“We actually found that to be a bit of an advantage”: Star Wars Outlaws Had All the Help It Needed to Succeed, So What Happened?
Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft are puzzled by the lack of enthusiasm for Star Wars Outlaws despite their evidently well-planned efforts.
- Star Wars Outlaws has failed to be the experience that its fans were hoping for since its release.
- Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft's best efforts seem to be insufficient with a poor sales record showcasing a distinct lack of engagement with its gameplay loop.
- Its poor performance is surprising given the team's enthusiasm for the project.
With Star Wars Outlaws finally in the hands of players who have been eager to dive into Massive Entertainment’s new adventure set between two of the franchise’s most iconic films, initial impressions of the game have been worryingly underwhelming – and its sales affected accordingly.
While the lure of an entirely new character whose associations with the Empire’s Underworld drive her to take on an adventure of her own is largely promising, it seems that Ubisoft’s attempt to recreate the magic that George Lucas achieved with his films all those years ago has surprisingly fallen flat.
Apparently, Not Everyone Loves a Rebel
Set in the period between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Star Wars Outlaws features several locales from the films that many players have found quite enjoyable. Following the story of Kay Vess, a scoundrel who runs afoul of the Empire’s criminal underbelly, the game takes its players across the galaxy on an adventure that is filled with activity, action, and a lot of nostalgic references to its source material.
However, it seems that Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft’s take on a galaxy far, far away has not been as incredible as the initial hype around Outlaws suggested it would be. It is quite surprising given how its developers and creative teams found the source material quite easy to work with despite having to navigate a complex universe in which many events and characters had their stories set in stone.
What Could Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft Done Better?
While Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft have certainly done their part in creating an open world that players would want to explore, the response to their intergalactic adventure has not gone as expected – a setback for Ubisoft that it may find hard to recover from.
Star Wars Outlaws‘ underwhelming debut is surprising considering how confident its team was in what they had crafted as an obvious tribute to fans of the films and associated media. An interview with IGN is the perfect showcase of this, with a response to taking on such a detailed period of the game’s history coming from the game’s narrative director Navid Khavari showing their love for the source material they were working with.
“We actually found that to be a bit of an advantage…there’s been so much written about the Empire and the rebellion during that period…so much story to tell there and to have a character like Kay, who’s not a Jedi or a Sith or anything like that, she is a thief who’s just trying to get by to step into the underworld and navigate her reputation with these syndicates. There’s so much to tell.“
The team behind Star Wars Outlaws would certainly find its poor sales to be a disappointment but can hopefully manage to turn things around with future additions to the game in line with a very exciting roadmap that is sure to sell more than a few copies when the new content releases.
