Our best look yet at Ubisoft’s open-world Star Wars game.
Star Wars Outlaws didn’t put its best foot forward when I played it at Summer Game Fest. That demo covered most of what you do in Ubisoft’s next open-world game: sneak, hack, shoot, and fly. It was fine, but it was overfamiliar, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was experiencing Outlaws in the exact opposite way it was intended. I wanted so badly to hop on Kay’s speeder and explore the open world a bit, but we were rushed through three linear missions on strict 20-minute timers.
Ubisoft flipped that SGF demo on its head at a dedicated Star Wars Outlaws preview event held earlier this month in Orange County. No on-screen timers, no segmented missions—I played nearly five hours of Outlaws, and a good chunk of that time was spent chatting up NPCs, taking on side jobs from factions that all hate each other, and full-sending Kay’s speeder off the biggest rock ramps I could find on Toshara, a planet of deep canyons and desert brush where the opening hours take place.
My complaints about unchallenging shootouts, stiff climbing, and dumb Stormtrooper AI haven’t changed, but I learned that Outlaws shares a notable quality with other Ubisoft open world games: no one aspect is exceptional, but when it all comes together, I’m having a really good time.Job hunt
One of my favorite quests from the demo involved surprisingly little sneaking or shooting. It was a side job from the Pyke Syndicate, the dominant faction of Toshara’s major city, Mirogana. I was hired to bring in a syndicate member who was caught planning a coup (he’d actually come up in an earlier story mission, a nice, natural-feeling bit of worldbuilding). The first stop was to track a co-conspirator in the city market, but I immediately got distracted by the glow of a Fathier race betting minigame. It briefly occurred to me that this was the same betting operation from that gross casino planet in The Last Jedi, and that maybe it’s messed up to exploit these cute alien horses—I put a stack of credits on « Man From Naboo » and lost it all (instant karma).
Back on track to the market… is what I was for about 10 seconds before I spotted some loot through the window of an abandoned speakeasy. I Deus Ex’ed through a vent to get in, hacked a terminal to shut down an energy barrier, and pocketed a new trophy for Kay’s speeder. Eventually, the quest’s clue (« The agent is making comlink calls ») led me to eavesdropping on a conversation in the busy market, and the development that my man was holed up in a space station in Toshara’s orbit.
So I made for my ship and took off, triggering the seamless transition between surface and space that Ubisoft has touted in every demonstration of Outlaws, and rightly so. It’s just a well-disguised loading screen, not a controllable sequence like in No Man’s Sky, but it’s a convincing and immersive detail that solves a problem Starfield’s planet-hopping couldn’t. Now in space, I enjoyed an uneventful flight to the station.
This demo cleared up something I’d been wondering about Outlaws—you don’t spend all that much time flying around. I was always confined to a planet’s orbit, a boundaried area that’s functionally a hub of floating islands, and flying between them never took more than a minute or two.
The station had a cantina—the third cantina I’d visited in as many hours. I needed access to the restricted section in the back, and while I probably could’ve lockpicked a door or knocked out a few guards to get in, I opted to skip the theatrics and bribe the bartender. Finally I found my guy hiding in a storage room, and he made a last minute offer: Let him go, get paid double, and get in good with his friends at Crimson Dawn (a rival faction you probably don’t remember from the Han Solo movie).
