Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is being review-bombed on Steam as a ‘total crap’ PC port
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor has launched in a dire state on PC, and fans are flocking to Steam to review-bomb the game.
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Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is off to a bad start. The game launched to Mostly Negative reviews on Steam, with only 34% of the over 2,000 reviews being positive. That’s around the same level as the disastrous The Last of Us Part One PC port released in March, and it’s for the same reason: poor performance.
As pre-release footage showed, the game struggles to maintain a consistent frame rate even on a system equipped with an RTX 4090. Steam reviews claim frame rates around 30 frames per second (fps) at 1440p with an RTX 3090, and many are saying the game consumes upwards of 19GB of video memory with ray tracing turned on.
Low performance, particularly with ray tracing turned on, seems to be the key issue in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. The game includes AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2, but the high VRAM requirements seem to be leading to crashes and stutters regardless of the upscaling feature.
Another common issue plaguing users is traversal stutter. Like the previous game, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Survivor is built with Unreal Engine 4. Going between areas, especially on a large planet like Koboh, results in a massive dip in frame rate while the game struggles to load in new assets.
In our Star Wars Jedi: Survivor review, we praised the game and the experience it offered on consoles, though noted the minor technical issues still present on the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 versions. The PC release only seems to amplify these problems.
We’ve been testing the early sections of the game with an RTX 4090 and Core i9-13900K and can confirm relatively low performance and consistent traversal stutter. We’ll need to continue testing the larger areas of the game to find out if the issues worsen as the game continues.
Developer Respawn promised a day-one patch to solve major issues, but it seems the team didn’t include some key optimizations. The developer is saying it plans to release patches that address bugs, improve performance, and add more accessibility features “in the weeks ahead.”
Cal’s newest journey in a galaxy far, far away has begun and we’re excited for you to experience it!
Our first patch will arrive on launch day across all platforms. In the weeks ahead, we’ll deploy patches that will:
– Fix bugs
– Improve performance
– Add more accessibility… pic.twitter.com/pUtyoGopP5
— EA Star Wars (@EAStarWars) April 26, 2023
Since the onslaught of negative reviews, Respawn as issued a statement saying it will look into the state of the PC port:
Unfortunately, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor isn’t an isolated incident. It joins a long list of games that have experienced performance issues on PC that have released this year, including Hogwarts Legacy, Returnal, and Resident Evil 4 Remake. The common thread between them all is crashes and stuttering due to high VRAM requirements.
This new wave of games has pushed VRAM requirements far above what we expected in years past, with some titles consuming 16GB or more with ray tracing turned on. That leads even high-end graphics cards like the RTX 4080 to struggle to maintain a consistent frame rate.
Short of simply having more VRAM on tap, this issue mainly falls in the developer’s lap to find ways to save on VRAM requirements or wind down the scope of the game. As it stands now, it’s hard to trust that most major PC releases will launch in a playable state, even on the most expensive PC money can buy.
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Jacob Roach is a writer covering computing and gaming at Digital Trends. After realizing Crysis wouldn't run on a laptop, he started building his own gaming PCs and hasn't looked back since. Before Digital Trends, he contributed content to Forbes Advisor, Business Insider, and PC Invasion, covering PC components, monitors, and peripherals.
Outside of tinkering with his PC and tracking down every achievement in the latest games, Jacob spends his time playing and recording music. Before switching to writing full time, he worked as a recording engineer in St. Louis, Missouri.
How Unreal Engine 5 is tackling the biggest problem in PC gaming
During its State of Unreal address at GDC 2023, Epic announced a wide-ranging suite of features for Unreal Engine 5.2. But perhaps the most important feature coming in the updated engine doesn't relate to lighting, geometry detail, or ray tracing. It's all about performance.
Unreal Engine games, rightly or wrongly, have been associated with stuttering and hitches over the past few years. With the new release, Epic is finally tackling the problem head-on, so I thought it was high time to break down why Unreal games so commonly show stutter, what Epic is doing to solve the problem, and when we can expect to see those efforts show up in new releases.
Remember the stutter
These frame time spikes manifest as severe stutters in Gotham Knights.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor will now release in April following delay
EA and Respawn Entertainment need a bit more time to create Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, so the game has been delayed until April 28.
Originally set to release on March 17 at The Game Awards 2022, this delay pushes the highly anticipated Star Wars game back by more than a month. In a tweet explaining the delay, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor director Stig Asmussen explains that the game is "content complete," but needs more time to "enhance performance, stability, polish, and most importantly, the player experience." Ultimately, he believes this six-week delay will allow the development team "to hit the Respawn quality bar, provide the team the time they need, and achieve the level of polish our fans deserve." You can read the full message in the tweet below:
https://twitter.com/eastarwars/status/1620527593580806145
Thankfully, a six-week delay isn't that lengthy in the video game industry, so Star Wars fans will only have to wait a little while longer to experience Cal Kestis' next adventure. Today hasn't been the best for Respawn Entertainment fans, though, as the developer also announced it would shut down the mobile version of Apex Legends.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is the sequel to 2019's Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, a single-player action-adventure game that followed the journey of former Padawan Cal Kestis between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. This sequel takes place five years after that game, with Cal Kestis actor Cameron Monaghan telling Digital Trends that the narrative has an "emotionally complicated center where we’re exploring some challenging questions." Hopefully, that all makes this game worth the wait.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor now releases for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on April 28.
Why Cameron Monaghan wanted a ‘darker’ Cal Kestis in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
When we first met Cal Kestis in 2019’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, he was just a young Padawan. A redheaded kid draped in an unflattering poncho, Cal would grow into a full-blown Jedi by the end of the game. It was a classic Star Wars arc in video game form, but one that left players wanting more. It’s great that we got to see that growth, but who could resist the idea of a sequel where his newly awakened powers would be fully unleashed?
Cameron Monaghan, who reprises his role as Cal in next year’s Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, had that same itch. The Gotham and Shameless star was already thinking about where Cal could go next before Fallen Order was even out. Monaghan’s ambitions weren’t focused so much on what kinds of cool lightsaber tricks Cal could pick up between games, but rather how to bring more complexity to one of Star Wars’ newest Jedis.
“In the first game, he had a naivete and a wide-eyed nature that I love about Cal,” Monaghan tells Digital Trends. “But I think tha,t situationally, if you’re in such a desperate place for so many years and fighting and being a soldier and a tool for resistance, at some point, it’s going to start to change the way you see the world around you.”
I sat down with Cameron Monaghan ahead of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s grand reveal at this year’s Game Awards. The actor explained how Cal has changed in the five-year time skip between games and shared fresh details on the sequel’s new companion character, Bode Akuna. Monaghan explained the balancing act that comes with trying to stay focused on a character’s personal journey when working within a much larger, expanded universe -- and he offered some praise for Andor too.
Back before a sequel was greenlit, when you were waiting to see if Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order would get one, what did you want to do with Cal Kestis if you got a second run with him?
When we were making the first game, we had inklings that we would maybe want to do more with it if it was successful. I’ll never forget when we had the wrap party for the first game and Stig Asmussen, the head of Respawn, was like, “What do you want to do?” I had this crazy moment where I was like, “Wow, I really wish I was more prepared for this!’”
But I was able to give a broad strokes answer: I wanted to see Cal a number of years on from the first game and see him mature and have a different outlook. A more complex, darker, more challenged character. In the first game, he had a naivete and a wide-eyed nature that I love about Cal. But I think that, situationally, if you’re in such a desperate place for so many years and fighting and being a soldier and a tool for resistance, at some point, it’s going to start to change the way you see the world around you. I wanted to explore what that looked like for Cal.
He’s been through some stuff, and I think over the last two years, we’ve all been through some stuff, man!
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