Jedi Survivor Final Thoughts

Yesterday I hit the credit roll on Jedi Survivor. I’ve always thought the “production babies” screen on these games is fun and tends to illustrate the scope and timeframe required to create these experiences. In High School I saw Jurassic Park and Lord of Illusions back to back… and I have never been entirely certain if Lord of Illusions felt awful because Jurassic Park was so brilliant. Similarly, I am not sure if I am judging Jedi Survivor harshly due to the fact that I just finished Alan Wake II and it was so brilliant. While I enjoyed myself this game was a bit of a mess, and nowhere near as focused as the first game Jedi Fallen Order. This morning I am going to do my best to give a non-spoiler explanation of my thoughts.

Jedi Survivor is simultaneously too large and too small… in that, you essentially have one massive world called Koboh that allows you to explore every inch of it and a bunch of very shallow destinations. So much of the gameplay revolves around going and collecting some MacGuffin, flying across the galaxy to have a conversation, and then flying back to Koboh to do something. This cycle repeats several times during the course of this game and it ends up making the entire experience feel like a series of fetch quests. I feel like I am supposed to be in awe of being able to explore this planet and find all sorts of little diversions… that do not really matter to the game as a whole and only serve to muddy the waters when you are attempting to follow the golden path. The first game felt like it did a better job of giving you a concrete reason for going everywhere, and if you wanted to go back later and 100% that area it was up to you to do so. Fifteen hours into the game I was still being introduced to new NPCs with their own currency chase to unlock a different sort of cosmetic.

What the game does nail however is giving you these perfect vignettes of action scattered between miles of mashing the shift key in order to try and make yourself run faster through the boring bits. How clean and tight these corridors are designed, only serves to illustrate how muddy the waters really are. Jedi Fallen Order was a game made up of only the good bits, and Survivor feels like a game that has been watered down significantly in order to increase “player engagement” artificially. The game has a fast travel system, but it never seems to really matter because anywhere you might need to go… is down a path that you did not have access to previously. So ultimately you still end up spending huge amounts of your time running past landscapes that are all too familiar as you seek that one area that a new widget or ability allows you to access.

The game does however manage to set the stage for a whole slew of interesting characters that are not exclusively Human and Twilek. For example meet Skoova Stev, a delightful “Big Daddy” reference and the NPC that unlocks this entire fishing and fishtank maintenance mini-game. Someone poured a lot of love into this character and I find it a bit sad that it is entirely fluff… and does not really play any importance in the thrust of the main game as a whole. The game is littered with these loveable characters that don’t really matter and you could probably go through the entire game without ever actually encountering them. I love that they all exist, but wish they were more than glorified vendor NPCs.

The game hits the ground strong with one of the best tutorial sequences I have ever played through in one of these action combat platformer RPGs. The same is true for so many moments in the game, but the story that is attempting to weave them all together is a bit muddled. I think on some level I never really bought into the main Villain of the title. They are bad because the game tells you that they are bad and that they spend a lot of time doing “megalomanic monologues”. There is a mini-boss that is way more relatable other than the fact that they keep “playing with his food” as it were and letting you go every time you encounter them. When I finally had to kill them… I sorta felt bad because they had hitched their honor to a cardboard cutout of a villain.

Then there is the big reveal at the end… that legitimately did throw me for a loop and served to kinda make up for some of the muddled mess in the middle. The thing that I cannot entirely forgive however is that the game robs me of any agency. This is where we get into some light spoiler territory… but there are several points in the game where you must embrace the dark side in order to complete an encounter. I was given no choice save for a fail condition and having to restart that area. I am not edge lord enough to revel in Darkside Cal Kestis. I am a Paragon path player in Mass Effect, and no matter how much I might think I am going to do a renegade playthrough I always shift away from it quickly because it “feels bad”. Being the villain feels bad. Turning to the Darkside even for a moment… feels bad and feels like a betrayal of the character I have been building in my mind.

Do I think Jedi Survivor is a bad game? No, not at all. Do I think it doesn’t really deserve to be on any “games of the year” lists? Probably. It has some great moments but the muddy middle serves to tarnish everything that was great about the experience for me. It was a “mid” game for me, and aggressively so… but it was still something that I felt was worth finishing up. If you enjoyed the first game, then I would suggest you eventually pick this one up as well. I would probably wait for it to go on sale however as it was nowhere near as impressive as some of the other titles from this year. I still love Cal Kestis and the characters that are being woven together in this world. I still hope at some point these characters cross over into the Mandoverse that is being built on Disney Plus. It would be a crying shame for such a great actor as Cameron Monaghan to not get a live-action Star Wars debut.

Now that I have talked about the story and gameplay… let me dive into the other thing that harmed my experience. This fucking screen shows up every time you launch the game. You would think that once the shaders were compiled and cached… you would never see this screen ever again. However, you would be wrong and it takes a couple of minutes to load through this screen every time I launch the game. Worse than this is the fact that the game can only seem to run for about an hour before locking up and crashing to the desktop. If you happen to get a crash during one of the many sequences that do not checkpoint your progress in the form of a save file… you will have to repeat whatever nonsense you were doing before the crash. This meant that a lot of my gameplay was trying to log out every hour and reload the game in order to forestall a crash…. only to see this damned shader caching screen again. I get that I am a weirdo in that I want to play this with a mouse and keyboard… but I do feel punished for not just playing it on a console.

The game has a lot of really cool things going for it, and I know that I will be picking up the next game whenever it releases because you sort of end at the midpoint of a larger story arc. This is the “Empire Strikes Back” of the Respawn Jedi trilogy. While we end on a more hopeful note than Empire did… there is definitely a lot of baggage that our crew is going to be sorting out. I am “bought in” to the franchise and the characters at this point, and I will be here for the entire run however long that lasts. I hope however that they return to something closer to the first game for the third. This type of story was better served by a tighter style of gameplay as opposed to the more open-world experience. I get that this is odd since I never liked any of the Assassin’s Creed games prior to them attempting to replicate the Witcher 3 format… but I feel like it just does not work for the Respawn Jedi series.

Did I completely miss the mark? Did you play it and love the faffing about? Drop me a line below.

With Liquid Hot Magma

One of the problems with finishing up a truly phenomenal game… is that it is occasionally hard to move past it. I had decided that I would be in a bit of a narrative phase given that I am mostly done with the Trials of the Ancestor league in Path of Exile and that I have a few weeks until the launch of the next league on December 8th. I have a list of games I wanted to play this year… but never quite got around to it. Top of the list was Alan Wake II of course, and I have now finished it… but last night I had some trouble easing into the next adventure.

Another game this year that I was deeply looking forward to was Jedi Survivor. However much like Fallen Order… I floundered a bit when I first started playing it. I decided that I would go after this as my next game to finish, and I went back and forth about whether or not it was a good idea to start from scratch. I only made it a few planets into the game and I think it would have been easy enough to retrace my steps, but instead, I decided to essentially wing it and just keep pushing forward. Thankfully I had never actually uninstalled the game and didn’t need to bother with trying to track down my save games.

I apparently had left off on a phase where I was forced to do a lot of platforming and careful gliding between platforms over a giant pit of magma. Luckily my muscle memory came back pretty quickly and the puzzle I was being asked to solve involved something brand new to me so I could learn on the go. The first thing I did was rebind a number of keys because hitting 2 and 3 on the Hotbar was a bit awkward while also having to navigate myself with WASD. I moved them down to 7 and 8 which are way more comfortable for me to hit on the keypad on the side of my g600 MMO mouse. There are probably a few other things that I want to shift around a bit. I know that this is a game designed for a controller but I fought through playing it with a mouse and keyboard for the first game and I will struggle forth again because the actual combat feels way more comfortable for me with a mouse.

I did not make it terribly far last night, but I did complete the series of puzzles that involved the gaping chasms… collected some data and am now about to face off against some Imperials as I attempt to buy folks time to evacuate a safe house. I did manage to pick up some gun parts and crafted something a bit more to my taste as far as blasters go. That is probably my favorite part about these games is collecting bits and bobs and crafting my own lightsaber and now blaster. I am hoping as I go forward with the game I will begin to feel it. At the moment I am nowhere near as connected to this particular story as I was the first one.

I am sure I will get into the swing of things as I go… but honestly, I feel like this game might be too open-ended. I know that is ironic considering how much I have praised other games for having a big explorable world… but I am not sure it really serves the story here. The set pieces are wonderful, but I gotta say I enjoyed the opening scenes on Coruscant far more than I have these wide-open planets. I think Fallen Order benefited by having a fairly linear story that was being told. Sure there were hidden places to find along the golden path… but there was still a very clear golden path to follow. It feels a bit like a Ubisoft collect all the things game… which I can’t say is necessarily a good thing. I’m hoping once I get engaged in the plot thread I will ignore this and just push forward.

The other big game that I am hoping to make a dent in during this break is Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty. If I manage to wrap these two up I will be pretty happy, but if I do and have room left over… I am probably going to play some more Zelda or maybe actually finally try and get into Final Fantasy XVI. The tail end of the year tends to be when I have the mental power to focus on story-driven adventures.

Starfield First Impressions

Good morning folks! I am technically on vacation today… and technically on vacation tomorrow as well but I figured I might as well spend a bit and knock out a blog post. Since my last post about Blaugust, Starfield has come out with a game that brought with it both unrealistic hype and toxic negativity depending upon where your biases against Bethesda Games landed. I am a Bethesda enjoyer, so I knew without a doubt that I would check this game out. I tried my best to go into this experience with as neutral of expectations as possible. I did not expect this game to be the second coming of Skyrim, nor did I expect it to be vaporware as some corners of the internet seemed to. What I expected more or less was Fallout in Space and that is essentially what they have delivered.

Starfield above all else is a Bethesda game, and that comes with certain parameters. You will have your accompaniment of weird dead-eyed NPCs and bizarre glitches but also a lot of freedom in how you go about approaching the game. It was announced before this game came out that it was going to be one of the most bug-free Bethesda games, and quite honestly… I believe that. However, I have still seen my share of weird bugs that are often fixed by either resting or zoning out of an area and back into it. Yesterday I had a quest NPC randomly float up into the ceiling while I was trying to turn in… and essentially zoning in and out resolved the problem allowing me to continue with my gameplay session. So far I have only had one crash to desktop, which is quite honestly pretty good for a Bethesda game.

What you gain for your slight moments of “Bethesda Jank”, are some really gorgeous examples of level design. On the podcast this weekend we referred to this as “NASApunk” and it seems to be the best description. Everything is big, chunky, analog, and inspired by the space age. This is how I dreamed space would look like as a kid, and I am thrilled to be roaming around the world in my space suit. The game even gives us some really cool moments where we are learning how to fight in Zero-G, with my ballistic weapon kick causing me to go flying backward. The thing is… Starfield has a lot of really cool ideas… some of which are not exactly implemented perfectly, but there are enough hooks there to allow modders to come in later and perfect them.

For example, the Character creation system is beautiful in its simplicity and has the model, the rigging, and gender choices being handled by a very simple pronoun selector… rather than the awkward genitalia simulation systems in some other games of late. Does it go far enough? Probably not for everyone, but there is enough separation there that I would imagine someone is going to be able to come in after the fact and create body and rigging packs similar to how they have in something like Second Life, allowing folks to exist in space in exactly the body and gender identity that they want to have. I wasn’t super happy with the beard options, but I know given time someone will release a mod pack that will resolve this for me. I think a lot of the way I approach a Bethesda game is knowing that eventually, I am going to have fifty-some mods installed at some point to completely tailor the game experience to my tastes.

Let’s talk about some of the places where the game fails. Space combat I believe is probably one of these areas, mainly because for someone who does not want anything to do with simulated space flight… this game is a bit too fiddly for my tastes. However, it is way too simplistic and hamfisted to work for a Star Citizen enjoyer like my friend Tam. So by shooting for this awkward middleground… it is essentially disappointing both ends of the spectrum. Most of my interaction with spaceflight is that I don’t interact… I try my best to always rely on fast travel options for which there are many. You can jump from system to system without having to spend a lot of time actually piloting your ship. There are a few missions however where you will be forced to fumble through space combat. For example, in the above screenshot, I was trying to sneak up and repair a satellite without drawing the attention of some baddies. I did it… but it felt like one of the most cumbersome things I had done in recent memory and have no real interest in doing this again.

Another place where the game fails miserably… is with the talent system. Personally I prefer the old school days of just having a list of talents as compared to this whole talent tree system with pretty pictograms representing each talent. In past Bethesda games, you could TRY and do things… albeit badly without having any talent points assigned to a skill. In Starfield you are not even given the option to try something. This leads to some weird happenings like… it took me 10 hours before I realized there was a talent tree that dictated whether or not I could use a boost pack aka this game’s version of a jet pack. Similarly in my first pass through the talents I completely missed that Security was what this game called “Lockpicking” because I assumed this would be in the social tree not in the tech tree and just assumed I had not uncovered it yet. The game forces you to spend a certain number of points in the first tier of abilities before it allows you to proceed to the second, third, or fourth tiers so I just assumed it was something I had not earned access to yet.

Had I realized this… I might not have gone all in on Ballistics like I have. I do sort of love the octopus with “many guns” icon though. Essentially the skills feel kludgy and I am hoping someone will come in after the fact and mod these to work a bit better. I think that outlines my feelings in general… that Starfield in many ways feels like a good first draft of a game and that I know modders will come along and perfect each of the individual niches. Like for example I hate carrying weight as a concept in video games. I want to be able to loot everything and carry it around forever. Inventory maintenance is never an interesting gameplay loop for me personally. I know that someone out there will release a simple mod that I can install to just remove this gameplay loop entirely so I don’t have to care about it. For the moment I have done this myself with console commands, and it was one of the first things I did upon playing the game. The Bethesda experience for me personally is tailoring the game to fit me, rather than trying to play it the way they intended.

As a result, I view this game as a work in progress, and when I encounter something that annoys me… my first reaction is not to throw up my arms in frustration… it is to go search NexusMods to see if there is a way to mod that frustration out of existence. It is because of this mindset though that I have a really hard time reviewing a Bethesda game. I’ve been playing these for so long at this point, and I know that given enough desire… You can pretty much make the game do anything you want it to do. You have to understand that when I first played Skyrim, I had no clue that you could choose Thief, Warrior, or Mage statues to direct your gameplay… because the second I got out of that first town I was leaving the main questline behind. That said… I am spending a lot more time in this game following the main quest because it is way more cumbersome to travel off the grid.

One of the challenges for me personally is that with Starfield, it is much harder to just wander off into the distance looking for something interesting. Most planets are fairly empty in the grand scheme of things. There are far fewer POIs and way more barren fields of assorted minerals and resources. When you land on a planet, you are dropped into a region surrounding some fixed points of interest, and a bit of procedurally generated area around them. In Skyrim, almost everything in the game existed for a reason… and going there ahead of time allowed you to essentially brute force your way through a side quest that would take you there eventually. In Starfield… there are a lot of areas that only serve as a way to refill your ammunition and med packs… and places for you to farm randomly generated space mercenaries, pirates, and cultists. Knowing that a lot of the world is pointless… gives me less desire to explore it.

That is not to say that you will not have a bazillion conversations that you overhear while roaming around the world and notes that you pick up that will lead you to “pointful” areas. The Starfield experience though sorta waters down the effectiveness of my chosen way of playing a Bethesda game. So as a result I am mostly just following the golden path, or have for the first thirteen hours of playing it. I am not necessarily mainlining this game as my only entertainment, as I am still playing quite a bit of Path of Exile. I am however enjoying the time I am spending with it, and I don’t want me pointing out its flaws to make it come across like I am not enjoying it greatly. In fact, Starfield is honestly the sort of game that I kinda of wish Destiny would have been. If I could take the world of Starfield, and transplant the Destiny-style gunplay… then I think I would be in heaven. The gunplay is so much better than any other Bethesda title out there, but it is still eons behind anything I would call “good” gunplay.

At this point I am really bought into the story, even though it is sort of riddled with tropes we have all experienced before in other games. I like the world quite a bit and I like experiencing it… albeit with a bit more direction than I am used to in a Bethesda title. Is this game-of-the-year material? Honestly, I am not sure. There are so many great narrative experiences this year, and this is more of a sandbox experience where you need to bring with it your own expectations that shape it. Do I regret buying Starfield? Hell no. I am having a blast honestly, but I still feel like it is important to talk about the flaws of that experience. More or less Stafield is a higher fidelity and much larger version of The Outer Worlds, without that game’s particular sense of humor. It will be interesting how we feel about it in ten years, and if we honor this new franchise in all the same ways that we do Fallout or Skyrim. So far… it doesn’t have nearly as much personality as either of those games does but I am only 13 hours in instead of 1300 hours over multiple playthroughs.

It is also somewhat unfair to expect a new IP to have near the punching weight as Fallout, a game that I have been playing for a quarter of a century at this point. I’ve enjoyed this enough though to give it time to grow and come into its own. I am hoping with time something like Galacticat will make me even halfway as happy as Vault Boy does. For now, I am enjoying the journey, and I definitely think Starfield is worth your time especially if you were already a big fan of these sorts of games. Admittedly my perspective is exclusive to PC gameplay where you can mod anything until your heart is content. I have no clue what a Bethesda game experience feels like on a console because I never play Bethesda games in their vanilla launch state without at least a bit of tweaking. I figure this is probably going to feel similar to all other Bethesda games you have ever played. If you go into the game expecting that sort of gameplay experience… then you are probably going to be very happy with it.

AggroChat #448 – NASApunk Adventures

Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! We start this week with the fact that Bel cannot distinguish a 6 from an 8 when looking at it from the corner of his eye.  We dive into a discussion of Goodbye Volcano High that Kodra has been playing.  From there we talk a bit about what is happening at PAX West this year and this leads into a discussion of all of the games.  We talk a bit about some of our first impressions of Starfield in as spoiler-free a manner as we can.  Finally, Tam talks about rolling the credits on Armored Core 6 and his final thoughts.

Topics Discussed:

  • Bel Can’t Read
  • Goodbye Volcano High
  • PAX West 2023
  • So Many New Games
  • Starfield First Impressions
  • Rolling the Credits on Armored Core 6