take forever to get through however in general especially for the grunt enemies it feels as though they aren't as bloated as some of them were in the last game like those purple guys jeez I hate those guys you know the guys with the spinny sticks with the purple on the end can't stand them and in addition to all of this I will also say that hitbox accuracy feels very much improved this time around as you can see on screen some of these combat sequences would be very very difficult I'm sure to track with accurate hitboxes and somehow they managed to do it the only exception would be this massive frog guy which I'm going to talk about in just a little bit don't you worry um I think we can all agree this guy can go truck himself the reason I can't stand this guy is because he is extremely cheesy it feels as though he has hitboxes that are not very accurate specifically when dealing damage to you it also feels as though his AOE attacks are much broader than they should be and he has ridiculous tracking on a few of these grab animations but again we'll get to him in just a second you know what now's as good a time as any let's get into the nitty gritty of how the bosses work because this is one of the biggest selling points of Jedi Survivor that they took the souls lights combat and then they expanded it and gave us a ton more bosses with tons of variability in a Star Wars setting and for a lot of people it's a dream come true so let's talk about it but first i'm gonna do a little costume change whoa spin move there we go we're back in a different outfit wearing shorts because it's a lovely day let's talk about bosses in Jedi Survivor there's no way of putting this other than saying this is a huge improvement over the last game the variety of bosses difference in movesets and archetypes difficulty and sheer quantity have all seen a huge step up whether you want to fight bosses you came across in the last game or if you want to take on new foes such as a Rancor you will find it in this game a lot of them are hidden around secret Caverns or you find them through rumors which are things that you get while speaking to NPCs around central hubs of the game such as the saloon in rambler's reach on Kobo sometimes they'll give you a gentle hint that there's something that needs to be checked out in a certain area and then you'll get a map marker leading you to the general area where you can expect to either find treasure or you usually a mini boss guarding some treasure now there's all sorts of different types of bosses you'll encounter whether they're beasts or humanoids or Androids or just crazy aliens there's a ton of variability here and they each have their own movesets different attack patterns timings for Perry's I freaking love it the one thing that is very inconsistent though is the difficulty you see Jedi Survivor and Jedi Fallen order both Implement what are known as metroidvania styles of world design or level design and basically all that means in common parlance is that there are certain areas within levels that you will reach early on in the game that you can only get through later on using separate abilities that you unlock later on within the main story for example however this isn't just implemented by way of say destructible objects that you can only blow up with a certain ability but rather also to the difficult difficulty level for example the rain core rain core Rancor every time I say it it sounds weird Rancor Rancor I'm just gonna say it however it comes off my tongue I'm sorry the general consensus consensus seems to be that this guy is extremely difficult for when you can discover him in the game a lot of people will take on the rancorp with as few as two to three Health stims which makes this fight very very difficult considering how aggressive he is and how slow I think you're expected to take the fight this probably means that the developers intended you to find him bash your head up against the wall for a little bit and then give up moving on to another area and returning once you've grown more powerful or capable with new healing items and skill unlocks part of what reaffirms this idea that you're meant to fight the rancor later on is that some of the animations are so short for some of this that it really makes it seem like they intend for you to use abilities such as the lightsaber throw which you're gonna unlock using skill points later on in the game you probably won't have that ability when you first encounter this guy an example would be the Stagger if you deal enough damage you pair the crap out of him and break him so that he's staggered he will fall backwards a little bit but he will recover so quickly that you won't be able to actually take advantage of the opening and so it feels as though you worked really hard and played very carefully to stagger him only to be given a split second to take advantage of that a time period which is simply Too Short if you're playing with the basic moveset and skills equipped that you'll have at the beginning of the game whereas later on you'll have things like the lightsaber throw which allow you to quickly get in there and deal damage before he fully recovers but I mean all of this is sort of beside the point because even if the developers intend for you to take this guy on later in the game it doesn't really matter because if you want to just bash your head up against the wall and keep trying until you've defeated him with a basically perfect run of not taking a single hit and dealing out perfect damage good on you that's awesome or paratuya however I do think it's important to note that a lot of players are going to feel as though they should be able to do this so they'll keep bashing their head against the wall and it can often lead to frustration which for some people is a real turn off but I would say most people who are playing these games are adults and can figure it out themselves and if they're having trouble with the boss fight they shouldn't feel ashamed moving on until they gain new abilities and I think most people can figure that out but I think perhaps the most important thing to discuss when it comes to the bosses is not necessarily the quality because I think in general especially taking them on in like New Game Plus they're pretty well built but I want to talk a little bit about the rewards that come from these boss fights because you can bash your head up against the rancor early on in the game and beat him and I think most players will be doing that because they feel as though he's probably guarding something that's pretty special why else would you put a very difficult boss in front of a locked Treasure Chest effectively it's got to be because there's something good in there right well in some cases after a boss fight the reward is quite good in the case of the rancor you actually get a skill point and you get something called the shatter perk which helps you break down the guard of enemies much faster which if acquired earlier in the game can be really really useful when taking on bosses later on and things like that so it's actually a pretty solid reward however a handful of other mini bosses you'll encounter as you work your way through the game are guarding things as useless as a different paint job for bd1 or a beard style or a different haircut like a mullet that you're never gonna use and this leads us really nicely into the open world discussion because I think one of the biggest problems with Jedi Survivor is how they reward players for exploring and for doing stuff like mini boss fights and things they do have a lot of cosmetics in this game which they deserve credit for there is a lot of customization available however I don't think it's a controversial thing to say that finding a mullet in a box or a different paint scheme for bd1 is not as impressive as finding for example a stem canister or a new perk like you got after that Rancor fight there's nothing more frustrating than spending an extended period of time exploring and navigating a level going and looking in every nook and cranny finally finding a mini boss that's guarding some blocked off treasure you spend some time you defeat the mini boss you go up to it and it's like a red white and pink color scheme that you're not going to use it feels like a total waste of time it's like when you're playing Diablo 4 you take on some boss and he drops a bunch of gear for a character that isn't yours like for a Barbarian Build but you're playing as a necromancer you're like oh okay well that sucks like if the game does that and if the game were to drop gear that you can't use or are just not going to use you'd be like oh well so that was a waste of time that wasn't worth it I just did that for nothing even though you got something for it it feels bad man because it's not something that you actually will use so effectively by way of its lack of use it's useless to you and if we look at other games such as tears of the Kingdom you can see what this is like when it's implemented very well when you explore and find a unique armor set or you find Majora's Mask down in an underground Coliseum or you get all sorts of diamonds that you can sell for super high value or you find a shrine and then that gives you one of the four little orbs that you need to upgrade your max health or stamina it's little bitty things but it's something tangible that's useful and will eventually have an actual impact on your gameplay I do think that whenever we get the sequel to Jedi Survivor which at this point I'm convinced is inevitable they really do need to reevaluate just how they reward players for completing these side activities that are more optional as far as I'm concerned there really is not much reason to freely explore the world of Jedi Survivor other than simply seeing things for their own sake or because you are a completionist the quality of rewards to be found are so vastly inconsistent that it's frankly baffling after my fourth or fifth time in my first run through of looking in nooks and crannies finding something that was hidden away only for it to be something totally useless I basically decided that this wasn't worth my time if they were going to reward my careful exploration and searching with something as stupid as a couple of different colors of paint or a haircut I'm not going to apply to Cal because it's horrendously ugly I I just am not going to bother and I think a lot of other players feel the same way though to be fair I'm sure there are players out there who got giddy every time they got a new cosmetic I'm just not one of them now there's also other things to find as well while you're exploring the game it's not just purely Cosmetics there are some other things for example you can find Hollow tactic Pieces by scanning down to enemies this is the mini game that you can play back at the saloon and honestly I actually really like this game I know it's like super minimal and it's kind of bland it's just you pick the different quality of Fighters then you watch them fight it out in real time it's super simplistic but I actually had a lot of fun with this and I would appreciate like a mobile game version of this I'd probably play that a good amount I just thought it was kind of fun and it actually encouraged me to scan all of the enemies that I downed instead of just running past them like my knee-jerk reaction is to do so Props to them they found a way to get me to do something I wouldn't normally do in a game and all for sake of a mini game which while I don't think it's on the same level as the mini game that they have in say Horizon forbidden West that I can't remember the name of or like gwent in The Witcher 3. I do think that this is pretty interesting and if we get a sequel I would love to see them expand upon this and that Beyond haircuts you can find different outfits for Cal or get ups for bd1 or the ship like you did in the last game you can also of course find different customizations for Cal's lightsaber Blaster and even find different seeds for planting in the garden on the roof of the Cantina it's pretty cool that there's so much stuff here it might not be for everybody but if you're a completionist there's plenty to find though I will still insist the most satisfying thing to find while out exploring in the world were the stems these things were just like a little shot of dopamine straight to my brain every time I found them because they have a quantifiable and noticeable impact on gameplay and combat especially now as for General open world exploration setting aside how you're rewarded for doing it this will take the form usually of running around or occasionally using mounts such as spammals nekos or relators to get to different areas on the map that were initially gated off they the spammals are basically just space camels these are the big blue long-legged things that run really really weird I don't know if it's just me but these things freak me out they terrify me in a way that I cannot even begin to describe they just look wrong their animation sets are also really really weird their feet don't sink with the ground so it looks like they're sliding constantly I don't know these things I think could just use a little bit more work as they are they're really janky and sit proudly in The Uncanny Valley and freak me out I just I don't like these things the nekos are nice little mounts that help you get around a little bit faster but honestly none of these creatures run much faster than Cal is able to run on foot it never felt as though I really needed a mount to get around these levels I could just kind of run and zip around it's like the Gotham Knight situation all over again where they give you a motorbike where you can zip around on that and then they also give you a grapple hook to fly around and then each character also has a specialized movement ability so they give you this really cool gameplay ability but it's not actually useful enough to Warrant your careful consideration while exploring levels but once you finally get to some place that's interesting you can expect to either be completing different combat challenges clearing a space of enemies completing a platforming challenge or finding a puzzle that needs to be completed with some combination of the aforementioned abilities implemented as well sometimes while exploring these large open areas you'll find something that is specifically intended for use in the main story and other times you'll find stuff for side content the game doesn't usually prevent you from engaging with the side content but they will prevent you from engaging with the main story content before they're ready for you to engage with it this brings us back to those metroidvania elements where they want to make sure that you have a certain set of abilities before progressing through a given area at precise moments in the story when they want you to be able to do that so to make sure that you're able to do something such as using the router to Glide across a vast expanse but they only give you the ability to do that at a specific point in the story when then they know okay everybody will be able to do this at the same time one thing I will say is that it can often be hard to distinguish between Pathways crafted for main story sections and those that are meant to be optional in some areas within Kobo for example there are Pathways which you are only meant to travel down during General adventuring or for sake of a side quest to take you there there were many times where I found myself getting distracted or diverted from the main story Quest I was trying to engage with by sheer accident some people might see this type of diversion as a good thing but for me it didn't feel like the fun sorted version that happens in a game like breath of the wild or Red Dead Redemption or The Witcher 3. in those games you will get constantly diverted from your initial objective because you see other things that seem worthy of your attention like a new Shrine or a tower or korok seed in breath of the wild or perhaps you see a really interesting NPC engagement in Red Dead Redemption or you'll find a monster Nest to take down in The Witcher 3. these are all interesting Dynamic events in the game world that divert your attention and that often you will decide to engage with so that you don't forget should you move on but in Jedi Survivor it often feels like you're being diverted not by curiosity but rather by confusion since often the interwoven level design can lead to retreading the same areas you've already explored and needless doubling back now I understand that this is probably an artifact of the soulsborne design methodology they were employing here but I think it shows just how much better at that world design a team like from software is it's not as easy as it looks to create levels that are intricately interwoven but that also naturally guide the player towards the next boss encounter or objective to put it simply I just feel like there were multiple times when exploring any given level where I would get lost or turned around because it wasn't clear where I was supposed to go next in Jedi Survivor not in a fun way where I'm challenged to pay more attention to the environment but rather because the levels weren't built very clearly and often were built in a confusing way I have no doubt that I wasted probably an hour or two of my total run time running around areas that I wasn't supposed to be in while trying to complete main story quests all of this is compounded by the fact that the map is still God awful somehow they didn't manage to fix much of anything about how terrible the map was in the first game and in some ways it feels as though they made it worse because these levels only got bigger and more confusing to look at one of the ways they helped this was by adding a fast travel option once you reach a meditation point this allows you to fast travel between meditation points within a given map which I think greatly reduced the total amount of time running around on the ground compared to what we had in Fallen order for example where you couldn't just fast travel but rather you needed to land on the planet and then run all the way to the end of the map to reach a late stage area that you were perhaps doubling back on later in the game after initially visiting that area early on maybe this is just subjective but really I cannot stand the mini-map in this game the Fast Travel helps navigating because you can just skip navigating but that to me is not really a fix like if you're fixed to a system being kind of crappy is letting me avoid it by using another system that just ignores it and allows you to fast travel past it that to me is just a Band-Aid fix you should still figure out what was wrong with the initial system which players are going to have to use until they unlock all of those fast travel points to me this thing is up there with the Dead Space minimap I just cannot stand it it's baffling that anybody on the dev team thought that this was passable it's borderline useless it's just terrible and listen I know it might just sound like I'm whining and complaining about the mini map for no reason I'm just nitpicking but honestly a map matters if you're gonna give one to the player to begin with in a game where there is very intricately and interwoven level design which is what is here if you're gonna give the player a map and these interwoven levels you are telling them that this is what you can use to explore these levels this is what's going to help you this is a tool and if the tool is just frankly bad I wonder why it's there at all honestly while playing Jedi Survivor again this is maybe just me but I didn't find myself pulling up the minimap hardly at all I might set a waypoint or check a general direction okay head towards that Cliff side and then run over there and eventually I would just figure it out and find it but that was more because the map was so inconvenient and clunky to use and very difficult to read that I just didn't see the use now not every world that you'll be exploring is built in the same way Kobo is probably the most intricate and complicated level and it's also by far the biggest it's the same world that has the Hub it's also a bummer because I've find it like visually probably one of the most uninteresting worlds that you travel to but what are you gonna do and as I mentioned earlier I think in general they do a pretty good job but the intricate level design leaves a good amount to be desired especially when it's compounded by the terrible map which makes navigation broadly quite difficult and again one of the tricky things about discussing all of this is that I don't know if there were certain moments where I got lost or where I traveled down some weird like very narrow pathway only to find a dead end and nothing there I don't know if there was supposed to be a mini boss that triggered there that I just didn't get to fight because the game bugged or if it honestly was just a dead end that I was supposed to return to later I don't know because I hadn't played the game before that first run through and that causes all sorts of issues as I mentioned earlier when the spawn rates and when questing glitches out like that it can just ruin your time with the game while exploring because it starts to feel like well what's the point if I'm just going to explore all these nooks and crannies and I don't know what I'm gonna find if I find anything at all and when I do find something it's lackluster or a boring hair piece or or a different paint job for my little robot buddy that I'm not going to use it just starts to feel like there's very little reason to explore because the reward for exploring is so poor or because the quality of the exploration is so poor since it's not consistent at all but one last thing I do want to give them credit for are the puzzles this time around they really did take it up a notch the puzzles you'll find while exploring the open world whether they're for side quests or main story stuff are all in my view much better designed they feel more intuitive they don't feel anywhere near as much like you're just completing busy work it's actually pretty interesting what some of these Solutions can lead you to and they'll lead you to looking at levels and areas you've previously explored very differently a lot of the time there's things that you'll find in this game where you think oh that's just part of the level design and you kind of ignore it and then later you'll get an ability where you can harness that and it opens up a whole new dimension of gameplay that is one of my favorite things about metroidvania style games and they do generally do a pretty good job with it when it comes to puzzles here for example I thought those glass tubes with the blue glowing electric thing inside of them were just set dressing and then when I realized that bd1 can fire Electro darts later in the game I had a whole new dimension opened up to me it was super cool to see and speaking of bd1 they really tried to make him more useful this time around you can complete bounties and get these Bounty pucks which you can use to then purchase different upgrades such as being able to slice various different Androids but I'll be honest I didn't find myself using him that often to slice into different robots I I unlocked a handful of these I just didn't find it that useful by the time you have the ability to set nbd1 to slice into somebody and basically take them over so they start fighting for you or at the very least stop attacking you they're gonna be so weak that they're probably one or two hits away from dying anyways so usually I'd get the little prompt send bd1 in to to slice this droidika or something and I would hit that button and then after a couple more hits while trying to juggle my my business they'd be dead and it was just kind of a waste of time so I didn't find them super useful I think they could take some tweaking but an interesting shake-up making bd1 a little different from the first game giving him some more utility that's not bad but all told Jedi Survivor is a game with which I feel pretty conflicted I feel like they did a pretty good job everything here is really good there are some really epic moments graphically when it's working it's a very good looking game it's very well put together when it's working but the technical issues for me are really really hard to look past because they plague this game in every facet of its being like from beginning to end it affects it even now after some patches with it running a little bit better looking a little bit better running at high resolutions more steady frame rates less hitching all of that's great but it still is just not where it's supposed to be and that's really frustrating it would be like if they launched Red Dead Redemption 2 at 10 FPS you'd be like this game's amazing but it's like it's just broken it's just not ready to go or if you bought like a brand new Rolls Royce but one of the tires is perpetually flat you're like I'm sure it's a great car but I just can't really enjoy it to the fullest until this is fixed until this isn't broken anymore it's been really interesting to see how gaming journalists have handled it because in general it seems like most of the reviews called it out for the technical issues but they still gave it like a nine however for me it's still conflicting because it may be a nine in a vacuum when it's working well but in reality it's not performing well it's not in a vacuum if you were to buy this with your hard-earned dollars you're not going to get the vacuumed experience in a lab where everything's working great you're just not this is why I've taken the stance though I would prefer that these reviewers and review websites give the game a penalized score for poor performance and then go back in and adjust the score once it's been fixed very similar to what IGN did back in the day with prey if you don't remember pray for them had tons of technical issues even a soft lock which the developers couldn't even fix for them before the review embargo so the guy that was reviewing prey could not finish the game before the review embargo even receiving new copies of the games swapping out computer hardware and getting new save files from the developers directly so they gave it a 4 out of 10 saying hey it's unplayable right now it it just is sorry the internet lost their minds because they're like that's not fair it's still a good game I get it but if the game's broken the game's broken offered to raise it to an eight or raise it to a nine once it's working but until then I don't think you should just let the Publishers and developers get away with it and you might be thinking did they really get away with it here there was like a lot of drama around the performance issues and I mean the truth of the matter is that yeah they kind of did get away with it according to Christopher dring who's the uh like head of gamesindustry.biz so he's somebody in the know he said that although physical sales were down which is expected because it's been years since Jedi Fallen order came out he said with the Digital Data Star Wars Jedi Survivor actually beat Fallen orders launch sales by over 30 percent and this is because survivors digital accounted almost double what Fallen orders managed and it's also important to note like Nick mentions here that Fallen orders shipped during holiday so November right before Christmas compared to April for Jedi Survivor also April in a pretty busy month and in light of technical issues and a bunch of drama I guess I should say it wasn't a busy month it's like a busy season because there's a bunch of games that were coming out soon after that like tears of the Kingdom for example which of course a lot of people were holding out for or another example would be cyberpunk 2077 which I think we can all agree launched way more broken than Jedi Survivor did but that game sold more than 13 million copies in two weeks this was posted December 22nd of 2020. they sold 13 million copies in two weeks after all of the refunds and stuff were taken into account the unfortunate Truth for us is that it seems as though when games launch super broken it doesn't really affect sales numbers in some cases like with cdpr or Ubisoft when they launch broken games that get a ton of bad press or I guess you could also say EA with Battlefront 2 they sometimes see stock repercussions just because of the bad PR but usually those stock repercussions are recovered fairly well as long as the business was healthy to begin with in the case of cyberpunk 2077 it's different because I think the stock was super overvalued going into cyberpunk's launch but that's a whole other topic for another video where I get to flex my Corporate Finance crap on all of you guys the point is it doesn't seem as though Publishers see much blowback or financial damage from launching a broken product versus a really polish and refined one it's a bummer that that's the case but so long as review sites keep giving a game that launches broken like a nine and say but it's broken it's awesome but so you know it's a nine but it's super broken as long as that keeps happening I think they're gonna keep doing this again and again and again and if you're somebody that buys a game and it is broken at launch return it just return it they'll fix it eventually and then you can re-buy it but just vote with your wallet in the meantime but circling back to Jedi Survivor itself I think the game when looked at in a vacuum is very very good in many ways it's everything we hoped that Jedi Fallen order would be and it makes Jedi fall in order feel like a sort of beta or Alpha to this whole game in a really really good way and it really gets me excited for whatever the next game looks like while there are plenty of places where you can poke holes and say oh well this doesn't work super great or the Running Animation here is not great or this boss doesn't feel super balanced or this or that or this or that yeah as people who play video games I think it's fair to gauge the overall experience when all is said and done when you've played through the whole game once or twice or however many times you've done a bunch of the side content you've seen pretty much everything the game has to offer how do you feel and for me right now I feel like it's a very good game that is plagued by issues however once those are fixed it will just be a very good game sitting there ripe for the plucking and another way I often gauge games is how badly I would like to see a sequel or see the team take another crack at it and honestly I cannot wait to see what they do with another game I mean what they've done here is already quite impressive and to see them go at it again hopefully with like Unreal Engine 5 with a little bit more QA time with a little more polish and refinement I think we could see some truly insane stuff they already upped the ante and did some crazy high budget cinematic stuff in this game and to see what they could do in a game that is built from the ground up for current gen consoles and current gen software and engines I think it could be super super cool I don't think Jedi Survivor is a game of the year Contender frankly it is probably one of the best Star Wars games we've gotten in a while but I would say that's not really saying much uh it's still very good but it's just it's not a masterpiece it takes inspiration from open world games from the soulsborne franchise from all of these different places and some of those things that it pulls it does well and then other bits it just totally fails it might do a Star Wars version of Dark Souls combat decently well or perhaps Neo combat decently well with the different stances but then they just totally blow the interwoven intricate level design and they just don't do a good job of that it's just super confusing layouts or they see big open world games like like breath of the wild and like oh we can do that big open worlds open levels that you can explore freely and find interesting tidbits guarded by Bosses that could be really really interesting take some inspiration from like Elden ring even though Elden ring probably launched so far along in development that it wasn't really an inspiration but still you get what I mean they looked at that and said okay open the world stuff with cool treasure guarded by Bosses we'll take that and then we'll just kind of do it really crappily by rewarding players with stuff they don't want and it just never quite lives up to the standard of inspiration they're taking but maybe in a sequel they figure it out maybe they listen to the feedback and they see oh people want more quantifiable like tangible rewards for exploration okay we can do that they want bosses that are a little less confusing as to whether they should be taken on now or later or they really hate this frog boss who can eat every part of my ass because he sucks completely seriously I was gonna like talk about this frog boss in a little more detail and then I was just like I don't I don't know if it's really worth it but I will just say to wrap all this up that this frog boss is terrible um the tracking is awful the AOE attacks have really wide range it's just this one needs some love maybe they've patched it by now and maybe now it's it's not terrible but at launch this thing was a nightmare but to wrap all this up I would say that Jedi Survivor probably is like the Star Wars Jedi 1.0 experience to me it makes Fallen order feel like the 0.5 beta or the 0.8 or 0.925 beta not the full version but it was still in the in the oven figuring itself out and that gets me really excited for whatever the sequel is because it finally feels like they have their feet under them and they're able to make a really high quality vast expand chance of Epic Star Wars game this was their first real crack at it almost like Arkham City After Arkham Asylum so I just can't wait to see what they do next is the next game going to be their Arkham Knight are they gonna do a really good job also sort of fumbling it or are they just gonna hit it out of the park I I don't know but I'm very excited to see let me know what you think of Jedi Survivor in the comment section below as always I am away on baby leave right now when you're seeing this video which is kind of why we're hustling to get it put out so I will look through the comments and stuff but I am on baby leave whenever you're saying this with like a one or two day old baby at home so wish me luck but thank you for watching I love all of you dearly truly thank you for watching I love you I'll see in the next video my brain is fried if you can't tell already so this is gonna go well thanks for watching I'll see in the next one hugs and kisses bye-bye

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 102,971

Keywords: luke stephens, luke stephens star wars, luke stephens jedi survivor, jedi survivor, jedi survivor critique, critique

Id: HVrHehin_3g

Length: 77min 25sec (4645 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 21 2023