There’s a new Star Wars video game out! In Outlaws you play as a scoundrel who’s doing (space) crime as she makes her way through the galaxy, avoiding the Empire and running in with the rough and tumble of the Outer Rim. It sounds pretty cool. I say sounds because even though it came out a month ago, I haven’t played it yet.
Which, to be fair, on the one hand, I’m still on my Final Fantasy kick (and there is the ever-present siren song of Destiny). Plus, y’know, life stuff. But the early reviews for Outlaws are that it’s a perfectly fine game, albeit a buggy mess in places. And if there’s one thing I know about modern gaming, it’s that games that come out as buggy messes usually get fixed into less buggy messes. And since I’m waiting to play Outlaws, I may as well wait until the game’s been patched to have less headaches, zeitgeist be damned.
It’s become a bit of a recurring trend in games these days: when they’re first released they aren’t quite done, but don’t worry, those bugs will be patched out soon. Cyberpunk 2077 released as a disaster, but a year of patches made it into a pretty decent game. Destiny at launch was… incomplete, but by the time its first expansion, The Taken King, came out, the game started to feel whole. The Sims 4’s base was lacking, but by the time I picked it up a couple years later some of its issues had been fixed. A big game coming out fully polished is no longer the norm — and why would it need to be when everything’s online and a patch can be rolled out at will? I suppose I don’t really mind games being able to be fixed, on the other, replaying a bunch of old games lately makes me long for a time when the game that was released was firmly done. But maybe that’s nostalgia, since those games were smaller in scope and still had their own bugs and unbalanced exploits. The games, they are a-changing.
Ubisoft’s released a roadmap for Outlaws. Its fourth big update is due out late November and promises combat and stealth fixes —the latter being one of the big complaints about the game. When that comes around I’ll pick up Outlaws and live my Star Wars scoundrel dreams. Assuming, of course, that that game is now actually done.
Essays, Not Rants! 