Star Wars Outlaws is the latest cautionary tale of buying in early…

Star Wars Outlaws technically is not out until Friday, but as many games have offered before it, you could get access 3 days early (meaning as of this past Tuesday) if you ponied up some extra credits for one of the “premium” editions, along with which you got access to story DLC launching later in the year, some additional game content and cosmetics at launch, etc.

And while early access may not be the only reason someone bought these premium editions, it still is a perk that you expect to be able to enjoy. Might there be some bugs that get patched on or shortly after launch? Possibly, but nothing that catastrophic right?

Oh how wrong you’d be dear reader. Ubisoft launched a patch the same day that updated the game to a more stable version, but the damage had already been done. Because the version (at least on PS5, no word on other versions) that came with the “premium” versions was buggy enough that Ubisoft also sent out emails strongly advising that regardless of how far you were in the game, you should probably start a fresh save with this new update, lest you face some game-breaking bugs that might not even let you progress.

Now , granted, there’s no telling how many this affected or how much progress they lost, but I can speak to my experience: I played about 2 hours of the game but only stopped because I had work that day, otherwise I probably would’ve put in many more hours before seeing any email telling me my whole day of playing Star Wars Outlaws was a complete waste and I’d have to start over again. It’s not hard to imagine some either already had the day off and had it planned around playing this game early, it’s a big release regardless of what you think of the current state of Ubisoft or Star Wars and that really sucks for those people. There are probably still people unaware of the issue that have been experiencing game-breaking bugs.

This isn’t exclusive to Star Wars Outlaws. Games tend to launch buggy, but it’s rarely this extreme, and it’s always the biggest most committed fans that pay the price because they are the ones who want to spend the extra money and invest the time and that really sucks. This has been happening far too regularly and not giving much incentive to buy any games at full price on launch day when you can simply wait a few months and usually get a version that performs better and often on sale. As someone who pays for the games I write about and doesn’t get free codes currently, it’ll certainly make me far more wary about making such an investment in the future…

That’s all for today. Partially because of the setback, I probably won’t have any more thoughts on Star Wars Outlaws until at least Sunday or more likely Monday, possibly even the following weekend. But before that, a demo for Epic Mickey Rebrushed has dropped, so I’m definitely going to check that out and will probably have some thoughts in the next couple of days so see ya real soon!