Yesterday I hit the credit roll on Jedi Survivor. I’ve always thought the “production babies” screen on these games is fun and tends to illustrate the scope and timeframe required to create these experiences. In High School I saw Jurassic Park and Lord of Illusions back to back… and I have never been entirely certain if Lord of Illusions felt awful because Jurassic Park was so brilliant. Similarly, I am not sure if I am judging Jedi Survivor harshly due to the fact that I just finished Alan Wake II and it was so brilliant. While I enjoyed myself this game was a bit of a mess, and nowhere near as focused as the first game Jedi Fallen Order. This morning I am going to do my best to give a non-spoiler explanation of my thoughts.
Jedi Survivor is simultaneously too large and too small… in that, you essentially have one massive world called Koboh that allows you to explore every inch of it and a bunch of very shallow destinations. So much of the gameplay revolves around going and collecting some MacGuffin, flying across the galaxy to have a conversation, and then flying back to Koboh to do something. This cycle repeats several times during the course of this game and it ends up making the entire experience feel like a series of fetch quests. I feel like I am supposed to be in awe of being able to explore this planet and find all sorts of little diversions… that do not really matter to the game as a whole and only serve to muddy the waters when you are attempting to follow the golden path. The first game felt like it did a better job of giving you a concrete reason for going everywhere, and if you wanted to go back later and 100% that area it was up to you to do so. Fifteen hours into the game I was still being introduced to new NPCs with their own currency chase to unlock a different sort of cosmetic.
What the game does nail however is giving you these perfect vignettes of action scattered between miles of mashing the shift key in order to try and make yourself run faster through the boring bits. How clean and tight these corridors are designed, only serves to illustrate how muddy the waters really are. Jedi Fallen Order was a game made up of only the good bits, and Survivor feels like a game that has been watered down significantly in order to increase “player engagement” artificially. The game has a fast travel system, but it never seems to really matter because anywhere you might need to go… is down a path that you did not have access to previously. So ultimately you still end up spending huge amounts of your time running past landscapes that are all too familiar as you seek that one area that a new widget or ability allows you to access.
The game does however manage to set the stage for a whole slew of interesting characters that are not exclusively Human and Twilek. For example meet Skoova Stev, a delightful “Big Daddy” reference and the NPC that unlocks this entire fishing and fishtank maintenance mini-game. Someone poured a lot of love into this character and I find it a bit sad that it is entirely fluff… and does not really play any importance in the thrust of the main game as a whole. The game is littered with these loveable characters that don’t really matter and you could probably go through the entire game without ever actually encountering them. I love that they all exist, but wish they were more than glorified vendor NPCs.
The game hits the ground strong with one of the best tutorial sequences I have ever played through in one of these action combat platformer RPGs. The same is true for so many moments in the game, but the story that is attempting to weave them all together is a bit muddled. I think on some level I never really bought into the main Villain of the title. They are bad because the game tells you that they are bad and that they spend a lot of time doing “megalomanic monologues”. There is a mini-boss that is way more relatable other than the fact that they keep “playing with his food” as it were and letting you go every time you encounter them. When I finally had to kill them… I sorta felt bad because they had hitched their honor to a cardboard cutout of a villain.
Then there is the big reveal at the end… that legitimately did throw me for a loop and served to kinda make up for some of the muddled mess in the middle. The thing that I cannot entirely forgive however is that the game robs me of any agency. This is where we get into some light spoiler territory… but there are several points in the game where you must embrace the dark side in order to complete an encounter. I was given no choice save for a fail condition and having to restart that area. I am not edge lord enough to revel in Darkside Cal Kestis. I am a Paragon path player in Mass Effect, and no matter how much I might think I am going to do a renegade playthrough I always shift away from it quickly because it “feels bad”. Being the villain feels bad. Turning to the Darkside even for a moment… feels bad and feels like a betrayal of the character I have been building in my mind.
Do I think Jedi Survivor is a bad game? No, not at all. Do I think it doesn’t really deserve to be on any “games of the year” lists? Probably. It has some great moments but the muddy middle serves to tarnish everything that was great about the experience for me. It was a “mid” game for me, and aggressively so… but it was still something that I felt was worth finishing up. If you enjoyed the first game, then I would suggest you eventually pick this one up as well. I would probably wait for it to go on sale however as it was nowhere near as impressive as some of the other titles from this year. I still love Cal Kestis and the characters that are being woven together in this world. I still hope at some point these characters cross over into the Mandoverse that is being built on Disney Plus. It would be a crying shame for such a great actor as Cameron Monaghan to not get a live-action Star Wars debut.
Now that I have talked about the story and gameplay… let me dive into the other thing that harmed my experience. This fucking screen shows up every time you launch the game. You would think that once the shaders were compiled and cached… you would never see this screen ever again. However, you would be wrong and it takes a couple of minutes to load through this screen every time I launch the game. Worse than this is the fact that the game can only seem to run for about an hour before locking up and crashing to the desktop. If you happen to get a crash during one of the many sequences that do not checkpoint your progress in the form of a save file… you will have to repeat whatever nonsense you were doing before the crash. This meant that a lot of my gameplay was trying to log out every hour and reload the game in order to forestall a crash…. only to see this damned shader caching screen again. I get that I am a weirdo in that I want to play this with a mouse and keyboard… but I do feel punished for not just playing it on a console.
The game has a lot of really cool things going for it, and I know that I will be picking up the next game whenever it releases because you sort of end at the midpoint of a larger story arc. This is the “Empire Strikes Back” of the Respawn Jedi trilogy. While we end on a more hopeful note than Empire did… there is definitely a lot of baggage that our crew is going to be sorting out. I am “bought in” to the franchise and the characters at this point, and I will be here for the entire run however long that lasts. I hope however that they return to something closer to the first game for the third. This type of story was better served by a tighter style of gameplay as opposed to the more open-world experience. I get that this is odd since I never liked any of the Assassin’s Creed games prior to them attempting to replicate the Witcher 3 format… but I feel like it just does not work for the Respawn Jedi series.
Did I completely miss the mark? Did you play it and love the faffing about? Drop me a line below.
The post Jedi Survivor Final Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we start off with a carryover topic from last week and talk a bit about Star Wars Shatterpoint. From there Ash tells us about the Furry Child Soldier game… better known as Fuga: Melodies of Steel 2. Bel talks a bit about the Overwatch 2 PVE content that is being sold for $15 after the original PVE expansion was canceled. He also talks a bit about the concerns brewing about a proper cash shop opening in World of Warcraft. Tam tells us about this delightful-sounding game called I Was a Teenage Exocolonist before Bel brings down the show with talk of the current Corporate Internet Apocalypse. We talk a bit about the Reddit Blackout and Streamers abandoning Twitch. Finally, Bel and Ash talk a bit about how nonsensically good the Spriggan that Grace told us about is in Last Epoch.
Good Morning Friends! I hope this week is excellent. Last week was a kick in the teeth as far as weeks go, so by the time I reached Friday evening I was just too exhausted to start anything new and unfamiliar. So as a result I did not get engaged in Star Wars Jedi Survivor until Saturday morning, as I wanted to start the game with fresh eyes and a good perspective on life. I am playing on PC and I had a really good experience playing at 1440p and at the default settings which are a mix of High and Epic. I did not have any significant instances of slowdown other than one place on the first real planet where there is just a massive volume of particle effects.
That is absolutely not the case for everyone. Digital Foundry who obsesses about PC detail and performance has decreed this the worst Triple-A PC Port of 2023. When we recorded the show on Saturday night I found out that Tam was bit by this problem. My system is fairly beefy with an 11th gen Intel i7, RTX 3080, and 16 GB of ram… but so is his with a Ryzen 7, RTX 3070, and 128 GB of ram. Both are systems that should have run the game at 60 fps at 1440p without any issues. It did on my machine but it absolutely did not on Tam’s which led him to refund the game on Steam and pick it up on the PlayStation 5. Basically, I am throwing this out there so if you are on the fence… maybe wait a bit on the PC version of the game.
When you boot up the game, it is going to give you a warning message stating that the game is best played with a Controller. If you are most comfortable with a keyboard and mouse, then I would ignore this completely. I remember the first game having this warning as well, and I took its advice and bounced off the game pretty quickly. It was not until I stuck to my guns and played the game with my more greatly preferred mouse and keyboard input that I made it all the way through the game. Essentially I am telling you to take this with a grain of salt. There is one thing that frustrates me greatly though. While you technically can change some of your keybindings on the PC, you can’t change all of them. For example, I want to change dodge to something other than tab… because that feels like a keybinding decided upon by Joe in Accounting. So if you play with Mouse and Keyboard there are going to be some things you are just stuck with.
At this point, I don’t want to talk a ton about anything that would venture into the territory of spoilers. The game is gorgeous and manages to do something that so few games do. It allows you to pick up effectively where you left off without having some narrative device that caused you to forget everything you learned in the previous game. You effectively start with all of the movement and traversal abilities that you had at the end of Fallen Order and rapidly add a few new tricks to your repertoire including apparently the Jedi Mind Trick. The last bit I have admittedly only used once so far, and it was during a speech dialog, but I can influence animals with the force to either calm them or agitate them and get them to attack baddies.
The Tutorial Planet takes place on Coruscant, giving us an amazing romp through the lower levels of the machine city. After completing that mission arc and refreshing yourself on all of the movement, you are set loose on a much more open planet allowing you to explore fairly freely. This gives the game a bit of a Breath of the Wild feeling, though the exploration is not quite THAT free but you do eventually unlock the use of animals as gliders. You also open up a new lightsaber stance which is the ability to break apart your lightsaber into two sabers and fight dual-wielding style. This has absolutely been my jam so far and I am investing heavily in the ability to throw my sabers at enemies.
There are way more friendly folks scattered throughout the world that you can help out. There is also the introduction of Boglings, which serve a similar function to the golden birds from Ghost of Tsushima in that they occasionally lead you to the next objective. You can of course pet the Boglings which is super pure. The detail of the world is so much better than in the previous game. Fallen Order suffered from the problem of several tunnels and areas of work looking pretty similar to other areas. I know this was really bad on Kashyyyk, and caused me to get completely turned round at several points. Navigating here by visual landmark seems to work much better for me at least, but they have also improved the 3D mapping system if you need to lean on that instead.
Over the weekend I played all of the way through the Tutorial planet and unlocked everything that I think I can currently from the second planet. This led me onto the third planet… which frustrated me to the point of shutting down the game and going back to Path of Exile for a while. This third planet is “the floor is lava” the planet, and is comprised of shale piles that you can’t walk up without sliding down… and some sort of sandworm-like creature that can detect your movement and jumps up from the ground to eat you. Which means you have to do a series of annoying wall runs and duck from shelter to shelter while traversing the early areas. I opted to bail out because I did not want to tarnish the great experience of that second planet. I am sure I will return to it at some point this week and deal with the frustrations.
Probably my favorite aspect of the new game is that I can finally have a beard. Look this is important to me. I also can fiddle a bit with different styles of gear and assign some basic color options. My hope is as the game continues there are some really cool-looking options. What I really want is something akin to Obi-Wan’s Jedi Battle Armor from the prequel series. I have a few pieces of tactical armor that I have picked up but nothing quite that grand. As far as the story goes, it isn’t terribly interesting as of yet but does seem like it is going to bridge the gap between the Kenobi Series/Rogue One era of Star Wars and the burgeoning High Republic era. Nothing really has grasped me though story wise other than the desire to “get the band back together”, as all of the characters went their separate ways at the end of the first game.
I think that is probably all I will talk about for now. Expect more attempts at spoiler-free updates on my progress. If you were going to play this on PC… maybe wait for a patch for two until someone like Digital Foundry calls the all-clear.
The post Jedi Survivor Early Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
This show was one of those times when random discussions that we did not plan happened. Firstly we had a bit of an impromptu discussion about the Dungeons and Dragons movie which also led to some non-movie discussion. From there Bel talks about his life as a Path of Exile Vendor as he has become increasingly immersed in the trade market as a seller. Tam and Bel talk quite a bit about Jedi Survivor and how it is a more open game and might even draw some connections to Breath of the Wild. Kodra talks about Lone Fungus and Ash about Everspace 2. From there we fall into some unplanned discussions about how games seem to be moving away from Holiday Season release schedules, and then we get off on this tangent about the Gameboy.
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