Star Wars Outlaws Is A Crappy Masterpiece

Kotaku reviews Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft's latest AAA title: I was staring at a wall. It was an early mission in Ubisoft's latest behemothic RPG, Star Wars Outlaws, in which I was charged with infiltrating an Empire base to recover some information from a computer, and this wall really caught my attention.

It was a perfect wall. It absolutely captured that late-70s sci-fi aesthetic of dark gray cladding broken up by utilitarian-gray panels covered in dull blinking lights, and I stopped to think about how much work must have gone into that wall. Looking elsewhere on the screen, I was then overwhelmed. This wall was the most bland thing in a vast hanger, where TIE Fighters hung from the ceiling, Stormtroopers wandered in groups below, and even the little white sign with the yellow arrow looked like it was a decade old, meticulously crafted to fit into this universe. I felt sheer astonishment at the achievement of this. Ubisoft, via multiple studios across the whole world, and the work of thousands of deeply talented people, had built this impossibly perfect area for one momentary scene that I was intended to run straight past.

Except I ran past it three times, because the AI kept fucking up and I was restarted at a checkpoint right before that gray wall over and over. I'm struggling to capture the dissonance of this moment. This sense of absolute awe, almost unbelieving admiration that it's even possible to build games at this scale and at this detail, slapped hard around the face by the bewilderingly bad decisions that take place within it all. Brokerage firm UBS said in a note to clients: Based on the 621 ratings thus far the game has received a score of 4.8 (out of 10). This tracks behind previous blockbuster releases by Ubisoft in Assassin's Creed and Far Cry, behind competing open world games released in 2024 and behind other major recent Star Wars Games released by EA in 2019 and 2023. The user ratings, which are generally unfavourable lag its generally favourable critic reviews (game received a score of 76 by critics).

Early user ratings suggest downside risk to our 10m units forecast for the game: While we previously felt the largely positive critic reviews made our 10m units sold look achievable (a component upon which we forecast +4% FY25 net bookings growth), the user ratings now suggest downside risk to our estimates. Previous Ubisoft games in Assassin's Creed and Far Cry which sold 10m+ units in their first fiscal year all received higher user ratings and were instalments of well entrenched franchises.

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