Stances

Is there any word from EA/Respawn about the stances? As far as I've looked I haven't even really found any statements that confirm there're only two stances for balancing reasons. I know the bugs and performance issues have to take priority now and I want them to, I want everyone who wants to play the game and that's paid for the game to get to enjoy a smooth experience. But even with the game fully optimized, the stance limit just adds so many other issues to the game.

First of all, it's a hit to immersion to look at an all-in-one lightsaber hanging off Cal's belt the entire game, but having to go to a save point to treat it that way, and it feels especially frustrating when he switches stances in cutscenes, for finishing moves, to open crates, and ride chocobos, but you never get to use it that way.

Second is the time that it tacks onto the gameplay. Any time I'd like to experiment with a stance, get bored with a stance, or would just like to walk around with my blaster readied for story-telling, I can't do that without making additional trips to save points, and it doesn't matter that there are a lot of them, it's taking something you should logically be able to do on a whim and making your ability to act on it take several minutes.

And then there's the combat, as I've said, I can't find any official word that this was meant to balance the game, but even if there is, it doesn't seem to. The differences between what lightsaber you have in combat pale in comparison to how overpowered the Force makes you. Sure a double-bladed lightsaber is slightly more advantageous if you're surrounded or you come across a gatling trooper, but with the Force you can slam that entire group of enemies into the ground letting you freely attack them with whatever you have or pull a gatling trooper to you and open fire on the rest of the enemies. You can lift a hammer boss clear off the ground and fling him off of a cliff instead of fighting him for three to five minutes.

And that's not even getting into the step down in combat depth from the previous game. In Fallen Order, you could access all of your stances without a save point, albeit only two at the time, but you also had additional split-saber attacks, ironically giving Survivor less stance variation even with more stances. It also had combo pause variations and stance-switching attacks that allowed fluid transition to the other stance mid-combo. If you run the same single-blade+double-blade combo in Survivor, it's noticeably lacking from the first game, making it really feel like all of the additional stances were supposed to balance and complement each other with their specific trade-offs during combat and compensate for the removal of the other combat abilities.

Again, I know the performance issues are more pressing, but even in a perfect world where the game launched flawlessly or in a few months when they're all fixed, these problems would still persist. I'd just like some acknowledgment from development that they know it's a problem for a lot of us and make some kind of definitive statement on the state of stances so I know whether to keep holding out for an update or just bite the bullet and buy the game again on PC for the mod that adds it to the game, but I also really don't want to reward them twice over something they didn't bother to include. This really deflated my first playthrough of the game and I'm personally not interested in playing past the ending or starting a NG+ while the stances are still limited to two forcing all of these issues onto my experience with the game when I know it's capable of more.