Interview: Star Wars Outlaws' setbacks made its new expansion more interesting
Now one of the best Star Wars games (or Ubisoft games) in years.
Everyone likes games that are great out of the gate, right? But I’m a sucker for a stumbler that needs some time to find its footing.
Nearly eight months since its clunky launch, Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws has been patched and extended into one of the company’s most interesting and satisfying games in years.
The third-person multi-planet Jedi-free game is an origin story for scoundrel Kay Vess. It’s an adventure that is less concerned with lightsabers and the Force than it is with blasters, broken droids, and doing jobs for crime syndicates.
The game is also very good now.
A surprising new story pack expansion, A Pirate’s Fortune, came out last week, to seemingly cap things off.
The rough launch even helped make this add-on—the last announced for the game—better, given what Outlaws’ post-launch creative director, Drew Rechner, told me yesterday about its development.
Aspects of Outlaws’ combat and stealth gameplay that were weak at launch and were improved with patches became aspects the team wanted to showcase in A Pirate’s Fortune, altering initial plans for what it’d contain, Rechner explained.
“I think in the end it made it a lot stronger,” he said.
It helped that Ubisoft, for better or worse, has had to do this kind of thing before.
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