Gaming Star Wars: Outlaws (Ubisoft) [Mod Approved]

Saw both trailers and, for now, not quite sold.

As always, it looks and sounds like Star Wars. Kudos for the game design elements there, but so far I got very heavy vertical slice vibes from this trailer. Lots of character exposition and some very safe looking gameplay. I need more, Ubisoft, I need more.

 

Given it is still some time away, it looks pretty promising.

 

I'd like to see more of how "open world" it is before passing judgement on how good it will be.

SWTOR isn't really open world, the planets have big sections with loading times.

Star Wars Galaxies was, you could roam around a planet pretty much anywhere you wanted and fly into space pretty far to do combat & hyperspace jump to another planet.
Obviously that was a MMO and this won't be, but something on the same scale as Galaxies would be impressive

 

WOW. The gameplay looks fantastic.

 

IMO your never getting that big of a game outside of an MMO.

honestly though on that front wouldn’t be shocked if a new MMO is in the works for Star Wars. SWTOR is nearing its natural end. (Although I think it will stick around in maintenance mode for at least a couple years) so we probably have that to look forward to by the end of the decade.

 

Even the big MMOs tend to go with a zone structure of large open spaces, see Destiny 2 and Elder Scrolls Online.

The nearest to an open galaxy is games like No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous, maybe Everspace 2 and Starfield when they become available.

 

I briefly watched the scene where the protagonist meets with the Mon Cala character and the Imperial and you're "free" to make whatever choices you want. Then as you walk away you get 2500 credits. So it seems your decisions, at least in this one instance, effect your credits, which reminded me of the mechanic in Square's Guardians of the Galaxy. I didn't love it there, and I don't love it here.

With open world games, like Tear of the Kingdom (that's I'm currently entrenched in), I need to care about the characters. I don't love this character or any of the characters thus far. The "pet" is cute but so is BD-1. If you want a female bounty hunter to grab people why not an established character like Aurra Sing or comic favorite Doctor Aphra?

I don't see myself investing the time and energy into this game but time will tell.

 

This little feller is gonna give Grogu a run for his money

 

Seems a pretty clear structure;

Keep the money - get Imperial wanted rating
Pay off the Imperial - less cash, but no wanted rating.

 

So mo' money mo' problems?

 

If you got problems
I feel for you son
I got 99 problems
But Imperials / money ain't one

 

When did they go back to LucasFilm Games as the name instead of LucasArts?

Anyone play the LucasArts game Outlaws?

 

2021, which I think was around when they announced non-exclusivity of the license.

 

Galaxies was 20 years too early. Id do terrible things to resurrect it, or have PreCU/NGE remade.

 

looks decent to me

I generally like the open world maps in the assassin's creed games, so pretty ok with a star warsy version of those

hopefully the story and side quests are interesting

 

It doesn't have to NOT look like Star Wars or not feel like Star Wars to be set in a different era. And it doesn't have to be experimental. It can still have all the quintessential elements of Star Wars and be set 2000 years before the movies, or 400 years before the movies, or whatever they choose to. And I never mentioned "launching a new era". At the end of the day, it could have been set in the High Republic era for all we know. To me the whole "we live in dangerous times and I am trying to make it in this huge galaxy" is way overplayed, not just in terms of the movies and the shows, but even in the games that we have gotten so far in Star Wars (and not only actually).

All I know about videogames (and any other medium of storytelling really) is that if that game has a good story, then people will buy it. It will be hyped, advertised, it will have word of mouth and it will be a success. Regardless of the setting. It's not like people saw the trailer and said "oh cool it has stormtroopers I will buy that game".

 

The Lucasfilm LTD logo started as the Lucasfilm Games logo. When LTD adopted the logo Games stopped using it for a more generic logo before becoming LucasArts a few years later. I never knew why both couldn’t use it.

Ironic it’s back as the original use.

 

Maybe it's just me being paranoid, but I just feel like because this game does feature a female lead it's getting far more scrutinized with uncertainty than it would've gotten if it had a male lead.

Were there a good amount of SW fans who were apprehensive about JFO when its trailer was first released?

 

Quite a few I think but the basis wouldn't have been due to character gender but that it had been so long since there had been a good, single player SW game.

As an AC Odyssey player who had a fun time with Kass I'm not seeing the problem.

 

Most big budget games make the majority of their sales in a launch week+2 window. Word of mouth is considered worthless and new IPs or excessive deviation from the perceived norms in existing IPs are considered high risk. Ubisoft is playing this very conservatively and has gone with the “recognizable” era of SW. They don’t care what we think about the era being overused because by virtue of visiting a website like this we’re not the audience they think they have to win over.

 

also it's the best era anyways

 

Tales From Galaxy’s Edge is mostly post-OT, but also has some High Republic Material, nothing from GCW era.

And before anyone says “the vr games are not AAA they don’t count”, TFGE is actually a pretty long, multi-chaptered and full-priced game, if you include the expansion.

Actually yes, a lot of fans complained that Cal was a "boring white guy" and whatnot, and still complain about it. My impression is that many SW fans still haven't played the games for this very reason.

There will of course be fans who complain about Kay being female or white. If she's gay some will complain about that, and if she's heterosexual others will complain about that too. It's the nature of culture war. My impression is that Ubisoft has generally tried to let players determine the character's sexuality on their own lately, to avoid these issues, but of course there is always some particular sexuality that will be "underrepresented" so you can't please everyone.

 

The only reason I didn’t count them was because I didn’t play them lol.

 

Eh, for me it's that generally speaking I don't like the games that Ubisoft puts out whereas the people at Respawn, the makers of Jedi: Fallen Order have a better pedigree.

I was initially very interested in Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs, and The Division when they first were announced but they ultimately didn't click for me. I can't really think of any Ubisoft games that I've loved. The second Assassin's Creed was an improvement over the first one but by the time I finished it I had zero interest in playing another one in the franchise. I played one or two of those Far Cry games and they were fine I guess? Nothing to write home about. Kinda dopey.

At best I find Ubisoft games to be just okay so it's not the female protagonist that I'm hung up on it's that the game is being made by a company that makes games that I'm not terribly interested in.

 

I agree that the Ubisoft games get very bland very fast, although for me it's because the settings get fairly boring, and once you've gotten the full gameplay experience, there's not much new to discover in subsequent installments. The AC series in particular, while it ostensibly should feel very different with all the time periods from antiquity to modernity, they somehow feel very samey, the cultures do not feel distinct, the peoples don't feel ancient. But I haven't played the ones since Origins so perhaps I've missed big improvements.

With Outlaws though, the setting is distinct enough that I believe it'll keep me interested. I'm still an incorrigible sucker for Star Wars, I even finished watching Season 3 of The Mandalorian. It'll probably come down to the character, Kay. So long as she doesn't constantly drop cringey humor, if she's at least a little charming on occasion, that should be enough along with setting to carry me through otherwise routine/grindy gameplay.