At first glance, Star Wars Outlaws is aiming to realize all of your galaxy far, far away fantasies, but if you look closely enough, Massive’s new open-world actioner is an amalgam of numerous other games that came before it, rehashing all the tired tropes of interactive blockbuster entertainment to create a set of selling blurbs with no real depth.
We’ve seen it countless times before. Licensed games usually persevere at the forbearance of a franchise’s name and popularity, rather than their own merits. For games like Outlaws, publishers take that a step further by incorporating higher production values, imitating game design philosophies from other prominent titles, and even resorting to fan service. But it’s not necessarily the so-called “corporate cash-grab attempt” that puts us off, but the game’s own roaring mediocrity.
In this article, we will discuss why Star Wars Outlaws will almost certainly fail, and, to give credit where credit might be due, why there’s a very small chance that it might succeed despite the odds being stacked so clearly against it.
Here’s how the gameplay demo for Outlaws plays out: You’re introduced to the game’s main character – a scruffy-looking nerf-herder who goes by the name of Kay Vess. She’s a wiseacre, an outlaw, and a person out for her own interests at the height of the Empire’s tyrannical rule over the galaxy. Sound a little too familiar? Well, don’t worry, because Massive Entertainment has a big twist to completely throw you off your calculations. This time, instead of a bipedal Neanderthal growling unintelligibly as a comic relief sidekick to your burgeoning hero, we have a commando droid, called ND-5, cracking jokes and filling in the silence that looms over long stretches of play in a setting that has yet to justify its allusion to open-world game design.
Kay Vess finishes her current mission and slowly creeps her way out of a criminal gang’s hideout, but this being a gameplay demo for a global showcase, she doesn’t get away undetected. The NPCs see our heroine and start shooting in her direction, whereupon she unholsters her own blaster and returns fire. The gunplay is anything you might expect from a third-person shooter, except that it doesn’t do much besides giving you the option to change settings on the blaster’s fire mode.
The main character then grapples down the building, gets on her speeder bike, and drives away from the compound. The enemies give chase, and Vess oh-so-generically remarks, “These guys don’t quit.” She manages to lose them, of course, and traverse a seemingly open-world landscape that stretches many kilometers in each direction, ultimately coming up on a small town. After concluding their business, Kay and ND-5 board their ship and fly to orbit, where they engage in a starfighter combat with a couple of hustlers.
The mechanics in this part eerily remind us of Star Wars: Battlefront, but what sets this apart is the seamless manner in which you can fly off a planet and then jump into hyperspace, arriving at another destination without so much as the glimmer of a loading screen.
Here, we have to give Massive credit for utilizing the incredible speed of ninth-gen SSDs to create such an expansive open-world experience, but the rest of this showcase, as described above, brings to mind a very ill-formed mashup of things we’ve already seen before.
What would even constitute the idea of an open world in the galaxy far, far away? Starfield, the newest game from Bethesda, is set in an open-world galaxy that contains more than a thousand planets for players to explore, and though we truly believe in the team’s abilities to craft an immersive open world, we already know that many of those places will be a shallow algorithmically generated disappointment. How many planets will Outlaws feature when it arrives? And how massive will each map on those planets truly be? Will they be filled with meticulously crafted side quests and hand-sculpted landscapes where each corner has a unique identity and a story to tell? Or will it be more in the vein of other recent Ubisoft open-worlds as seen in Assassin’s Creed or Far Cry, where there has never been a better embodiment of “quantity over quality” in terms of content?
If we’re being entirely honest with ourselves, Star Wars Outlaws looks like a great game on the surface level, but altogether repetitive and shallow when taken apart and thought of as the sum of its parts. Of course, there’s always the possibility that a developer will manage to exceed expectations and create a truly visceral experience against all odds, but that’s not something Outlaws’ 10-minute gameplay demo highlights by any stretch of the imagination. Perhaps that’s the main issue with this game. If there’s more to Massive’s latest sci-fi venture, it’s not readily apparent here, at least not when the game is struggling so hard to come off as appealing by just rehashing a set of generic tropes in terms of level design and gameplay synergy.
There’s nothing wrong with a cliché if the execution is right. In fact, when it comes down to it, few ideas are truly original and innovative, and even those draw a fair bit of their initial spark out of things that already exist. If we were to nitpick unoriginal games — or more broadly, works of art in the entertainment industry — then most of the products out there would be dismissed without a second glance. But if a creative truly understands what they’re doing with a genre and its tropes, then they can make it work under that context even if it’s repetitive and unoriginal.
It’s our deepest hope that Massive is down the right path in this regard, but with the studio having its hands tied working on two massive open-world games — the other being the ambitious Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora — we’re not optimistic that will be the case.
And that is, if neither of the games is subject to any delays, as can be prevalent in the gaming industry. As of now, Frontiers of Pandora is slated for release on December 7, 2023, for current-gen platforms, while Outlaws is being scheduled for an unspecified date in 2024.