This one is going to be frustrating, but it has to be done.

Jedi Fallen Order was easily one of the best games I’d played in 2019. Respawn diverged from their FPS roots to make a third-person action-adventure game with souls-like elements in this beloved universe, and achieved that with flying colours. It had fun and challenging combat, a dense and diverse set of planets that were rewarding to explore, and a great story that expanded the universe around the Order 66 era without overly relying on fan-favourite cameos. While it could retrospectively be seen as ‘baby’s-first souls-like’, especially as that genre and my understanding of it has considerably evolved in the past four years, it nonetheless remains one of the best Star Wars games ever made.

It was a game with a quality bar high enough where I knew I would buy and play its sequel without any hesitation. I barely looked at any footage going into this, as all Respawn needed to do was to make a bigger and better game that retains what made the original great, and it would comfortably rank as one of the best titles I’d played in its release year. Judging the game in absence of any technical points, Jedi Survivor has easily hit that mark.

It has the same great combat as the original with two additional stances, both of which have a unique function, especially the blaster stance which became my go-to alongside the single lightsaber. Cal’s traversal abilities have been considerably expanded, making the experience of simply moving about these spaces a super engaging time. The scale of the game’s two biggest planets is amazing, each offering plenty of extra hours of content even beyond the main campaign.

My favourite part of Survivor has to go to the story however, as this is truly one of the best Star Wars narratives ever told across any medium, telling a deeply personal journey for Cal that also has stakes for the future of the galaxy. It boasts great performances from all the cast, a small but highly nuanced group of characters, and plenty of twists and turns that have weight to them. Aside from its lesser visual diversity from the original and its lower overall difficulty outside of a handful of encounters, it’s an easy 9/10 experience, and I cannot wait to see how this trilogy concludes.

It is therefore incredibly disappointing that this amazing game is attached to one of the worst PC ports I’ve ever had to endure. In spite of many patches and the game’s visual fidelity not being far beyond other titles on the market, Jedi Survivor’s optimization remains very poor, with issues prevalent enough that it has sullied my overall experience substantially.

My full PC specs are on my profile, but I would say the relevant parts are:
- GPU – AMD Radeon RX 6700XT with 12GB of VRAM
- CPU – Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core Processor
- RAM – 16GB DDR4
- I installed this game on my external SSD.

Now this isn’t the most powerful machine on the market by any means, but it can outpace the current-generation consoles, and has successfully managed to run equally or more demanding releases this year than Jedi Survivor without many issues. To list a few examples, Returnal, Starfield, Alan Wake 2, and The Last of Us Part 1 (its July Build) all ran at 1080p 60fps on high/ultra settings with very little in the way of performance issues to speak of, despite many of them looking better than Jedi Survivor. So this PC is capable of handling modern releases at demanding settings, leaving this game as the exception in terms of its optimization.

In terms of the specific issues I faced:
- Problems begin with Jedi Survivor before I’ve even loaded into the game. The logos are somehow presented at single-digit frame rates, and shader caching occurs every single time I boot up the game, taking at least 5-10 minutes to complete every time. While this is a feature of many modern releases, it typically only happens the first time a game is loaded. I wasted so much time on this screen, evidently gaining little as there is essentially nothing to show for it in terms of performance.
- Once this is finally completed, the game will take another 2-3 minutes to load no matter the size of the area I’m loading into. The other games I listed require a minute or less to get into the action; Jedi Survivor totals to around 7-10 minutes when all’s said and done.
- When the game has finally loaded, the first 3-5 minutes of play always involve a severe level of stuttering down to single-digit frame rates in the worst-case scenario. Combat is essentially a no-go while this is happening, so I typically spend even more time waiting around to avoid having to subject myself to a PowerPoint presentation.
- Even when this stuttering is finally resolved, the game will not maintain a good frame rate in many segments of these maps. The smaller planets and enclosed areas are usually fine, thankfully hitting 60fps pretty consistently, but the biggest planets, namely Jedha and especially Koboh, drop down to 40fps and even 30fps or below when talking about the central outpost on that latter planet. There is no justifiable visual fidelity or environmental detail reason for these areas to have poor frame rates even on Medium settings.
- Jedi Survivor is a gigantic resource hog, being one of the few games that slows every other program on my PC down simply by having it open. While I typically use my second monitor to have chats and websites open while playing a game, this was a no-go while playing Survivor as tabbing out of the application would take forever, and the other programs would run very slowly even when tabbed out. Upon closing the game, I was typically forced to use Task Manager because it took far too long to fully shut down by itself, and of course the game negatively affected the other programs I had open until it was terminated.

So yeah, it’s pretty bad. I would say that over half of the time I tracked playing this game involved dealing with at least one of these issues, most commonly the insane loading times and the poor frame rate. All of these issues I documented led to me putting the game down in late June, and practically nothing had changed by the time I returned to stomach through it and get it off my SSD in December. While I did literally everything in Fallen Order, I left a decent amount of non-achievement required side content in Survivor as I just couldn’t deal with this port any longer.

The funniest thing of all is that Respawn are actually trying to port this to the last-gen consoles. People joke about their devices blowing up when loading a demanding game, but I really don’t think that’s far from reality when discussing the likely outcome of those 10-year-old devices running this technical mess. I can only hope that it could lead to Respawn delivering performance improvements across all platforms, but I find that highly unlikely.

If your PC is about as powerful as mine and you have a high tolerance for loading and poor performance, maybe I could recommend it on sale. Hopefully, your PC will be more powerful than mine, and if it isn’t, may Vader have mercy on your soul. Fingers crossed that Respawn figure out how to optimize Unreal Engine by the time Jedi 3 rolls around, as it will be truly unforgiveable if this potentially incredible trilogy is let down by poorly optimized releases.

[h1] And the worst PC port award of 2023 goes to… [/h1] This one is going to be frustrating, but it has to be done. Jedi Fallen Order was easily one of the best games I’d played in 2019. Respawn diverged from their FPS roots to make a third-person action-adventure game with souls-like elements in this beloved universe, and achieved that with flying colours. It had fun and challenging combat, a dense and diverse set of planets that were rewarding to explore, and a great story that expanded the universe around the Order 66 era without overly relying on fan-favourite cameos. While it could retrospectively be seen as ‘baby’s-first souls-like’, especially as that genre and my understanding of it has considerably evolved in the past four years, it nonetheless remains one of the best Star Wars games ever made. It was a game with a quality bar high enough where I knew I would buy and play its sequel without any hesitation. I barely looked at any footage going into this, as all Respawn needed to do was to make a bigger and better game that retains what made the original great, and it would comfortably rank as one of the best titles I’d played in its release year. Judging the game in absence of any technical points, Jedi Survivor has easily hit that mark. It has the same great combat as the original with two additional stances, both of which have a unique function, especially the blaster stance which became my go-to alongside the single lightsaber. Cal’s traversal abilities have been considerably expanded, making the experience of simply moving about these spaces a super engaging time. The scale of the game’s two biggest planets is amazing, each offering plenty of extra hours of content even beyond the main campaign. My favourite part of Survivor has to go to the story however, as this is truly one of the best Star Wars narratives ever told across any medium, telling a deeply personal journey for Cal that also has stakes for the future of the galaxy. It boasts great performances from all the cast, a small but highly nuanced group of characters, and plenty of twists and turns that have weight to them. Aside from its lesser visual diversity from the original and its lower overall difficulty outside of a handful of encounters, it’s an easy 9/10 experience, and I cannot wait to see how this trilogy concludes. It is therefore incredibly disappointing that this amazing game is attached to one of the worst PC ports I’ve ever had to endure. In spite of many patches and the game’s visual fidelity not being far beyond other titles on the market, Jedi Survivor’s optimization remains very poor, with issues prevalent enough that it has sullied my overall experience substantially. My full PC specs are on my profile, but I would say the relevant parts are: - GPU – AMD Radeon RX 6700XT with 12GB of VRAM - CPU – Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core Processor - RAM – 16GB DDR4 - I installed this game on my external SSD. Now this isn’t the most powerful machine on the market by any means, but it can outpace the current-generation consoles, and has successfully managed to run equally or more demanding releases this year than Jedi Survivor without many issues. To list a few examples, Returnal, Starfield, Alan Wake 2, and The Last of Us Part 1 (its July Build) all ran at 1080p 60fps on high/ultra settings with very little in the way of performance issues to speak of, despite many of them looking better than Jedi Survivor. So this PC is capable of handling modern releases at demanding settings, leaving this game as the exception in terms of its optimization. In terms of the specific issues I faced: - Problems begin with Jedi Survivor before I’ve even loaded into the game. The logos are somehow presented at single-digit frame rates, and shader caching occurs every single time I boot up the game, taking at least 5-10 minutes to complete every time. While this is a feature of many modern releases, it typically only happens the first time a game is loaded. I wasted so much time on this screen, evidently gaining little as there is essentially nothing to show for it in terms of performance. - Once this is finally completed, the game will take another 2-3 minutes to load no matter the size of the area I’m loading into. The other games I listed require a minute or less to get into the action; Jedi Survivor totals to around 7-10 minutes when all’s said and done. - When the game has finally loaded, the first 3-5 minutes of play always involve a severe level of stuttering down to single-digit frame rates in the worst-case scenario. Combat is essentially a no-go while this is happening, so I typically spend even more time waiting around to avoid having to subject myself to a PowerPoint presentation. - Even when this stuttering is finally resolved, the game will not maintain a good frame rate in many segments of these maps. The smaller planets and enclosed areas are usually fine, thankfully hitting 60fps pretty consistently, but the biggest planets, namely Jedha and especially Koboh, drop down to 40fps and even 30fps or below when talking about the central outpost on that latter planet. There is no justifiable visual fidelity or environmental detail reason for these areas to have poor frame rates even on Medium settings. - Jedi Survivor is a gigantic resource hog, being one of the few games that slows every other program on my PC down simply by having it open. While I typically use my second monitor to have chats and websites open while playing a game, this was a no-go while playing Survivor as tabbing out of the application would take forever, and the other programs would run very slowly even when tabbed out. Upon closing the game, I was typically forced to use Task Manager because it took far too long to fully shut down by itself, and of course the game negatively affected the other programs I had open until it was terminated. So yeah, it’s pretty bad. I would say that over half of the time I tracked playing this game involved dealing with at least one of these issues, most commonly the insane loading times and the poor frame rate. All of these issues I documented led to me putting the game down in late June, and practically nothing had changed by the time I returned to stomach through it and get it off my SSD in December. While I did literally everything in Fallen Order, I left a decent amount of non-achievement required side content in Survivor as I just couldn’t deal with this port any longer. The funniest thing of all is that Respawn are actually trying to port this to the last-gen consoles. People joke about their devices blowing up when loading a demanding game, but I really don’t think that’s far from reality when discussing the likely outcome of those 10-year-old devices running this technical mess. I can only hope that it could lead to Respawn delivering performance improvements across all platforms, but I find that highly unlikely. If your PC is about as powerful as mine and you have a high tolerance for loading and poor performance, maybe I could recommend it on sale. Hopefully, your PC will be more powerful than mine, and if it isn’t, may Vader have mercy on your soul. Fingers crossed that Respawn figure out how to optimize Unreal Engine by the time Jedi 3 rolls around, as it will be truly unforgiveable if this potentially incredible trilogy is let down by poorly optimized releases.