Monday was a big day for Star Wars Outlaws. During the Ubisoft Forward event, the company dropped two different trailers about the game. One was a detailed gameplay trailer that showed Kay Vess enacting many different elements from the game, like sneaking into a place, using Nyx for help, fighting enemies, and seeking out an expert, while the other was an overview trailer. Both of these glimpses into the game made people rather excited about the upcoming action-adventure title and made many wonder what else Ubisoft had up its sleeve. However, right after the event, some people got a one-hour hands-on preview of the title, and opinions quickly shifted.
While some liked what they saw, others noted that numerous aspects made it play more like a Naughty Dog title than something from Star Wars. Others noted that the gameplay felt “dated,” and with talks of the campaign only being about 30 hours at max unless you do a completionist run, many are starting to get worried.
In response to this, creative director Julian Gerighty had a chat with VGC and revealed that the preview that people got at the event was simply an “appetizer” for what was coming:
“I think coming into a show like this, while you’re closing a game in terms of production, you have to make a lot of choices, and our producer was like, you get one demo for all of the shows that we’re going to go to during the year, so Gamescom, ComiCon [etc]. And they’re consumer plus journalist focused, so we had to choose something that was 20 minutes, bite-sized, lots of variety, lots of representative systems, but not the open world experience, because we’re going to expose that during the studio tour, in the preview event over here. So we’ll spend a lot more time on those things, so this is an amuse bouche, it’s a starter rather than the main course for the game.”
That makes sense for the most part. Not to mention, even if you took an hour of gameplay from the start of certain beloved titles, they’re not fully indicative of what’s to come later on.
The trick with Star Wars Outlaws is that Ubisoft is desperately trying to buck the trend of having hyped titles that don’t fully live up to the hype once they launch. If they blow it with this one, it could hurt both them and the IP itself, and no one wants that. We’ll find out the try by August 30th.
