Summary

• Star Wars Outlaws gives a Mandalorian Season 1 vibe, focusing on simple stories in the universe.
• But the space battles seem off.
• The game features cutscene-heavy fast travel like Starfield.

Despite middling previews coming out of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Summer Game Fest, I’m still interested in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars Outlaws. Ubisoft’s take on the Star Wars universe is giving me a Mandalorian Season 1 vibe, before all the Ahsokas ꦫand Skywalkers and other Glup Shittos arrived to fold it into the wider lore.

I’m a man who wants his 168澳洲幸运5开奖网: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 Yoda’s origin story. This is why I’m finding 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Acolyte refre♔shing, and why I’m immediately turned off b💧y practically any other modern Star Wars media.

Andor is the exception that proves the r🍌ule. 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 𓂃Solo, she’s the perfect vehicle to get m꧃e engaged with a new Star Wars story. The actual vehicles, on the other hand, might turn me off.

Yesterday’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ubisoft Forward showcase spent a long time dwelling on Star Wars Outlaws. It’s clearly the company’s golden goose, along with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and it’s putting all of its eggs in these two multi-million dolla𒊎r baskets. While the gunslinging and adventuring looked interesting, the extended space battle gave me the opposite feeling.

It’s 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 &ndash🦩; weaving together the chaos of war with effective ship-handling mechanics to create a🐻n 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 ti💃mes, 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 d💝ifferent to how it looks, but it’s a little worrying.

Something that definitely won’t 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 cutsc💜ene, after which you turn up on 🌳the planet. Why are we still doing this?

This is a direct parallel to Starfield’s space travel. Which was fundamentally terrible. Why did we need to watch three (or more) cutscenes to get around the galaxy? I understand thဣat not everyone wants to play an Elite Dangerous-esque simulator, but why can’t we fast travel from one planet’s 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 it&r꧑squo;s a trader, a distress call, or an enemy who immediately opens fire at you. If yo𝐆u 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). It’s got story, it’s got Star Wars Easter Eggs, it’s got exploration, it’s got your lil pet. Do we need space battles on top of that? Maybe the devs wanted to include it because it’s a very Star Wa🌌rs thing, but I’d 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 we’ll 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, you’ll know it’s full of stuff to do. Starfield’s empty planets exacerbated the travel problem because🐽, when you arrived after the three cutscenes, you were met with procedurally-generated 🐽emptiness.

I’m 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 tr⛎avel worth it.