Final Hands-On: Star Wars Outlaws doesn’t feel like an Ubisoft open world at all

Until now, Massive Entertainment hasn’t shown off what is arguably Star Wars Outlaws‘ biggest selling point.

You might remember from when press played the game at Summer Game Fest earlier this year that the majority of the content we were shown was from linear levels, which, while a fine way of showing off the game’s gunplay and protagonist Kay Vess, this focus on linearity perhaps wasn’t the best way to show off a game that is selling itself as the first open-world Star Wars game.

Now, just six weeks before the game will be in the hands of fans, we got a chance to see exactly what makes Star Wars Outlaws tick. We spent four hours in both the open world and dense cities of Star Wars Outlaws, which is shaping up to be a seriously fun, if rather familiar adventure.

Star Wars Outlaws is a lot like The Force Awakens. It looks like Star Wars, it sounds like Star Wars, and if you’re even a moderate fan of the franchise, you’re likely to have a good time on the journey. But, the other side of that coin is that nothing we’ve played so far feels like it’s pushing in a bold new direction.

Not every game has to. It’s fine for something to be a really good example of some familiar trappings. We just wonder how many non-Star Wars fans that will actually bring in. It’s a comfort blanket, but is it any more than that?

Star Wars Outlaws is a third-person shooter. In our demo, we were primarily alternating between our primary blaster fire, which does exactly what you would expect it to, and a stun charge, which serves as a get-out-of-jail-free card if you’re caught during a stealth sequence.

We were dropped near the start of the game on the planet of Tosharna. We’re told to investigate a local city, and it’s here where we got the first taste of what the settlements in Star Wars Outlaws are really like. The city is in the grips of Imperial control. There are control points where Stormtroopers are checking papers, there’s a sense of unease on the streets.

But it’s also a town controlled by the underworld. Despite the imperial presence, shady gangs operate around every corner, and it’s here where Kay will make her fortune and escape a the “Death Mark” bounty that’s been placed on her head.

One of the most interesting political elements of the Imperial age of Star Wars is the way that crime was able to take over the galaxy in smaller planets due to the Empire’s lack of interest in actually policing it. While rarely explored in the films, the degradation of cities that were thriving in the Republic age to now being dens for low-level thugs and criminal outfits is a seedy side to Star Wars that Outlaws nails.

Soon Kay is attempting to ingratiate herself with a local crime syndicate, and it’s here where the game’s faction reputation system shows itself for the first time.

The game’s reputation system is both one of its most interesting features and something we worry could turn out to be somewhat underbaked. Essentially, missions you take on in the world will result in you gaining or losing a reputation with the game’s factions. These are the likes of The Hutt Cartel, The Ashiga Clan and Crimson Dawn.

Your status with these factions will influence things like what items are available at certain merchants, discounts at those merchants, and access to areas of the world. Occasionally, you’ll come across a fortified building or outpost, which, depending on your status with the group controlling it, you can either stroll in or it’s time to start blasting.

“Occasionally, you’ll come across a fortified building or outpost, which, depending on your status with the group controlling it, you can either stroll in or it’s time to start blasting.”

During one mission in our preview session, we were tasked with sneaking through the back of a restaurant in order to get to a part of the map with some hidden documents. Because of our status with the clan that owned it, we skipped half of the task, basically walking right through.

This is a very obvious cause and effect of “getting in” with the gangs. However, due to the fact that the game has to account for you being on good and bad terms with everyone, and not locking you out of content, it can sometimes feel hollow.

Sure, if we didn’t have the right reputation with that group, we couldn’t have brazenly walked through that door, but just 10 feet away, there was an absolutely massive Kay Vess-shaped vent staring us in the face that would have led us to the same area.

Similarly, during a mission we double-crossed our mission giver and lied to them about a score, instead of freaking out and vowing to never work with us again, the mission giver simply said that they thought we were lying and only did half the job, so we’d only get half the pay. Not very criminal, in our opinion.

We asked if the team considered a more drastic reputation or morality system, especially when despite Kay’s plucky, friendly character, the player themselves can get up to some pretty shady dealings in the game.

“Being nice to every crime syndicate probably wouldn’t make any sense in this universe,” laughs associate game director Thibault Machin. “The fantasy is better nailed with the reputation system we have in Outlaws.”

The example we can’t stop thinking about is, during one mission, we entered a random room and started searching for information. One of the data pads we came across told us that the next Fathier (a Star Wars horse) race was fixed in order for the largest one to win.

There are places around the world to bet on these races. With this information, you can then put all of your credits on the fixed race, guaranteeing profit. While this is a cool way to use information around the world in order to benefit Kay, it didn’t really seem like something the character that we’d come to know would do. An option to shape your Kay into a more street-tough, no-nonsense scoundrel or someone with a stricter moral code may have been more interesting.

Kay herself is an incredibly charming on-screen presence. Played by Humberly Gonzalez, who’s previously appeared in several Ubisoft projects, Kay is a character we’re happy to spend 40 hours with. She’s funny and witty, without quipping your ear off.

Kay is her own character, but it’s impossible not to get a whiff of Han Solo off of her. We asked Nikki Foy, one of the game’s lead writers, how the team approached shaping a scoundrel character without doing a tribute act to arguably the series’ most beloved character.

“A scoundrel in Star Wars to me is a regular person who is trying to carve out their own place in the galaxy,” said Foy.

“There’s not a rebel, they’re not Empire… they’re a person that refuses to play the hand that she’s been dealt. She’s going to go above and demand that the world gives her something that she feels she deserves. I think in terms of developing a new character in that, it was exciting, and it was a challenge that was satisfying to meet.”

Nix is the player’s in-game companion and an essential tool for interacting with the world. Nix can distract or attack enemies, open or close doors, or interact with basically any notable object in a level. During a panel prior to our gameplay session, Massive described Nix as the player’s extendable arm throughout the world, and there’s no better way to describe it.

Plenty of games have attempted to let the player control a separate co-op partner alongside their main character, but all too often it’s a clunky mess of menus and slowing down the action to give out orders. Nix, on the other hand, is entirely controlled using two buttons, and the game is very intuitive about predicting what you’re trying to do with Nix and offering you a single button press to execute it.

During the production of the game, Nix was played by a professional puppeteer, rather than, as Humberly describes, “a floating tennis ball,” which she claims gave her performance much more authenticity as she forgot that the puppet version of Nix wasn’t a real animal that she was taking care of.

Much like Cal Kestis and BD-1, Kay and Nix are a wonderful double act. Their relationship is more than enough to carry large parts of the game where Kay would otherwise be talking entirely to herself.

When it was announced that Ubisoft was doing an open-world Star Wars game, the jokes about towers pretty much wrote themselves, but in truth, Star Wars Outlaws doesn’t really feel like a Ubisoft open world at all.

When exploring Tosharna, we were struck by how little the game actually led us to interesting locations, instead relying on us to use our eyes to decide what we wanted to explore. As we were speeder-biking through a field, we heard on the radio that there was some Imperial activity nearby.

This didn’t pop a massive exclamation mark up on our screen, and the game didn’t wait for us to be perfectly in range for the event to occur, instead,  we saw the ship in the distance, chased it down and watched as the Stormtroopers attacked a local group of pirates. Instead of helping them, we waited for the Stormtroopers to be finished, stole all of the lot and ran off. We hope the game is full of little moments like that.

This moment reminded us of Red Dead Redemption’s random world events. Small, less-than-side quests going on in the world that make it feel more alive.

“The jokes about towers pretty much wrote themselves, but in truth, Star Wars Outlaws doesn’t really feel too much like a Ubisoft open world at all.”

The cities are full of them too. In a random outpost, we walk past a malfunctioning droid, only to be told that its motivation function has broken, and thus it’s too depressed to continue its work as an R5 droid. While this small conversation does lead to a larger side quest if you choose to follow it, we loved the sense that any conversation we had could lead to something much larger.

The area we are least sold on is the game’s space flight. Between planets, Kay can take to the stars and fly around. While it’s novel to be able to fly from planet to planet, and there are some incredibly beautiful sights to see in space, the combat and flying didn’t feel great.

Both EA‘s Star Wars Battlefront reboot and Star Wars Squadrons have it well beat for space flight gameplay, and while we do concede that it’s a far larger focus on those games, big Star Wars fans who’ve likely played all of the recent Star Wars console titles will notice the disparity.

We assume that due to space flight being a key element of the scoundrel experience, the team felt that it was essential to include, but if the game dropped it completely in favour of the game ship being more of a fast travel function like in the Star Wars Jedi games, we don’t currently feel like a lot would be missed.

By the end of our time with Star Wards Outlaws, we knew exactly what the next 40 hours of our time with the game looked like, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t want to play it. It’s fairly formulaic, but it’s nailing the formula that it’s following. There’s been plenty of room for a third-person Uncharted-ish Star Wars game in the market, and Outlaws is a great attempt.

Kay and Nix remain stars of the show, not just due to Humberly’s excellent performance, but Nix’s genuine function in both quiet and violent gameplay. Using Nix never feels clunky, and he’s an utterly adorable new entry in the canon of things that will make Disney millions in toy sales.

While the space flight didn’t wow and the faction system feels like it’s a bit too safe, as soon as we’d finished our session, we wanted to continue that save file to see more of the world, speak to more strange patrons of dingey pubs, and live in the grimy world of the Imperial age.

Star Wars Outlaws will release for consoles and PC on August 30.