EA and Respawn Entertainment have confirmed that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is in development for the PS4 and Xbox One. Despite previously making it clear that the action adventure game was exclusive to current-gen platforms and PC to take full advantage of the updated technology, it seems the unlimited power of additional sales and piles of money have helped change a tune which once sounded absolute. This is a bad idea, and will be a version of the game not worth playing. It will look worse, run terribly, and drag down Survivor for no good reason. How do I know? Well, we only need to look back on how Fallen Order fared on old hardware.
I recently touched on how Jedi: Survivor is far more unpolished than it should be, and even now is still subject to graphical glitches and abhorrent bugs months after release. Much like with its predecessor, Respawn wasn’t given enough time to iron out the rough edges and a lack of care was evident in the final product. It’s still a great game, but half a dozen times now I have had to reload my save or relaunch the game due to an awkward bug or finding myself stuck in the terrain. This shouldn’t be a thing in a title this high profile with this much money behind it. It’s Star Wars, right?
Fallen Order was rough upon its release, and even struggled to maintain a consistent rate of performance and resolution on PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. The current-gen update that came before the release of Survivor was an improvement, but it still felt like it wasn’t pushing as far as it should have been. Textures were muddy, characters looked strange, loading times were egregious, and the whole thing lacked the prestige identity we were hoping for. The combat and exploration were fun enough to forgive such foibles, but it felt strange for a game which clearly took inspiration from Soulsborne games to feel so unresponsive.
Survivor didn’t do a huge amount to improve things, except for more robust gameplay mechanics and larger environments, many of the weird quirks remain. These will only be worse when a port tries to crowbar things onto hardware now pushing a decade old. It is not going to be pretty.
Sprawling open biomes like Koboh and Jedah are going to slow to a crawl on PS4 or Xbox One, and Cal Kestis’ momentum will also suffer hugely, thanks to non-existent textures and an approach to level design which older hardware likely won’t have the muscle to do justice. I cannot see performance faring much better either, since during tense moments of action with many enemies on screen, even the PS5 drops to single digits at times before managing to recover. Things still need to be ironed out on current hardware, let alone older consoles. It reminds me of when Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor came to PS3 and Xbox 360 for some godforsaken reason, and ran about as well as you’d expect. It wasn’t unplayable, but it wasn’t much beyond barely acceptable.
Electronic Arts is likely forcing this porting job on Respawn Entertainment for little reason other than to pick up additional players as the install base of PS5 and Xbox Series X continues to build up steam. The logic doesn’t make sense otherwise, and chances are the publisher wants Survivor to achieve the impressive sales figures of its predecessor. Even when that comes in the form of a version which is worse in every conceivable way. If and when this version does come around, do yourself a favour and don’t bother with it.