Ubisoft has just launched the first post in a series of developer updates on Star Wars Outlaws, promising more improvements to come for the open-world game. Like… a lot of improvements. There are so many fixes coming for so many basic elements of the game that I'm starting to feel bad for playing the game and having a good time when it first launched.
This first dev update post is penned by Drew Rechner, who's taking over as creative director now that Julian Gerighty is moving on to The Division 3. Rechner highlights the big stealth fixes for certain story missions and other fixes that Ubisoft has recently deployed as being the result of fan feedback, but says there are still several "key areas" the team wants to improve with future updates.
"The first key area of improvement to the game is combat where we see a real opportunity to add more depth and excitement to the experience, further rewarding your tactics and precision," Rechner explains. "Our second key area is stealth which is not only about improving the readability and consistency of enemy detection, but also providing choice in how you want to approach each encounter. Finally, our third key area of focus is centered around the character controls, which means improving the reliability of cover, increasing the responsiveness of climbing and crouching, and generally improving the consistency of the controls overall."
We'll get more concrete details on what these updates will entail in the weeks to come, and "all of this will culminate" in title update 1.4, which'll land on November 21 alongside the Steam version and the game's first DLC pack.
Rechner says the devs will be "celebrating and embracing player choice more than ever before, whether it's sneaking through encounters, going in blasters-blazing, or everything in-between." The biggest point of criticism against Outlaws' gameplay comes down to just how much it forces you to stick to stealth, and if the devs aim to make a change on that front it sounds like a pretty fundamental shift in the game's underpinnings.
All of these changes sound great, but they've also got me a hair disappointed. My feelings on the game pretty much reflect Josh's Star Wars Outlaws review - a 3.5 out of 5 star evaluation calling out the repetitive missions and stealth - but I had a good time with it when I played it from start to finish in the month after launch. But now all this has me thinking that if even Ubisoft knows there's this much room for improvement, was I a fool to enjoy myself? These fixes are a net positive, but you only get your first playthrough of a big story-driven game once, and knowing just how much better Outlaws could be in a few months' time has me bummed.
