Quick Look: Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

It’s been a minute since I watched Revenge of the Sith, but I know Obi-Wan goes to the temple and sends out a message to the Jedi warning them of the purge. I think they might just be using the audio from the movie for holocron, in which case it could be Ewan MacGregor’s actual voice.

I loled at the data credit union joke. I see you @benpack

Control:

Does Star Wars force stuff better than Star Wars.

Respawn has been so very reliable. Good to see another good Star Wars game, even if it's not the best Star Wars game.

Shame about the technical issues though. I didn't expect that from Respawn.

I like how the death screen just says the name of the studio.

Playing on X1X. Looks beautiful & v solid frame rate.

About halfway through first planet on pc at 4k epic I've still had 0 technical issues besides the frame stuttering during achievement.

Maybe it happens later but some reviews said even on a 2080 ti they got a bad fps and had to turn down options but none yet through the first tutorial area and now the first planet.

One thing though is load times between death seems odd, even on a fairly new (2018) SSD dying back to back load times seems longer than would expect. OS is on nvme ssd and game is on a WD black SSD so it isn't my setup and I've heard this mentioned in other reviews on the pc version.

Come on Brad, you can't just go making alt accounts on here to shill yourself!

Shouts out to Debra Wilson and Phil LaMarr for keeping MadTV in the back of mind nearly every time I play a video game.

Since the original trilogy, certainly!

Also, I see this game has fallen into the Star Wars RPG trap of "oh crap, lightsabers are OP god-weapons that can do anything in the lore, so now any random mook has some sort of gimmick that lets them block lightsabers."

It looks ok. Shame the main character is that boring little twerp though.

Really excited to play this from all I've seen, but seems like a great game to ask for as a holiday gift so they get a month and a half extra to start fixing it up with a patch or two.

Does the game ever come up with any good reason why the lightsaber isn't cutting through anything easily? It seems kinda weird and dumb to play as a Jedi with a lightsaber but make it behave like a regular old sword and have to wait a ton of time around the enemy until there's an opening to do an attack, then parry, then repeat it over and over again multiple times until an enemy is killed.

It just makes me miss how fast the combat was in the old Star Wars games with Kyle Katarn. Even Force Unleashed made combat with a lightsaber and force powers feel better.

Also, the game seems janky overall. The way the character connects with the floor reminds me of PS2/PS3 third person b-games. There's constant frame rate dips and there's something weird with the motion blur or the anti-aliasing that makes the edge of anything that moves have this weird pixelated/grainy effect.

The way the player character walks and runs is really weird. Like he's floating above the ground whenever he's going over uneven terrain. Maybe because Respawn isn't used to making things in 3rd person.

Its so funny playing this game and watching The Mandalorian right now. They both take so many things from the Clone Wars series but clearly need to explain them to the more general audiences, like holocrons. There is a thread in Fallen Order than pretty much rips off an arc in TCW which I find rather amusing. But I am glad to see more of those ideas and tones make it in to the broader SW stuff. TCW proved to me that they could absolutely tell interesting stories outside the Skywalker revolved stuff.

If performance mode is so bad why not just play the capped 30fps quality mode? I’ll take capped 30 over a variable 30-60fps any day, less frames but smoother gameplay.

Maybe my biggest gripe (technical issues aside) is that guard breaking an enemy doesn't let you pull a kill move off instantly. It's more glaring after Sekiro nailing it earlier this year with, "either wear down the enemy's health or posture and then you can finish them immediately."

Still, glad to hear they made something solid. I'm still a little sad that they didn't do anything wilder with the MC design, and it's a real shame it appears to have been rushed out, but I'm glad the actual content of the game appears to have come together well for the most part.

The combat seems to be a lot like Vampyr.

Now if this game's combat was more Ninja Gaiden (Xbox) and less Dark Souls, then I would be hyped af to play it.

Okay, at 08:50. Can someone tell me if you enjoy these wall climbing bits in games? Why do designers build these? They aren’t fun in any way, even less-so when you have to attack during it.

Edit: omg Brad just mercilessly slaughtered a rampaging bull just go around man he don’t know any better.

1) I don't trust EA NOT to fuck this up, in some manner, sometime in the near future (more so than rushing a technically half-baked game out to meet a holiday launch window, vs. releasing a polished game this spring).

2) Honestly... I'd much rather have an incredible Titanfall 3 solo-campaign / adventure that was 18 to 20 hours long than this. Since the Disney acquisition, Star Wars has oversaturated the market in every way, to its detriment. I've long since stopped caring about it.

@dasakamov: Yep. It kind of made sense in the KoTOR games. Like, I could believe that a galaxy-spanning war involving two lightsaber-wielding factions would result in an arms race to mitigate or counter lightsaber technology.

It makes less sense when you get to a point in the timeline where enemies are not expected to have lightsabers.

"Shame about the technical issues though. I didn't expect that from Respawn."

But I DO expect EA to rush a technically half-baked game out for a holiday launch window vs. releasing the same game complete and polished in late Spring or Summer.

It's infuriating how complacent the video game community has become with AAA publishers releasing broken games as paid public betas.

@two_socks: Seriously. Just this YEAR Debra Wilson has been in:

Far Cry New Dawn
Days Gone
Rage 2
Wolfenstein: Youngblood
Remnant: From the Ashes
Gears 5
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
The Outer Worlds
AND this game. If you're a big game that released in 2019 and didn't have her doing voice work, you're in the minority.

@bludgeonparagon: I felt the same way when I watched Battlestar Galactica then played the Force Unleashed games and noticed the actor in BSG was StarKiller.

It looks really good to me, and I like we've gotten this game instead of another Battlefront this year, though I've been concerned about how these third party games have been running on consoles. I have a regular PS4 with no intention of going Pro. I still haven't played Control for that reason.

For some reason, Ben mentions Rocket Raccoon when talking about Ben Burtt. Not sure why, as Rocket is voiced by Bradley Cooper. Burtt did do the voice for WALL-E though.

@brainscratch: Well I mean, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy have lightsabers that don't instantly kill on touch on the regular, and those games never felt the need to explain themselves.

That said, expanded universe material always had training sabers and different power settings for lightsabers, and Kal Cestis does seem like an unlearned Padawan who made a crummy-looking saber with a box of scraps...

hey um.... do the faces look fucking fucked up for anyone else? Like they're creepy vaseline-smeared robots? or like... just me? Also Cal's VA seems................. iffy.

Edit: maybe it speaks to how few people played Sekiro (disappointingly), but hearing them talk about the difficulty of making lightsabers feel dangerous and the guard system and talk around the idea of having the lightsaber be lethal is bizarre. Sekiro has a sword that felt more like a lightsaber than 99.9 percent of Star Wars games, and it did that by having blocking be an integral part of the combat, and that dropping your guard was grounds for an instant kill.

I will definitely pick this up for 20 bucks in March.

EA definitely has a dreadful reputation when it comes to pushing barely finished products out the door.

I actively dislike Star Wars but when I started seeing footage of this game it really got me interested. It's on Origin Access, so I'll be playing it that way. I was hoping this QL would answer whether a non-fan of the series who has absorbed at least some knowledge of the lore over the years would still be into the story here. For $15, though, it's totally worth it even if I don't pay attention to what's going on and just whack dudes with my laser sword.

I decided to pass on this after reading the review but figured I'd check the QL. Looks meh. Sad they pushed it out the door.

@bludgeonparagon: yeah i was like, "wow... again?". But I'm super glad she's getting work. That's Debra Wilson by the way, she is like an OG Mad TV alum at this point. Some of the best seasons.

This guy seems like Average White Dude to me. He should just be waiting in line at a cafeteria somewhere, not having galaxy-spanning adventures.

I disagree completely with Jeff. The running animation looks horrid. It looks like you're moving the chest and the legs drag behind and IK onto the terrain very sloppily.

The is def pulling a lot more from the cartoons (Rebels and, to a lesser extent, Clone Wars), comics and Rogue One than the prequels. Should have Gary Whitta on the podcast to get his thoughts on the game considering he did a fair bit of writing for the cartoons and Rogue One.

"No one's ever really gone..."

*hits respawn button*

Apparently on the pro and the xbox x you are better off using the quality mode as the frame rate is capped at 30 and smoother as it isn't bouncing around between 30 and 50.
I have only played a couple of hours of it on pc but it seems to run really well apart from the loading issues when it tries to seamlessly load stuff in. It hitches a bit then but never freezes totally like the base xbox and ps4 do. At least for the small amount I have played

@synthesis_landale: It's not Ewan, it's James Arnold Taylor who's done almost every animated incarnation of Obi-Wan

I am curious as to which upgrade Brad is talking about. I beat the game yesterday and didn't do what he did so wondering how it would change the game up

On the PS4 Pro and maaaaaan this game is buggy as hell. I really want to like it since there's legit cool "Star Wars" stuff but the multitude of technical issues plaguing it makes me want to delete it forever. Aside from all the hitching and audio glitches that's been constant, I've gotten stuck on geometry 3 times in the past 5 hours and have just now fallen through the game world which required a soft reset since I couldn't "die".

It's such a shame since without the bugs this could have easily been one of the best Star Wars game out there. I'd advise folks to wait for a patch that fixes these issues before playing the game to avoid the frustration.

Edit: Ugh I fell through the world again at the exact same spot despite the map showing it as an unexplored area seriously fuck the bugs in this game don't play it until there's a patch unless you want the whole experience soured for you.

This is the most excited I've been about anything Star Wars since I was an idiot kid who LOVED Shadow of The Empire/ Jedi outcast, and I honestly never thought A: I would ever be after the Last Jedi, and B: have it be a solid-storied action adventure video game by Respawn. Very, very happy about both.

I managed to fall through the world a few times, (which was actually fairly funny despite losing some minor progress) ..so there's some definite jank under the hood but on PC I'm not really experiencing any technical issues?Gettting a solid unwavering 60fps on a 1080 so I guess the console versions might be (provbably are) suffering from Unreal Engine-itis. Even very simple (by design) games like Absolver fucking CHUG on PS4, for example. I dunno about Xbox but PS4 does NOT like Unreal. Having a choice of platform to play on, I'm glad EA isn't forcing frostbite on another developer.

Game time is limited to weekends so by the time I get through the first third of the game I'm sure a patch will be out. Also this game is hilarious/cool with cheat engine/trainers- slow motion lightsaber fights and super-jump are pretty sweet and if you're not looking for a souls-adjacent difficulty, there's some tweaking you can hex in to make it more power-trippy to combat the whiffle-bat-ness of the lightsaber-per enemy.

To weigh in on the running animation, I am a semi-prof animator and....I can't say for certain weither I think the run animation is 'good' or not. I won't say it's awesome, the feet have this weird gravity on the key poses from foot-to-foot, like his feet are sticky, but on the other hand there's a good sense of forward momentum that propels the character in a very action-movie-unrealistic way I like that kind of animates in a way that suits the dorky-ness of the character. I think if anything, the non-sprint jog looks really bowlegged and strange butt he full on sprint is better than a lot of games as far as the 'rush' you should feel when you're about to make stormtrooper sushi.

No tech issues on PC. Maybe some major patches came out since release? I'm really enjoying the game. It reminds me of God of War in that there isn't anything that creative, it's just mashing other recent popular games, but it's all streamlined and really enjoyable. I like it more than God of War, actually. That said, it has its issues, the collectibles are pointless and ugly, and some of the platforming is just awful (specifically the Crash Bandicoot slides). Much better than I'd ever expect it to be, though. Some elements of it have so much polish like the scripted events and healing animation, so I think it would have greatly benefited from another 6 - 12 months of development so the whole game would have that polish: Would have gone from 4 stars to 4.5 stars for me.

Who knew a good Star Wars was just a few Disney decisions away

I just got this game a few days ago and beat it in like 3 days (admittedly during the Covid lockdown) but its SUPER good. Most of the performance issues have been fixed. One cutscene kept hitching up when you first get to the wookie homeworld and talk to Saw, that whole dialogue had like a dozen hitches in it but aside from that performance has been solid on a normal PS4. Alot of the issues seem to have been fixed.

Its like star wars + dark souls + metroid + uncharted, with solid story telling. I loved this game during the this whole covid lockdown, i'm probably going to replay it on the highest difficulty. But just letting folks know most (not all) but most of the issues have been resolved.

"I use a data credit union" lmao. I fucking miss Ben.