This month’s IGN First is Star Wars Outlaws! To kick things off, here’s how Massive Entertainment built the first open world Star Wars game, and what you'll be doing in it. Learn all about Star Wars Outlaws’ world, missions, Wanted System, development, and much more from the devs themselves, and check out some Star Wars Outlaws gameplay.
Star Wars Outlaws is this month’s IGN First and we’ve got a full mission of exclusive new Star Wars Outlaws gameplay to show you! Set on the classic desert planet of Tatooine, this expert mission takes Kay on a journey involving a Jawa and a Sarlacc pit as she journeys from the sand to the stars.
By the end of my four hours with Star Wars Outlaws, all I wanted to do was play more. I've found myself growing increasingly burnt out on open world games over the years, but this open world feels like one of the most complete and coherent I've seen in ages. I'll need a lot more time with Outlaws to know how it measures up against incredible games like Red Dead Redemption and Ghost of Tsushima, but the fact that it's reminding me so strongly of them is a good thing indeed.
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.
If there’s one thing that concerned me during my hands-on time, it’s bugs. Outlaws went gold well before the preview event, meaning that if I wasn’t playing the certification build, it was something mighty close. And while yes, there will inevitably be a day-one patch as most games have nowadays, it was still disappointing to see as many annoying little – admittedly mostly visual and harmless – glitches as I did. Hopefully that day-one update will knock out the bulk of them.
Ultimately, though, I had a fantastic time with Star Wars Outlaws. Open-world games tend to be jacks-of-all-trades, masters-of-none, and while I’m not sure Outlaws will master any of its gameplay components, it nonetheless not only does them all very well, but it does so with a convincing Star Wars sheen. And since there’s somehow never been an open-world Star Wars game before, it feels new, fresh, and most welcome. I’m glad this is arguably the first big-name game out this Fall on August 30, because I can’t wait to play more of it.
But I'm on board with the stuff that matters most to me: sneaking, questing, and exploring. I even want to know where Kay's story goes. The one cutscene I saw that featured the game's main antagonist, a real jerkwad of a mid-level bureaucrat, suggested he isn't hunting Kay because she poses some special threat to the Empire, but because she stole his favorite ship.
That's the sort of petty revenge I can get behind, especially as a break from the self-seriousness of recent Star Wars side stories. In almost five hours of Outlaws I didn't see a single character I recognized from a movie, and nobody invoked the Force. That alone makes it the most interesting Star Wars thing happening right now.
Get to know some of the worlds you'll be visiting in Star Wars Outlaws, including Akiva, Toshara, Kijimi, and Tatooine, in this new trailer for Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment's upcoming open-world single-player Star Wars scoundrel adventure.
werd da dann erst später einsteigen können...