Ubisoft has confirmed that Star Wars Outlaws has a new creative director.
The latest Star Wars Outlaws update on their official blog actually introduced us to the director, Drew Rechner. Rechner worked with the prior director, Julian Gerighty, on the Tom Clancy’s The Division games.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Gerighty has returned to work on Tom Clancy’s The Division, while Rechner is now committed to righting the ship for Star Wars Outlaws.
Rechner reassured players that they were paying attention to feedback, and that that feedback drove their last three Title Updates. He then explained what improvements Ubisoft Massive is planning to do next:
“The first key area of improvement to the game is combat where we see a real opportunity to add more depth and excitement to the experience, further rewarding your tactics and precision.
Our second key area is stealth which is not only about improving the readability and consistency of enemy detection, but also providing choice in how you want to approach each encounter.
Finally, our third key area of focus is centered around the character controls, which means improving the reliability of cover, increasing the responsiveness of climbing and crouching, and generally improving the consistency of the controls overall.”
Star Wars Outlaws holds the dubious distinction of being the Star Wars licensed video game that failed to sell well, a genuine surprise given the popularity of the IP. Its failure doesn’t reflect on Disney’s failure to manage the franchise, so much as it was Ubisoft itself fumbling the ball.
And in that regard, it is one of several games that have factored in the company’s ongoing crisis. We are still waiting to see if Ubisoft’s big shareholders, the Guillemot brothers, go ahead with a buyout to Tencent, but here and now, what they want to do is get all their current and upcoming projects in order.
But we do have to get back to Star Wars Outlaws, because this was a completely unusual situation. Why would the game still need a creative director for patches? But it seems to be an understated admission that Ubisoft released the title months before it was ready.
So maybe the way we should be seeing this is that Star Wars Outlaws is still very much in development. The tweaks and patches they continue to apply to the game are at such a significant level that they are essentially finishing the game’s development, with the help of player feedback.
We certainly hope that Ubisoft Massive can do right by their players in the end, but also that they, and other video game companies, won’t have to resort to something like this again.
