The difference between Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order on PS4 and Xbox One appears to be night and day in terms of performance — in certain cases. I reviewed the game running on PS4 Pro and encountered frequent instances where the game would freeze while trying to auto-save on Kashyyyk, textures would not load properly, assets would pop-in mid frame, and the game completely crashed at least once.
Speaking with another member of our Android Central team also playing on PS4 Pro, he encountered similar issues. A few of my other colleagues playing on Xbox One X only noticed some minor frame rate dips. In Polygon's review where pre-release versions were tested, both suffered from multiple crashes and dropped frames. People on the game's official subreddit have also reported issues on both consoles.
In the video below, you can see a few instances of my gameplay on PlayStation 4 Pro along with my colleague Asher Madan's on Xbox One X. One of the more egregious examples of freezing during my game happened on Kashyyyk where the game froze for over ten seconds. Both versions were running in performance mode.
Digital Foundry notes that performance can vary drastically even between two different consoles of the same platform, i.e. an Xbox One X and another Xbox One X. This is a game where it's not an exaggeration to say your mileage may vary. It looks to be a problem with storage, and running it off of an internal HDD vs an external HDD or SSD can have an impact, as can switching between performance and quality mode in the game's menu. These performance issues are exacerbated on the base PS4 and Xbox One consoles.
A patch is on the way for consoles to address texture flickering and an issue "where the game could become slow and loading times longer than expected." It's unclear whether this will fix the exact problems that players have been reporting.
Because this has been brought up, I do not believe that the PS4 Pro version needs to be scorned like it's a technical mess based solely on my experience. These problems did not hinder or interfere with my enjoyment in any way — I actually found some of them rather funny, like when an enemy T-posed into frame. There are much, much worse games in terms of performance. I never once felt that Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was unplayable. It certainly helped that the problems I encountered didn't happen during combat or action-heavy sequences. Instead, they usually occurred while between areas, and I'm assuming the game would freeze in order load new data and assets.
But just because these problems didn't ruin the game for me doesn't mean the same can be said for others. I know people who won't touch a game with frequent frame rate drops, as minor as they may be. If a game crashes just once, that could sour the whole experience and keep them from continuing. I'm not here to say how you should feel about these issues, but I will say that they are the current reality of Jedi: Fallen Order right now on consoles.
Journey across the galaxy
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order puts players into the shoes of a Padawan on the run from the Empire after Order 66 devastated the Jedi Order. Hopefully soon you can experience it without frequent performance problems
