With a handful of days off work around the Labor Day holiday, I dove deep into Star Wars: Outlaws, the new open world game developed by Massive Entertainment and published by Ubisoft. While I’m far from seeing everything it had to offer, I’m largely enjoying the story, the gameplay, the meta systems, and the experience as a whole. It’s a highly customizable experience, but one that’s occasional let down by baffling decisions.
The basic set-up is that you play as Kay Vess, who everyone describes as a “scoundrel” but would probably best be described at the beginning of the game as a “dirtbag.” She seems to be a low-level thief or layabout, living rent-free above a bar. She takes a job above her renown and probably ability, gets caught, escapes, and you’ve completed the tutorial and are out in the galaxy to lie, cheat at cards, steal, and do odd jobs for four different factions.
I’ve reached the part of the game that seems to make up the bulk of the narrative: Kay is recruited to put together a team for one big heist, and I’m recruiting my team from across four planets I can move between freely. I’m also taking various side missions and “contracts” of wildly varying depth and complexity to improve my standing with the four underworld cartels in this galaxy: the Pykes, the Crimson Dawn, the Hutts, and the Ashiga.
Main missions frequently have you making some kind of choice between supporting one of these groups over the other. Any reputation loss with the other group can be made up relatively easily, making the system an interesting idea but one generally free of consequence. Did I piss off the Pykes and lose ready access to their territory and special vendors? Smuggle a few bits or cargo or give those same vendors “intelligence” you’ve found to build that rep back up. It’s more gameplay padding that anything, but the game is moving a good clip so I don’t mind having these smaller missions to spend some time with.
What has really frustrated me so far are two utterly baffling decisions: early game mission design and plot communication. I’ve found myself having a LOT more fun with the game after completing an early story mission that is what we call “forced stealth.” Outlaws has several stealth systems and is meant to encourage stealth gameplay, but those systems aren’t refined enough to where requiring stealth is a fun experience. A few upgrades later and stealth is more viable, but this early game mission is a poor showcase of what the game can be. Secondly, I just finished a main story mission with an (I think!) particularly weighty choice of how to resolve a previously mentioned faction conflict. The problem is that the set-up for this is given to you in the middle of an intense firefight, with aggressive enemy types you haven’t fought before, over an audio comlink…by a character who doesn’t speak English. That’s right - a major plot point is spoken in the made-up language of Huttese and subtitled on your screen during a mechanically busy portion of gameplay with a possible fail state. I’m at best an arm chair amateur game designer, but this is un-fucking-forgivable design if you want your players to care about what’s going on. I think I may have made a choice that amounts to cultural genocide because I didn’t really get everything that was being said to me in the set up of this plot point? Oh well, on to Tatooine!
The Empire is treated well here: they’re essentially a fifth faction of assholes but one that you can never get in good with and who are always somewhere between “annoyance” and “antagonist.” I’m anti-spacefacist but at the end of the day I need to make some credits to upgrade my ship and if they’ll just leave me alone so I can deal with the Hutts I’ll be as happy as Han Solo to avoid any Imperial entanglements.
I’ve said for years I wanted a Star Wars experience without Jedi or Sith, and think the best of Star Wars recently (Andor and Rogue One) have been those types of stories. Outlaws could pull a third act switch-a-roo and give Kay Force powers or a lightsaber…but I hope they don’t. Let me assemble my heist crew, take some Sabbac pots to keep the credits flowing, smuggle some cargo on land and in space, and work with these underworld dirtbags for another 20-30 hours and I’ll have had a good time.