Can you believe Star Wars Outlaws only came out three months ago? For all the anguish, criticism and hand-wringing it inspired it feels more like 17 years.
Surveying this discourse, you'd be forgiven for thinking (if you hadn't played it yourself) that this was one of the worst games of the year! Such is the nature of video game discussion today, fuelled by the decline of the website, the rise of the thumbnail reaction face and the obliteration of traditional social media channels. This game cost money, came from a big publisher and had an even bigger license attached to it. It was set in a universe with a toxic waste dump for a fandom, while starring a woman in the lead role. There's no room for nuance when the stakes are that high. No room to explore what the game is and what it’s trying to do. The Emperor's thumb, as driven by algorithms as it is, can only point up or down.
I didn't play Outlaws in August for two reasons: One, I couldn't afford to buy it at the time. And two, I'd been cursed by that discourse. When a big review scores the game 2/5 and makes very convincing arguments, I'm affected. When normal people make seemingly valid complaints about Ubisoft's tired open world formula, as someone bored with some recent Assassin's Creed games, that hit home. And as someone who has all but fallen out of love with Star Wars following Disney's decade and change of neglect, even the license held little appeal.
But I played it across November and December, after a number of patches and updates to the game have done everything from solve some technical issues to making stealth sections easier. And let me tell you: I think it's fuckin' great.
I'm not here to diminish people's very understandable concerns with so much of this game's design. A lot of the negative reviews were right, from a certain point of view: Outlaws has problems. Whole sections are broken or pointless (the criminal influence system especially), there are dumb restrictions on stuff like weapon use (you only carry one gun permanently), space combat is underbaked, the speeder is a nightmare to control, I could go on forever. And would, if others hadn't done so already.
I am here, though, to point out that a lot of those issues (though not all!) were clearly caused by a major publisher, desperate for an injection of cash, rushing a licensed AAA game onto the market before it was ready. And that the three months since launch have seen the game markedly improved. It's still weird that you can pick up other people's guns only sometimes, but at least now you don't drop them every time you climb a ladder. It's still annoying that you can't hide bodies you knock out silently during stealth sections, but now if you're discovered there are no more instafails, so you can at least blast your way out.
Basically, whatever game it was that people played and reviewed and posted and talked about in August, that game was from August. The one you'll be playing in December is slightly different and, if any of the affected stuff matters to you, better.
A lot of the criticism of Outlaws upon release seemed based on what it wasn't--it wasn't as sneaky as Assassin's Creed, wasn't as blasty as The Division, etc--so let's spend a little time talking about what it is. It's a game where you play as Kay Vess, a young criminal making her way through the galaxy on her first big score. Well, second...the first got a bounty put on her head, so you're also making your way through the galaxy trying to clear that. You've got your own ship, your own crew, you have a little rodent sidekick. You visit a number of Star Wars planets--some of them with large open worlds to explore--and there's a combination of main storyline quests, contracts and card games to keep you busy.
Sometimes you get to ride a skittish speederbike, which can be frustrating (you crash a lot!) or amazing (sunsets over Tatooine!). Other times you fly a spaceship and shoot at TIE Fighters in a way that feels like a mobile port of Star Wars Squadrons. And sometimes you get to play cards. The first two are lowpoints. The latter is, depending on how much you enjoy games-within-games, one of the finest examples of the genre.
You spend the vast majority of your time in Outlaws just walking around. A lot. Exploring towns, talking to people; you do a bunch of missions, most of which involve sneaking around somewhere (hence the Assassin's Creed comparisons), and some of which are closer to something like Tomb Raider or Uncharted, where you just explore a wreck/ruin and do some basic platforming.
That sneaking has been one of the discourse's main bones of contention, because for such a cornerstone of the experience, it's not great. Combat isn't much better; aside from a neat trick where you can use different types of blast for different enemies, it's plagued by poor AI and a disastrously poor cover system (in that there kinda isn't one).
It's not an unplayable disaster; you can have fun on these missions. There are some problems to solve and some bank vaults to rob, and it never gets old sneaking up on space fascists and punching them in the face. I'm also going to take this opportunity to express my love for Nix, your little space cat sidekick who is there primarily as a quality-of-life tool, able to fetch distant items and distract enemies with the push of a button. This game would not have been what it is without him.
If the missions are just fine, and other parts are not great, and some other parts are even terrible, then isn't Outlaws--despite the updates and patches and supposed improvements--still the same thing everyone was shitting on earlier in the year? How can a stealth game with busted stealth and a shooting game with no cover and an open world game with an uncontrollable speeder bike be "fuckin’ great"?
Because I don't care about any of that. This is not Assassin's Creed. It's not Uncharted, it's not Tomb Raider, it's not Gears of War. It's not Pod Racer, it's not Squadrons, it's not anything else it's been compared to and found wanting against. This is Star Wars Outlaws, and it doesn't exist to challenge your expectations of the stealth genre, nor to redefine the open world experience for the 21st century. It's a Star Wars game that wants to be maybe the most Star Wars game ever made, and I think it comes pretty close.
Outlaws is, before anything else, an adaptation. That's what Ubisoft spent the money on. The company already has multiple open world AAA franchises, it didn't pay Disney to compete with itself. It paid for Star Wars, for Darth Vader and Rodians and Stormtroopers, and that's what Outlaws does best. It's a game that shines when you're doing some of the (quite literally) most pedestrian acts like walking around, talking to people and soaking up the sights. And it knows this; the game is full of locations and moments where you're specifically prompted to press a button that just leans you on a railing, or sits you down at a cafe, and lets you watch the world--full of very Star Wars characters chatting and going about their lives--pass you by.
It does this so well that even its dalliances into cliche end up being highlights. You will once again visit Tatooine during this game, but it's not the tiresome recap you might have expected, yet another superficial representation of George Lucas' late-90s reinvention of the place. Outlaws has such a love for the universe's traditions, and such a meticulous eye for detail, that this Tatooine feels more like Ralph McQuarrie's version of the planet: a desolate frontier place, a spaghetti Western with laser guns. It was a pleasure to explore every inch of its Mos Eisley and poke my head into corners only previously glimpsed.
Walking down the stairs into New Hope's famous cantina was a distinct highlight. That cantina is part of my memories of what used to be my favourite movie; the power of walking into a perfect recreation of it set in an open world video game can't be understated. This is the burden, but also the power, of a thoughtful adaptation. People loved the wizard game despite its flaws, and Alien Isolation is still spoken of in hushed tones over a decade later. Outlaws is in the same category, its love for the source material (specifically, the late-70s source of the source material) shining through everywhere from costume design to sound effects.
It's not Outlaws' fault that it arrived at a time when public conversations about Star Wars has become a minefield, for reasons both easy and difficult to explain. This game doesn't care about Skywalkers, or cancelled movies, or terrible TV shows, or online culture wars, or pretty much anything that has contributed to the dire state of things in 2024. All it wanted to do was bring the original trilogy's vibe to life in a lavish, immersive video game space. For all its other missteps, it absolutely nails that.
There's so much irony in the fact so many chuds, so many middle-aged lifelong Star Wars fans, were so hostile to this game, because Outlaws is exactly the kind of thing people have wanted from a Star Wars game for so long. Andor is the closest comparison here, an exploration of the universe free from the burden of its lore, that doesn't try to weave itself into an existing story and whose lone encounter with the Force is to treat it as a mind-blowing party trick, not a sacred code. Outlaws is just a game about a single, likeable kid caught up in the events of the Star Wars universe, which, like in Andor, looms enormously when the camera is free to zoom out from the Skywalker family and Jedi Council.
I loved every weird Star Wars guy I met playing Outlaws. I loved every shitty little bar and every sterile Imperial base. I loved riding around Tatooine (when I could go in a long straight line) and flying a spaceship through a debris field (when nobody was shooting at me). I loved the way my little gun sounds just like a Star Wars gun should, and that my spaceship's cockpit looks just like a Star Wars ship's cockpit should.
I loved all that shit because, in spite of the discourse, in spite of the missteps and crimes committed by Disney over the past decade, I still have love in my heart for Star Wars. Not all of it, of course, but I was born in the 1980s, and that's the Star Wars this game doubles down on. It's a cultural security blanket, an old friend, a cherished photograph on the shelf. The team at Massive (and everyone else who worked on it, it's a big Ubisoft collab) deserve a ton of praise for the lengths the art and sound and writing and design have gone to here to make everything look and feel like it came straight out of the original film trilogy.
The beauty of a good adaptation--and this is what people miss when they lament the lack of movie tie-in games, not the rushed development and rudimentary gameplay--is that it's something beyond a video game. As a video game, Outlaws had, and still has, issues! The stealth still needs more visual feedback and options, the gunplay is maddening without cover and space combat probably shouldn't have been in the game at all. Some of those frustrations will be addressed in updates; others we're likely stuck with forever.
As a Star Wars game, though? One that lets you spend 20-30 hours really living inside the universe, warts and all? This is one hell of a game.
