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[IbizaPocholo]

Respawn Considered Delaying Jedi: Fallen Order to Smooth out Its Rampant Bugs

It's been a bonkers year for the team at Respawn Entertainment. In February 2019, the team surprise-launched Apex Legends, a free-to-play battle royale with ...

www.usgamer.net

At launch, Jedi: Fallen Order received some criticism for its prolific bugs. In USgamer's own review, Editor-in-Chief Kat Bailey notes that playing on PlayStation 4 Pro, she encountered "texture pop-in, weird frame rate hitches, and glitched enemies," and she wasn't alone in those criticisms either. Compared to other Respawn games, the rougher shape was a bit of a shock. With a couple high profile game delays recently, from The Last of Us Part 2 to Cyberpunk 2077, I wondered if there was ever a conversation to delay Jedi: Fallen Order to help polish it.

"Yeah, it was a conversation that we had and we decided that we wanted the game out there, we wanted to get it, you know, being out for the holiday," says Zampella. "It's a game that really fits that timeframe." Last holiday season was quite a busy time when it came to Star Wars. Disney+, Disney's new Netflix-like streaming service, launched alongside the weekly Star Wars television series The Mandalorian. Then Jedi: Fallen Order launched, and soon after that, the final film in the Skywalker saga, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. It was the season of Star Wars.

"I think we're in a situation [where] we're trying to build a game for several different systems and we wanted to hit a date, obviously," says Asmussen. "[W]e all look at it, and earnestly we feel like we could, if we had a little bit more time, it would've been better. But at the same time, we could play through it. It was good and we felt like fans were going to like it."

In Kat's review for Jedi: Fallen Order, she wrote that it, "comes painfully close to being the best action game of the year, but ultimately falls short due to pacing problems and a host of technical issues."

"That was always the natural direction, considering you're wielding this deadly weapon," says Jason de Heras, lead combat designer on Jedi: Fallen Order. "So we wanted to make it about doing a less amount of attacks, and how can we build a whole enemy cast around that. Because that means if I'm not swinging a lot, then I'm thinking about other things to do. So parrying, rolling, force slow, force powers, and then we just build all the enemies to make you do different things. So it's not about just pressing square."

As for what's next for the Jedi: Fallen Order team at Respawn, they play coy. Zampella answers succinctly.

"What's next is a celebration of this win."

 

[Hendrick's]

Thank you for considering releasing a polished game. We really appreciate the thought.

 

[Mista]

Respawn being Respawn, one of the great mofos out there. Of course EA has something to do with it but hey, the little bugs here and there didn’t dampen the game at all.

 

[Newly Vacant]

I really enjoyed playing Fallen Order. I played through it on PC, and didn’t really run into many issues besides frame-rate slow downs durning area transitions. I had some crashing initially, but that seemed to be RAM related. I don’t know what it was like on consoles, but, for PC, it played about the same or a little bit better than the standard Ubisoft release.
My general feeling on these things is to delay the game and polish it. For this game, it did seem like timing was a factor to its sales and reception. If Fallen Order had come out now, I don’t know if it would’ve had the same success. Eh, I’m conflicted on this one.

 

[nowhat]

My general feeling on these things is to delay the game and polish it. For this game, it did seem like timing was a factor to its sales and reception.

I'm not saying that it was also EA that said fuck it, we need something more to show our investors for fiscal year 2019, just ship it and fix it if it becomes successful...

...oh wait, that's exactly what I'm saying.

 

[JohnnyFootball]

Jedi Fallen Order was one of the best Star Wars experiences I have had in ages and probably the best SW game in over a decade.

However, the framerate was big time distracting. It was horribly unstable.

For those of you with Xbox One X (and presumably a PS4 Pro) I do NOT recommend playing the game in performance mode. Getting 60 fps is so rare and it frequently drops to 30 that you might as well keep it at 30 and get a much smoother experience. I played it on my X with VRR enabled and it still was a choppy mess.

Still it was a huge step in the right direction for EA and the Star Wars license on the whole.

Having said that, I am normally all in favor of delaying a game to iron out the bugs, but in this case I think EA absolutely made the right choice to release it when they did before Rise of the Skywalker.

 

[darkinstinct]

Please, understand, we had to get it out in time for episode IX.

 

[Stuart360]

I didnt have a problem on PC at launch. A bit of loading stutter, but no real bugs thankfully.

 

[JohnnyFootball]

My general feeling on these things is to delay the game and polish it. For this game, it did seem like timing was a factor to its sales and reception. If Fallen Order had come out now, I don’t know if it would’ve had the same success. Eh, I’m conflicted on this one.

This is one of those very rare instances where I agree that EA/Respawn made the right choice to release it when they did. Rise of the Skywalker didn't exactly light the world on fire and it's possible that if they had waited it would have drastically cost them sales.

On consoles, the framerate was a godawful unstable mess, especially in performance mode and definitely needed extra time to get that polished, but the entire game was definitely playable.

 

[sn0man]

Maybe the launch code will run well on the new consoles.