Five Things I’d Fix in Star Wars Outlaws

Star Wars Outlaws has been out in the wild for a little over a week and the reception has certainly not been universally positive. The development team has acknowledged that the game has both some stability and gameplay issues that they want to address and improve and have pretty much said they want to continue working on the game until they are satisfied it reaches it’s true potential.

That being said I am about 15 hours into my play of Star Wars Outlaws and I am mostly enjoying my time with it. I think it’s a pretty solid “7 out of 10” and we need to remember that score doesn’t mean a game is bad and in fact means if you like this type of game you’ll probably enjoy it! That being said, that doesn’t mean I don’t have some big issues with it and here are five major things I would fix ASAP

#1. How Bacta Vials work

You won’t get very far in Star Wars Outlaws without pretty liberal use of bacta vials, the universe’s equivalent of a medpack. Unfortunately not only do these take quite a lot of time to fully heal you, they can be straight-up interrupted and then are completely wasted. I feel like at least on anything but the highest difficulty, this is kind of insanely unfair.

Granted, there is equipment you can buy that helps with both the speed a bacta vial heals you at and it being interrupted but in my humble opinion if I have to earn that it should probably be a passive perk from an expert not equipment I have to buy and then decide if I need to use that over something that gives me better stealth or blaster protection. I have enough other things I have to choose between. Either way, I think the healing system needs to be re-worked a bit.

2. Contracts

There’s a couple very specific issues I have with contracts, which are actually one of my favorite things in the game overall. I really enjoy doing little side missions that curry favor with the various criminal factions. However, Smuggler missions often come with an extremely short time limit and I really feel this needs to be either way more generous or eliminated completely. Maybe it’s something you can adjust with game difficulty but at least the option to tweak this stuff needs to be there. It’s ridiculous that I take one wrong turn down an alley and that completely screws me over because of a short time limit.

The second thing is I feel that if you fail a job, you definitely should be given the option to start the job over. It’s a videogame, I shouldn’t get one shot at a job and then my reputation with a cartel suffers and the job is gone. At least give me the option to do it over or suffer the consequences of letting it fail.

3. Climbing/Grappling

Star Wars Outlaws is at its heart a stealth game. A stealth game from Ubisoft. You’d expect there to be some climbing stuff and you’d be correct, but it’s extremely limited to what you’d see in something like Assassin’s Creed. I am not expecting interactivity on that level, but I feel it could be improved as there are often seemingly arbitrary spots I should be able to climb but cannot and only very specific spots I can use my grapple hook when I probably should be able to use it to scale buildings or get up to high places in general.

I’m not positive with the way the game plays this actually can be fixed to the extent I would like but it probably could be improved to some extent.

4. Speeder Bike

Hoo boy I have never felt the need for speed riding this thing and it’s not because it isn’t fast. The speeder bike in Star Wars Outlaws is in fact, very fast and you can get upgrades to make it even faster. But then the environment works against you in so many ways it’s not fun. It’s super easy to simply crash and lose your speeder or just straight die, often on something off to the corner of your screen you can barely see or not see at all.

The other thing that really needs to be fixed with your speeder bike is combat or lack thereof. You are quite often being chased by bandits, Imperial troops, or whatever syndicate you just pissed off. They can fire at you on their vehicles, you cannot fire back. That’s ridiculous. It needs to be fixed, period.

5. Stealth

Star Wars Outlaws is a stealth game. But in many stealth games, you are given the option that if stealth fails, you can resort to just blasting the hell out of everything in sight. This is one of many inconsistencies with how stealth works in Star Wars Outlaws. Some missions (mostly story ones that you have to finish to make progress) are ones where if you are spotted you instantly fail. And you don’t know an enemy’s field of vision, they just spot you and instantly catch you. If you knock out one enemy, you still often alert ones who couldn’t possibly have seen you, often the entire base suddenly is aware of your presence.

Even the director of Star Wars Outlaws has admitted that at least the instant fail stealth sections are too punishing and there is a patch on the way to fix that. But that’s not the only part of the stealth that could use improvement. Will the other issues be addressed?

Regardless, it’s clear that to some extent (like many AAA games these days), Star Wars Outlaws is somewhat of a work in progress and could be a very different and very improved game in a matter of months. Does that mean you should wait? Again for the record, I am enjoying my time with the game and fully intend to finish it but it’ll be interesting to see where Star Wars Outlaws is at three or six months or even a year from now and if that will help it become a franchise or a mostly forgotten entry in the Star Wars universe. It’s certainly got potential and I’d hate to see it not realize that and have to the chance to improve upon it.

That’s all for today, but next week, Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection is coming out and you bet I’ll have some thoughts on that so see ya real soon!