Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (2023)

Just started Jedi Survivor. I really loved Fallen Order, and so far this hits the ground running, with the biggest improvement being the map! I've enjoyed the story beats so far and found that despite my lack of souls experience my playthrough of Fallen Order a few years ago allowed me to handle the early bosses at normal difficulty fairly easily. I figure I'll stick to normal unless it becomes a walk in the park, but save frustrating souls-like experiences for when I actually decide to play through the FromSoft games.

I heard lots of rumblings about bugs when this released, but I'm hopeful that I am playing it after those were resolved.

I posted very negatively last time because I was venting about my dislike of open world games. Just wanted to say now that I'm almost 30 hours in this game is pretty great. It's currently blowing the first game completely out of the water in almost every way.

I am also enjoying the open world a lot more when I use it as something to do briefly when I want to take a break from the story. Also, it is far more enjoyable once you've gotten far enough to unlock a lot of mobility options and barrier clearing abilities so you dont stumble across things you cant actually engage with.

It felt really good to get back into this story and see how things have progressed since the first game. It feels like all the little aspects of the game I found irritating or half baked have been tweaked so that it feels much better to play. I liked the intro level and I really liked the look of the main hub planet after that.

Then I got to the open world section, and my enjoyment dropped by like 33%. Man it kind of sucks being an open world hater. Cause I think open world level design is well on it's way to being almost ubiquitous, in the same way RPG elements became part of damn near every genre in the past decade or so.

Still planning on playing more of this, but ugh, just needed to vent lol.

I stumbled upon this article after I had already passed this moment in the game. Big spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn’t played.

How Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Pulled Off The Greatest Betrayal Of 2023

This part of the article really stuck out to me:

“Knowing that we had that double betrayal, you’re very paranoid. I was the primary writer on the Lucrehulk level where you spend the whole time with Bode, and the goal is to make people love him. Don’t make people feel suspicious of Bode. And it’s hard. He is incredibly earnest, not out-and-out lying to Cal, but he is also trying to convince Cal of his point of view while also being genuine in his affections. So that’s hard, but knowing at least that when we get to the actual betrayal - they’ll never see the Jedi thing coming. There’s no hints, there’s no notice of that. It made me feel a little safer.”

The reason is because, as much as I enjoy this game, nothing about this felt subtle and it was clear from a feel minutes in that Bode was the villain, and would betray Cal. Additionally it’s interesting that they claim there were no hints about the second twist, but not only did I suspect it fairly early on, there is a moment where that suspicion is effectively confirmed and I think is surprising that Respawn really thought people weren’t going to figure out the twist. As fun as this game is, it’s a fairly predictable story. And in many ways that’s why people enjoy genre stories like this, because they know what to expect.