If you haven't yet heard, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor came out today and wow is it ever a mess. The game suffers from a myriad of technical issues across all platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and especially PC.
Platforms have exhibited everything from textures and objects taking upwards of 15 seconds to load into a scene, to "Performance" modes on consoles struggling hard to hit 60FPS, dropped frames and inconsistent frame times for all platforms, and then there's the PC version in particular. The PC version suffers from both the GPU and CPU of rigs not being fully utilized. Systems that are kitted out with Nvidia's top-tier RTX 4090, 32GB of system memory, and a Ryzen 9 5900X will see GPU load sit at 50%, CPU utilize just four threads at most, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor eat up a whopping 22GB out of the 24GB of total VRAM.
Even with all that hardware pushing this game, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor struggled to maintain 50FPS at just 1440p resolution. You can see this scenario play out in GameStar's YouTube video below. While the speech is in German, it's easy to see the performance metrics on the left side of the screen.
Several players have also reported that they all ran into an issue where the game will repeatedly crash when trying to load into the third world. Others have been unable to load beyond the main menu. Some have reported that the game crashes for them when trying to accept the EULA. Then, of course, there are also numerous reports about traversal stutter that we all know and love from almost every Unreal Engine 4 title that doesn't pre-compile shaders.
This is, as the French say, shit. This is pathetic to see a game from a AAA studio (Respawn Entertainment) and a AAA publisher (Electronic Arts) ship in this state across all platforms. It is especially egregious when this release is just the latest in a string of high-profile yet poorly optimized PC releases. Just the other week we saw tons of issues with the PC release of The Last of Us Part 1 from Naughty Dog and Sony. There was Forspoken in January and Hogwarts Legacy in February that each had their own terrible technical shortcomings at release.
The original Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was also a bit of a technical mess at release but it wasn't this bad. What players are experiencing with Survivor are on a whole other level.
For their part, Electronic Arts released a public statement on Twitter about the dreadful state that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor launched in.
We are aware that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor isn't performing to our standards for a percentage of our PC players, in particular those with high-end machines or certain specific configurations.
For example, players using cutting-edge, multi-threaded chipsets designed for Windows 11 were encountering problems on Windows 10, or high-end GPUs coupled with lower-performing CPUs also saw unexpected frame loss. Rest assured, we are working to address these cases quickly.
While there is no single, comprehensive solution for PC performance, the team has been working on fixes we believe will improve performance across a spectrum of configurations. We are committed to fixing these issues as soon as possible, but each patch requires significant testing to ensure we don't introduce new problems. Thanks for understanding and apologies to any of our players experiencing these issues. We will continue to monitor performance across all platforms and share update timing as soon as it is available.
For example, players using cutting-edge, multi-threaded chipsets designed for Windows 11 were encountering problems on Windows 10, or high-end GPUs coupled with lower-performing CPUs also saw unexpected frame loss. Rest assured, we are working to address these cases quickly.
While there is no single, comprehensive solution for PC performance, the team has been working on fixes we believe will improve performance across a spectrum of configurations. We are committed to fixing these issues as soon as possible, but each patch requires significant testing to ensure we don't introduce new problems. Thanks for understanding and apologies to any of our players experiencing these issues. We will continue to monitor performance across all platforms and share update timing as soon as it is available.
I just take issue with this entire statement from EA. It should have never needed to be said in the first place. This game should not have shipped in this state for the PC or even for the consoles. Electronic Arts is the publisher. They have the final say on whether or not a game should or should not be released. They, along with Respawn, have testers. They have people playing these games ahead of release. To say that nobody brought up these technical issues before this launch is possible but extremely unlikely.
Games that ship like this need to have a couple of things done to show that this isn't ok to keep doing. Publishers need to start delaying these games. They need to start listening to the developers. And both publisher and developer need to start listening to the testers that almost assuredly brought these technical issues up during pre-release testing.
Furthermore, reviewers need to start being far more vocal about the technical side of a game in addition to gameplay, myself included in this. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor reviews sit at an 86% average. Only a handful of the review summaries mention the performance issues. Plus with the exception of We Got This Covered that scored it a 3 out of 5, most outlets that mentioned the performance issues still scored the game 75% or higher. This includes PC Gamer's 80% score despite dedicating an entire section, four full paragraphs, talking about the performance issues on the PC version.
I will also freely admit that the March 2023 release of The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition suffered from its fair share of framerate and performance woes at release on both PlayStation 5 and PC. I, like many outlets, did not place enough of a negative score to those performance issues. Though I was unaware of the more dire state of the PC version, I should have taken a stronger stance with those issues I encountered on the PS5 even if they weren't as bad by comparison. I admit as much in a couple of replies to my review of the PlayStation 5 version back in March.
Publishers need to start delaying these games. Reviewers need to start calling these issues out more than is already done. And those buying games need to stop double dipping on broken releases. I've seen so many people go "I bought the game for X platform but I'm also going to buy it on Y platform because it runs better." Why would you double-dip and reward this sort of thing?
I hear second world starts out fine and then it gets REAL bad. Third world is a crapshoot whether or not you can even load it (at least on consoles) and on PC it crashes randomly.
I just tried the game tonight on my system and it never made it to 60FPS during gameplay in that very opening walk on my 5900X and 1080 Ti. Was 50-55 most of the time with CPU maxed at 20% usage and GPU maxed at 80% usage. Framerates just didn't change no matter what graphical settings I altered. I've never seen anything quite so bad as this.
The onus is also on Disney i feel, who i'm assuming would demand a delay if they cared about their IP.