The games industry is understandably nervous about AI. Most predictions see the new tech burrowing into the heart of game development, putting designers, artists, musicians, programmers and even game designers out of jobs. We’re not too far away from an entire game developed by AI, and if you want an advance peek into what that future will look like, pick up Star Wars Outlaws.
Outlaws has three main gameplay systems: stealth-based sneaking, third-person shooting, and open-world exploration. Ubisoft has mastered these systems across a dizzying amount of games, with Outlaws developer Massive Entertainment specifically responsible for the underrated Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and The Division franchise. If an open-world Star Wars game must exist, Massive and Ubisoft are the best candidate to make it. And yet something has gone awry in development.
First up the basics. Set in the original trilogy era, you play as Kay Vess, a young thief out to make a name for herself in the Star Wars underworld. Assisted by her adorable sidekick pet Nix, you explore a series of open worlds, take jobs for competing crime gangs, and crouch-walk your way through bases littered with waist-high crates. If you’ve played an open-world game in the last twenty years you’ll know the formula: accept a mission, head to a waypoint, sneak/blast your way to a button in the middle of an enemy base, watch a cutscene, rinse and repeat.
Outlaws is frustrating in that it’s not outright bad, it just does the bare minimum. Much of the game will be spent sneaking around enemies, but the stealth mechanics would have been considered underbaked 20 years ago, let alone now. In an ideal stealth title enemies are responsive to your actions, respond in a broadly realistic manner to threats, and are satisfying to outsmart and manipulate. In Outlaws they’re just braindead, not noticing an intruder ambling around the small room they’re in loudly punching their buddies to death mere meters away.
A moment that summed it up for me came when I was sneaking up behind a Stormtrooper and accidentally knocked a metal tray over. It clattered to the ground and I held my breath, cursing my lack of environmental awareness and expecting them to spin around and riddle me with blaster fire. But, sadly, they didn’t react and promptly became the 20th Stormtrooper in a row to perish to Kay Vess’ mighty fist (the Empire really needs to have a word with their helmet supplier…). We are now around a decade on from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and Arkham Knight, each of which delivered satisfying and complex stealth — why have we regressed so far?
Combat and exploration suffer similar problems. Outlaws constantly feels like we’re getting the basic gameplay foundations on which fun and novel wrinkles should have been built on, but weren’t. When these systems — the “game” part of the game — are so obviously lacking in depth and creativity, it feels like Massive went to some game development equivalent of ChatGPT and told it “generate a third-person stealth/action game.”
Outlaws also has some glaring visual problems, at least on consoles. Like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora this is fully ray traced on the Snowdrop Engine, but splashing out on the fancy lighting tech inevitably means sacrifices are made elsewhere. I played on the PlayStation 5’s 40fps balanced mode, which (as per Digital Foundry) targets an internal resolution of somewhere between 936p and 1252p, which is then reconstructed to 4K by FSR.
The result is, frankly, a visual mess. Detailed moving elements like hair and foliage have an unpleasant aliased shimmer and objects and characters even in the medium distance are smeared and blurry — it’s clear to anyone with eyes that Massive’s implementation of FSR is struggling with the low internal resolution on consoles. An interesting comparison is 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2, which utilizes far less complex lighting and environmental tech, but delivers a crisper, more consistent, and better-looking final image.
And, while I’m beating this drum, the ray tracing in Outlaws often looks outright bad! The shiny floors of Imperial bases should be an opportunity for ray tracing to show its worth, but they display an offputting blur that doesn’t resemble any real-life reflection I’ve ever seen. One planet features a large lake to speed across, and the water’s surface looked bizarre to the point I wondered if the game had glitched. Results seem better on high-powered PCs, so perhaps Outlaws‘ visual deficiencies are down to current-gen consoles buckling under the weight of resource-hungry lighting (which it goes without saying adds precisely nothing to gameplay).
Then there’s the fact that the character modeling and animation look prehistoric. The underworld setting means many NPCs are aliens, all of which look fine, but human characters’ facial animations and model design make you recall games from generations past. Unfortunately, this all strongly applies to Kay Vess herself, with her oddly angular face and robotic expressions draining away whatever personality mocap and voice actor Humberly González provides.
It’s worth underlining that Star Wars is one of the biggest and most lucrative franchises in entertainment history and Ubisoft is one of the most prominent publishers in gaming. If any game should arrive with ultra-high levels of polish, graphical fidelity, and complex gameplay systems it should be a megabudget Star Wars adventure! I can only theorize that Massive’s resources were stretched by it being developed in parallel with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and that, combined with a fairly strict Q3-4 2024 release window, meant that “eh, good enough to ship” became the behind-the-scenes philosophy.
For the final time, I want to underline that Outlaws isn’t a bad game. It’s merely adequate, clearing the lowest bars possible with no sense of individual authorship or direction. It is, ultimately, a box-ticking exercise that carefully fulfills contractual expectations between Ubisoft and Disney. Some will be satisfied by this slop, but just remember that the vast financial and artistic resources necessary to bring Outlaws to life could have been used to make a truly special Star Wars experience that we will now never get.
Star Wars Outlaws
This isn’t a bad game, just one that does the bare minimum at all times. There’s no depth, complexity or novelty here, and no sense of creative or artistic direction. This is a product, not a labor of love.
A copy of this game was provided by the Ubisoft for review. Reviewed on PlayStation 5.
