Topic: Star Wars Outlaws (30-8-2024)

@colonelkilgore
pfft, the PS6 will be out in 2027 and then you will be dropping everything to play Returnal remastered.

As for Star Wars, I’m still keen to pick up a physical copy at some point plus Avatar. And I’m actually looking forward to playing AC Shadows, hopefully I can play the majority of the game as the ninja as I do enjoy a good stealth game plus it is called Shadows.
Speaking of stealth I see a trailer has dropped for that standalone Shadow Tactics game which was released on PC ages ago and stated at time no console port. Strange especially as the studio has now closed but hey that probably explains the port.

@CaptD yeah but I just have so many ps4 games in particular… and I’m intent on playing the vast majority of them. That’s not to say that I won’t subsidise the schedule with some ps6 releases at the time though 😉

@Max_Headroom Exactly. It happens no matter how good or bad the games are. In the case of Star Wars Outlaws, some of the crap that gets thrown it's way does get annoying though.

Sucks that you didn't enjoy it since it seemed like you were going to. I guess that's what happens to people who enjoy Spider-Man 2... (yes, I actually enjoyed that one too)

Glad they fixed alot in this game, will definitely be jumping in asap

Don't get me wrong i enjoyed the first few hours but the stealth part did my head in after a while its a shame you are not allowed to fight your way to the end of the mission even if there is only one or two guards in the room etc, i hate having to go back and start again it gets boring real fast.

So I'm a few hours in at this point. But I cannot understand some of the design choices made in this game. It's frustrating and annoying at times. Spending half hour clearing a base only to be spotted by one of the remaining enemies and seeing everything reset is just as frustrating as it gets. I am able to live with no saves during these missions, but the resets are just plain stupid.

I really like the Jedi games and I was looking forward to playing a game that didn't focus on light sabers, but at this point I'd much rather replay Survivor or Fallen Order.

@Octane Are you playing these sections before or after the recent patch that fixes the stealth mechanics?

@BeyondKnight It should be. I will give it another try tonight and see if there's an update still.

@Octane Let me know how it is?

@BeyondKnight I'm in between moving at the moment and I haven't found time to play. I think I won't be able to until December, so I'll see how it plays by then!

@Octane I'll probably play it by then, so no worries

I didn't think it was that good

Picked this up on sale. Its like one parts generic Ubisoft formula (which to me isn't a negative), one part insanely richly detailed Star Wars environments and one parts baffling creative choices. Even after all the sweeping balance changes, in six hours I have already run into multiple moments of such frustration I just had to turn the game off, entirely down to frustration created from needless terrible creative choices that should have never been here to begin with.

Got this in the sale as well and so far about 10 hours in and I’m having a blast. I was ready to give it up at the start in Canto Bight as the gameplay systems and progression weren’t particularly well introduced but after that a lot of it fell into place. Just did my first off-world mission on the Imperial Refuelling Station and enjoyed it immensely.

As it is with every game I suppose, the scripted story missions in Outlaws are better than the side content. Really enjoyed that first proper mission, which sees you getting into an Imperial Base under false pretences and then fighting your way out when it all inevitably goes sideways.

I think if the faction stuff had more benefits to the player (obvious ones), and didn't restrict your movement as much, and if they didn't respawn every enemy on death (which is a baffling choice anyway, but especially so in a game with a checkpoint system), I'd basically have no real complaints.

It is still a pretty bog standard 7 / 10 Ubisoft game (so far anyway), even if you took my issues above away, but that to me isn't a problem.

@Pizzamorg I didn't mind the stealth in the gang areas tbh. But, yes, the "your death revives everyone" was one really strange decision. It even annoys me slightly in the Jedi games too, despite them being designed around it and fun because of it, because even though they are supposed to be a souls-like-ish game, I don't think it fits the actual star wars universe and it definitely doesn't make sense logically when there is actual checkpoints. In souls games you die and are revived with magic and lose souls and pay for your sins by having everyone else return, fine, whatever, but in movie-like games you never ever "really die" unless it is explained as part of the story, and only everything up to your the last saved checkpoint actually happened in the game's universe no matter what you did after it, so it should only revive people beyond that checkpoint that you "haven't encountered yet" And when you get to the end of these type of games your character never actually died, as it obviously wouldn't make sense if they had 🤦‍♂️

I think this is why I like games that dial up the logic. People don't be respecting checkpoints any more 💀

Jedi and Outlaws are both fun games. But the silly decisions hurt Outlaws more because it is supposed to be even more movie-like than the souls-wars games, which can kind of get away with it, despite it being completely dumb 😅 and both series' have struggled technically too, and Jedi is more forgiven for it's misdeeds on that front too 🤔 I wonder why

The game engine for Outlaws is pretty sweet for the environments, so I hope it doesn't end up all binned because of some of the negatives. There's a basis to make something really great there if they ever get another shot at it.

Apologies for the text dump, I'm in a talk about games mood and was spurred on by your thoughts 🙈

Yeah @Ravix that one creative choice has caused me to rage quit more than once already. I had a side mission where I needed to infiltrate one of the little on planet Empire camp things. I stealthed my way in successfully, completed my objective and now I just needed to now leave the base to complete the mission.

Only I died from fall damage (this is stupid anyway, as she dropped like three feet from a ledge onto some stairs, but whatever).

What happened next, I was not ready for. The game respawned me right in the centre of the base, with all the enemies respawned and back in position, and also for some reason on high alert, too. So the game had basically soft locked me, as there was no way to shoot my way out of this and I was just stuck.

The only solution I found was lowering the game to the absolute lowest difficulty and just sprinting through the base praying I could make it to the other side (which I did).

It kinda makes the stealth feel utterly pointless as my dying from unrelated fall damage just completely erased from reality all that work I put in carefully stealthing my way through the base.

@Pizzamorg something very similar happened to me at one point but I managed to find a cheap way out after stubbornly attempting to kill every member of the empire a good few times. I think at one point I had the full 6 bars or whatever of empire rage, and managed to escape sprint to my speeder and then i flew across the map and crashed my speeder into a tree and died. And then I wasn't wanted any more and I had reached a checkpoint well outside the base 😅

If people had focused on this instead of just moaning about instant fail stealth, which is kind of fine and kind of makes sense in bases and locked off areas, maybe they'd have fixed the real problem.. Checkpoints not being actual checkpoints 🙈

Luckily it only happened once, so I don't think it will be anything to worry about too much as you go on further.

And if it does happen more... well... you better git gud (at stealth) 😅

Side content is good when it's the stuff that rewards you, and by good i don't mean story wise, just worth doing because you unlock all these perks that make it a lot easier to have fun with, so there's a real reason to do it, unlike some ubi games where it's kind of the same but for no real gameplay reason

Yeah I was thinking about that @Ravix like I am amazed they did that big balance pass when was it... November? And this awful respawning enemies creative decision somehow survived. I mean it is baffling to me it even made it into the game to begin with, to be honest. Maybe they'll do another pass and disable this (I dunno how complicated it is to remove, but I assume it is easier than removing entire fail states from missions) or maybe they've already moved on.

To be honest on that opening planet, side content is honestly mostly pretty annoying for me due to my other issue, being the faction system. I went with the Crimson Dawn instead of the Pykes, and it seems to have just completely scuffed my playthrough. Everywhere the game sends me is Pyke territory, if you walk into it not knowing its restricted (which, spoiler, all of it is it seems) it automatically marks you down for "trespassing", lowering your rating with them further, so its just this endless downward spiral that makes the game so frustrating to play, cause they just shoot me on sight now.

And I saw absolutely zero benefit with having sided with Dawn on the flipside. Couldn't they at least like spawn in some Dawn agents to help me or anything? Cause right now side content is more hassle than it is fun.

@Pizzamorg ah... Hahaha. I saw that as part of the fun and part of the story of being an outlaw, trying to play each side against the other. But also, it kind of all fell in to place. I'd piss off one side, do a sneaky mission because of it (tense) then find something that would get me in with the other side and play that card when I needed to. Before it gets too dire you have to make sure to get some jobs lined up so you can do those to curry favour. My game always felt like I was walking the line and playing those people rather than simply being played by them and it added a lot to the experience. And I think that is what the devs intended.

I won't break out the "you're playing it wrong" 🙊😅 but overall there is options to not totally ruin the game for yourself. They probably could have been laid out in a more accessible way, perhaps that is the issue. To me, it was clear what my goal was going to be regarding never being loyal to any one syndicate, but there should maybe be options to RP it in other ways without making it a chore for the rest of the stuff you're trying to do. So I do get where you're coming from.

I feel like there are options though, even if you piss one off fully, you just have to find the things that give big positive swings and avoid stuff that will make it worse for a while.