As we get ever closer to the release of Star Wars Outlaws, key details are being dropped that are painting the experience that players will have. Recently, the team at Ubisoft noted that there will be multiple worlds that will take you multiple minutes to drive across from end to end. That reveal hints that there will be a lot to see, and potentially a lot to do. However, once you get into a fight against bad guys int his galaxy far, far away, what is the payoff for beating them? Well, it’s not what you think it is, despite this game being hailed as a kind of action RPG.
In a massive interview with IGN, the Star Wars Outlaws team revealed that the journey of Kay Vess won’t be like the ones we’ve seen with characters like Kal Cestis, or the protagonists of the Bioware RPGs. Instead, Kay won’t “level up” at all during her journey in the gaming sense. She won’t gain levels nor gain points to unlock things via a skill tree.
Instead, as the team noted, you’ll have Kay find “experts” within various fields, and only by doing things with them will Kay gain new tactics and abilities to try and use to pull off the heist that might guarantee her freedom in this war-torn galaxy:
“You can go on a journey with a character such as an expert who is going to teach Kay a new skill and give her a new upgrade to her blaster. Now, that skill, that upgrade definitely ties into Kay pulling off the heist, but it’s also very much its own journey, which is in the Star Wars tradition as well.”
That last line is an interesting way of looking at things, as some would argue that’s not exactly the case. If you look at key characters from the franchise’s history, you can very much tell they have “leveled up” at times, especially when they’re learning to use the Force and fighting other people. Furthermore, none of them have had to find “experts” to learn new tricks, they’ve had masters that trained them, and sometimes, they learn things naturally.
So while this could be seen as something “fresh,” it’s also a risky endeavor. If the combat is seen as repetitive with “no true rewards,” gamers might get bored of it quickly. We’ll have to see how it all plays out. The game has gone gold, and that means you’ll get to see what you can do soon enough.
