Great article! Ubisoft seem to be really good at making worlds that are immense and magnificent and yet utterly boring to be in.
I don’t think “boring” is the right word for Outlaws. It has much less of the repetitive stuff that has plagued Assassins Creed for years now and instead puts in stuff that’s less frequent but more memorable. I’ve played for about 10 hours so far and it’s been the most fun I’ve had with an open world game in a long time. The annoying stuff is mainly bugs (not too many for me so far) and quality of life stuff like infrequent save points. A few patches down the road this could still become game of the year material.
Great article. That’s exactly how I feel playing games like that too. They’re so well done, and the world’s are so great. They just forget the game part of the game.
So far I was fortunate enough to not experience the weird AI bugs but that checkpoint system is sooo infuriating. There’s a side quest where you need to infiltrate a rather large imperial base on Toshara and even the tiniest misstep halfway through the quest will send you back outside the base. It’s 2024, my PS5 is powerful enough to just dump the whole world state from RAM to SSD within a second or two. Why can’t I save manually during a mission?
Other than that, amazing game. It just feels like Star Wars in a way that nothing since KOTOR and Jedi Knight 2 did.
I’ve really been enjoying it, but then again I really enjoyed Mass Effect Andromeda and AssCreed Odyssey, so who knows…
In my friend group one is really into both ME and AC, he really didn’t like Andromeda but he did like Odyssey.
The other felt that Andromeda was okay/mid but that Odyssey was also a lot of fun.
I never got into ME and the last AC game I played was Black Flag, and that may have legitimately been after Odyssey was long released. So while I can’t speak on these games, from what I gather online and from my friends is that Andromeda was kind of a buggy mediocre game that didn’t do as good of a job for the ME universe as it could have, whereas Odyssey was a bit of a deviation, which the people who don’t like it tend to criticize and everybody else seems to enjoy the game for what it is, if not maybe a little Ubisoft standard fetch quest grindy.
In the case of Odyssey, I think it’s a good potential that is limited by the restraints of Ubisoft, in the same way that has just happened to Star Wars Outlaws. Because for all of the obvious faults we can give Ubisoft, I think it’s fair to give merit to the developers and designers who, for example, completely recreated France for AC: Unity. For all the faults that game had at launch, apparently they did eventually clean it up and my friend really enjoys it.
It sounds like Outlaws has a great world but just didn’t get the polish, like Ubisoft tends to do.
Also some unrelated design choices, I’ve seen in gameplay videos like the repetitive mini-games (which can be turned off - but why design something that players turn off because it gets tedious and annoying?) and the AI during non-stealth combat encounters being completely inept, firing in the complete wrong direction. The little things become cumulative and can easily turn a perfectly fine game into a mish-mash of features that we’re put together with any cohesion. The last thing that I remember in terms of criticisms are that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of impact on the system for reputation. Someone who hates you after an interaction can be completely on your side just by doing a few side missions for that character. Not sure if this continues on into the late game, but if it does it seems to be another instance of just not quite fleshed out design.
The minigame looks fun, but not 4 doors and 3 item crates in a row fun. The reputation system is typically a really engaging and fun thing, but forcing yourself under constraints by choosing to not do missions with someone isn’t as engaging as being put into a situation where you choose one merchant over another, and then that merchant is just done with you forever and may even send goons after you. From what it sounds like, in present state if an event like that happens, just do some odd jobs for the guy and it’s all forgotten?
I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the game - I tend to like games and movies that people are criticizing, since at least lately most of the criticisms have been… severely biased… but sometimes there’s also truly legitimately terrible stuff, like Rebel Moon. There’s always a line of subjectivity of course, there are people out there who enjoyed it, but the other people see the nearly 21 minutes of the movie, legitimately nearly 30% of it, being in slowmo and say, “Hey, that’s pretty awful, why would you do that?” on top of having another mish-mash of ideas that are presented and subsequently dropped to never be heard from again. I don’t think Outlaws is comparable to Rebel Moon, I have a feeling it’s probably better than its reception but still worse than it should be.
WRT the hacking minigame(s), it’s much faster than e.g. Fallout 3/4 hacking and lockpicking. The rotating locks are a rhythm game that take 10-20 seconds. The sudoku-esque “slicing”/ hacking one takes about 30 seconds. Compared to Fallout 4 where you can be mousing through every line of characters to find the bracket pairs that remove a dud choice when you’re hacking, it honestly slows me down less. I haven’t had AI go wonky in combat.
I haven’t seen the reputations bounce around. I got the Pykes angry at me right at the start, and I haven’t managed to claw my way back yet. I haven’t been trying hard, to be fair, but if side missions are there that can easily recover you from negative faction standing, the game definitely isn’t putting it in front of me.
I’m always skeptical of edited videos that show bugs because controversy drives views, so there’s an incentive to find problems.
IMO it’s not amazing and it’s not bad. You need to enjoy stealth to enjoy Outlaws, because you need to use stealth 90% of the time to avoid getting overwhelmed. The worldspace is amazing, just like AssOdyssey. I love Star Wars as a universe, but not the movies themselves, and Outlaws doesn’t focus on Jedis or rehash the same old characters. And this game really feels like Star Wars.
If you’re not either really into Star Wars or really into stealth, I’d recommend waiting until it’s discounted, but mostly just because the Gold Edition price is insane ($110).
I would recommend reading Kotaku’s actual review of Outlaws, which is not the piece linked above.
This is what mods are meant for… to bring a beautiful setting and game engine to its limits beyond what story and gameplay could be crammed in at release.
