Star Wars Jedi: Survivor might have launched with significant performance issues, but that hasn’t stopped the game proving enormously popular with fans of Star Wars and big-budget action adventures alike. To give you some sense of how far across the galaxy the game has reached, developer EA has released a bunch of stats detailing players’ adventures on Koboh and beyond.
With an infographic, the EA Star Wars Twitter account revealed that players have been defeated by the game’s Rancor over nine million times. This might imply they haven’t watched Return of the Jedi enough, but in fairness, Cal Kestis doesn’t have a handy metal door to drop on the creature’s neck. Unsurprisingly, the Rancor is a significantly better fighter than Rick the Door Technician, although Jedi Survivor’s joke boss has still somehow managed to beat players 489 times.
The main thing the numbers reveal, however, is that Star Wars fans are an austere type with little patience for whimsy. The most popular lightsaber stance was “single”, meaning most players are batting Battle Droids in the standard lightsaber stance. By comparison, merely 8% of players are running around with a blaster, and only 7% are getting their Kylo Ren on with the Crossguard stance, though it’s worth noting that these stances are unlocked later in the game, so players have less chance to use them, and might be less inclined to move away from a familiar playstyle. The preference for vanilla goes on, though: the most popular hair/beard combination is “crew cut/short beard” and the most popular lightsaber colour is “White”. In other words, players are doing nothing to alter the Jedi Order’s reputation for being a bunch of boring bastards (although white is technically a novel lightsaber color).
Survivor’s Jedi have been busy cleaning up the game’s various side activities, however. According to the stats, players have collected over 3 million bounties, won over 8 million rounds of holotactics, and planted more than 15 million seeds in the garden above Greez’s bar.
As a part of the middle aged dad contingent of Star Wars fans, I can relate to the decision to spend more time gardening than bounty hunting, but at least I had a purple lightsaber and used all the stances equally.
Fun as using these stats to make fun of Star Wars fans may be, the numbers don’t really get to the heart of what makes Jedi Survivor such an improvement over the original. That would be the combination of spectacular set-pieces with much-improved combat and platforming. As Morgan points out in his review “Jedi: Survivor revisits an era when third-person action games were designed like jungle-gyms… Respawn has resurrected the big-budget 3D platformer, and it’s glorious.” EA hasn’t released specific sales figures as of yet, but the company last reported that the sequel were pacing “very strongly” ahead of Fallen Order, having been played by “millions”.