Highlights

Despite middling previews coming out of Summer Game Fest, Im still interested in Star Wars Outlaws. Ubisofts take on the Star Wars universe is giving me a Mandalorian Season 1 vibe, before all the Ahsokas and Skywalkers and other Glup Shittos arrived to fold it into the wider lore.

Im a man who wants his Star Wars media to just be little guys doing stuff in a universe I know, rather than a universe-altering plot that ends up with Yodas origin story. This is why Im finding The Acolyte refreshing, and why Im immediately turned off by practically any other modern Star Wars media.

Andor is the exception that proves the rule. What a show.

An independent force working apart from the Jedi, Kay Vess is an engaging protagonist. A rascal and likeable scumbag in the vein of Han Solo, shes the perfect vehicle to get me engaged with a new Star Wars story. The actual vehicles, on the other hand, might turn me off.

Yesterdays Ubisoft Forward showcase spent a long time dwelling on Star Wars Outlaws. Its clearly the companys golden goose, along with Assassins Creed Shadows, and its putting all of its eggs in these two multi-million dollar baskets. While the gunslinging and adventuring looked interesting, the extended space battle gave me the opposite feeling.

Its hard to get space travel right. One of the best attempts in recent years is another Star Wars game, Squadrons. It nailed the series iconic dogfights especially in VR weaving together the chaos of war with effective ship-handling mechanics to create an atmosphere that was hectic but controlled.

On the contrary, Outlaws fights already seem a little off. If the trailer, which is supposed to be a red hot sizzle reel of the best the game can offer, shows a player missing the target numerous times, turning sluggishly, and generally handling poorly. Of course, this could all be different by the time we get our hands on the spaceship, or it could feel very different to how it looks, but its a little worrying.

Something that definitely wont feel better, however, is the fast travel between planets. The gameplay clearly showed that you just need to select a planet from a menu to start a cutscene, after which you arrive in its atmosphere. From there, you can select a landing spot to trigger another cutscene, after which you turn up on the planet. Why are we still doing this?

This is a direct parallel to Starfields space travel. Which was fundamentally terrible. Why did we need to watch three (or more) cutscenes to get around the galaxy? I understand that not everyone wants to play an Elite Dangerous-esque simulator, but why cant we fast travel from one planets surface to another?

The answer is that games want to make space interesting. Interesting in the eyes of Bethesda and Ubisoft is having an engagement in the planetary atmosphere. Maybe its a trader, a distress call, or an enemy who immediately opens fire at you. If you could skip the atmospheric scene, you would miss all these storytelling opportunities. But would this be such a bad thing?

Games are big enough already. Outlaws has gunplay, stealth sections, vehicular travel on the surface (the speeder looks excellent, by the way). Its got story, its got Star Wars Easter Eggs, its got exploration, its got your lil pet. Do we need space battles on top of that? Maybe the devs wanted to include it because its a very Star Wars thing, but Id prefer one takeoff-hyperspace-landing cutscene to half-baked spaceflight broken up by three separate cutscenes. It would be less work, and a better experience for the player, especially considering well be zipping back and forth between planets on a regular basis.

Outlaws does have one advantage, however: its planets. At least when you arrive on a planet in the Ubisoft title, youll know its full of stuff to do. Starfields empty planets exacerbated the travel problem because, when you arrived after the three cutscenes, you were met with procedurally-generated emptiness.

Im willing to give Star Wars Outlaws a chance, but the space sections are already giving me the ick. I hope that the planet surfaces hold enough excitement to make the painful fast travel worth it.

We just got another extended look at Star Wars Outlaws' gameplay at Ubisoft Forward.

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Star Wars Outlaws' Space Travel Looks Disappointingly Similar To Starfield's - TheGamer