Star Wars Outlaws’ Space Travel Looks Disappointingly Similar To Starfield’s

Despite middling previews coming out of Summer Game Fest, I’m still interested in Star Wars Outlaws. Ubisoft’s take on the Star Wars universe is giving me a Mandalorian Season 1 vibe, before all the Ahsokas and Skywalkers and other Glup Shittos arrived to fold it into the wider lore.

I’m a man who wants his Star Wars media to just be ‘little guys doing stuff in a universe I know’, rather than a universe-altering plot that ends up with Yoda’s origin story. This is why I’m finding The Acolyte refreshing, and why I’m immediately turned off by practically any other modern Star Wars media.

An independent force working apart from the Jedi, Kay Vess is an engaging protagonist. A rascal and likeable scumbag in the vein of Han Solo, she’s the perfect vehicle to get me engaged with a new Star Wars story. The actual vehicles, on the other hand, might turn me off.

Yesterday’s Ubisoft Forward showcase spent a long time dwelling on Star Wars Outlaws. It’s clearly the company’s golden goose, along with Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and it’s putting all of its eggs in these two multi-million dollar baskets. While the gunslinging and adventuring looked interesting, the extended space battle gave me the opposite feeling.

It’s hard to get space travel right. One of the best attempts in recent years is another Star Wars game, Squadrons. It nailed the series’ iconic dogfights – especially in VR – weaving together the chaos of war with effective ship-handling mechanics to create an atmosphere that was hectic but controlled.

On the contrary, Outlaws’ fights already seem a little… off. If the trailer, which is supposed to be a red hot sizzle reel of the best the game can offer, shows a player missing the target numerous times, turning sluggishly, and generally handling poorly. Of course, this could all be different by the time we get our hands on the spaceship, or it could feel very different to how it looks, but it’s a little worrying.

Something that definitely won’t feel better, however, is the fast travel between planets. The gameplay clearly showed that you just need to select a planet from a menu to start a cutscene, after which you arrive in its atmosphere. From there, you can select a landing spot to trigger another cutscene, after which you turn up on the planet. Why are we still doing this?

This is a direct parallel to Starfield’s space travel. Which was fundamentally terrible. Why did we need to watch three (or more) cutscenes to get around the galaxy? I understand that not everyone wants to play an Elite Dangerous-esque simulator, but why can’t we fast travel from one planet’s surface to another?

The answer is that games want to make space interesting. Interesting in the eyes of Bethesda and Ubisoft is having an engagement in the planetary atmosphere. Maybe it’s a trader, a distress call, or an enemy who immediately opens fire at you. If you could skip the atmospheric scene, you would miss all these storytelling opportunities. But would this be such a bad thing?

Games are big enough already. Outlaws has gunplay, stealth sections, vehicular travel on the surface (the speeder looks excellent, by the way). It’s got story, it’s got Star Wars Easter Eggs, it’s got exploration, it’s got your lil pet. Do we need space battles on top of that? Maybe the devs wanted to include it because it’s a very Star Wars thing, but I’d prefer one takeoff-hyperspace-landing cutscene to half-baked spaceflight broken up by three separate cutscenes. It would be less work, and a better experience for the player, especially considering we’ll be zipping back and forth between planets on a regular basis.

Outlaws does have one advantage, however: its planets. At least when you arrive on a planet in the Ubisoft title, you’ll know it’s full of stuff to do. Starfield’s empty planets exacerbated the travel problem because, when you arrived after the three cutscenes, you were met with procedurally-generated emptiness.

I’m willing to give Star Wars Outlaws a chance, but the space sections are already giving me the ick. I hope that the planet surfaces hold enough excitement to make the painful fast travel worth it.

Next

Star Wars Outlaws Gameplay Trailer Shows Off Open World And Reputation System

We just got another extended look at Star Wars Outlaws’ gameplay at Ubisoft Forward.