Another month, another big game release, another shitty PC port. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor hit shelves yesterday and for all the tweaks, enhancements, and additional beards it boasts over its predecessor, its performance is leaving a lot to be desired. In Morgan Park’s Star Wars Jedi: Survivor review for PCG, he lamented its “unacceptable performance” but hoped a promised pre-release patch would improve things. If Steam reviews and social media are anything to go by, it hasn’t.
Jedi: Survivor currently sits at a 31% Mostly Negative review score on Steam, with legions of players posting descriptions of their many expensive, beefy rigs and how badly Jedi: Survivor manages to run on them.
“How do you push out a game with stuttering IN THE FIRST CUTSCENE!?” reads a review by a Steam user called AdamB, who says they have a “a very good NVMe drive and system, and yet this game runs terribly”. “It only took me 10 mins in a small enclosed area to get bad performance. Don’t buy this game until it’s fixed.”
Another, from Ty Rants, says they’re “Stuck between 36-41 fps regardless if anything is changed (performance mode, resolution, low, medium settings)” and notes that the game is just another in a long line of bad ports: “This now makes like the 6th AAA game to release broken on PC at launch this year alone. (**** us PC gamers right)”.
Still, at least some players are taking the opportunity to write some seriously poetic stuff. A review from Spartan says the game “Runs like my ass after taco bell”. I can only aspire to criticism so simultaneously concise and evocative.
It’s the same story across the internet. Reddit user astrangebiscuit calls Jedi: Survivor the “Worst PC port” they’ve ever seen, saying they can’t even obtain 60fps on their RTX 4080. Still, at least they managed to launch it. Some users who pre-ordered and preloaded the game were told it would take over a year to unpack it, although that might be a problem with Steam itself rather than Jedi: Survivor.
I imagine that a few months and several patches from now, Jedi: Survivor will run just fine, and cease being (in the words of a player called Santiago Santiago) “Star Wars CPU Survivor”. But it’s a rank absurdity that so many big-budget games from multi-billion dollar companies just keep releasing like this. Whether it’s the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, The Last of Us, or Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, publishers keep asking full price for games that clearly aren’t done yet. It’s got to stop.