Star Wars Jedi: Survivor launched last Friday, and depending on what platform you use, you’re going to have a wildly different experience. While the console version is fairly stable, if a little buggy, the PC version is pretty much unplayable for a lot of people. late last week apologizing for the issues and promising that they’re being addressed. I appreciate the communication and commitment to make the game it's selling actually playable, but this is a trend I’m getting extremely tired of.
I know that PC is an entirely different beast than console. The nice thing about developing games for PlayStation and Xbox is that you know if the game works on one PS5, it&rsquo꧑;s probably going to work on all of them. PC, on the other hand, isn’t really a platform at🌠 all. There is an infinite number of parts, configurations, and specs that a computer can have, and I recognize how challenging optimizing a game for every possible PC setup must be. I have sympathy for the developers who have a problem to solve, but I’m also a customer buying a product from a company - and when I buy something I expect it to work.
EA’s statement addresses some of the situations that are causing issues for PC players. Souped-up PC’s “designed for Windows 11”, in EA’s words, are struggling to run the game in Windows 10, while systems with high-end graphics cards paired with low-end processors are causing significant frame loss. What Jedi: Survivor is experiencing is often what people refer to as ‘poor optimization’. The game was designed and tested using certain hardware, and𒁏 now EA is learning that there’s a wide range of hardware it isn’t optimized for. The rest of the statement goes on to explain how complicated this problem is to solve, which I don’t doubt, but also, I don’t care.
This happens all the time, and I’m getting pretty sick of companies launching games before they're ready, then expecting us to be patient and have compassion for the poor developers who are now crunching to solve the problems. I care about those people a lot - certainly more than EA does, or it wouldn’t have put them in this position in the first place.
The fact is that this does happen all the time, but it doesn’t happen to every game. Jedi: Survivor, The Last Of Us Part 1, The Callisto Protocol, and Hogwarts Legacy are all lousy, stuttering messes on PC, but Uncharted 4, Gotham Knights, and Dead Island 2 are not. It is difficult to optimize a game for PC, but EA would like us to believe that a busted launch just comes with the territory, and it’s simply not true. Some companies are putting in the time and energy to polish their PC ports before they go on sale, and others aren’t. We should not be expected to put up with this issue when it's only an issue for some games, but not others.
No one likes delays, especially shareholders, and companies like EA have gotten way too comfortable releasing lousy products and patching them up later, after they’ve collected our moꦏney. We can appreciate how hard it is to make video games and acknowledge the work the developers are putting into them while also holding corporations responsible for delivering sub-standard products. Jedi: Survivor isn’t running poorly on PC because PC is such a complicated platform, it’s running poorly because of poor planning, mismanagement, and corporate greed that allowed the game to be sold before it was ready.