Star Wars Outlaws is in a bit of a pickle. Ubisoft’s model of making games that are too big to fail means the severe flaws in its seemingly guaranteed hit combining the open-world scope and mechanics the developer has made its bread and butter in recent years with Star Wars have left the publisher in trouble. Following recent pledges to start making some significant improvements to the game, the first of the promised patches has arrived, and addresses two of the game’s weakest aspects: the crappy speeder, and the dreadful stealth.
Ubisoft is not having a great time of it, of late. The publicly owned publisher makes projects on such a massive scale that anything short of blockbuster success means failure, and given the (relatively) disappointing sales of Star Wars Outlaws, and the subsequent delay of Assassin’s Creed Shadows to March of next year, the company’s share price has hit a ten-year low.
And when you’re owned by shareholders and beholden to impossible targets of permanent growth, that’s the sort of thing that gets you headlines like, “Ubisoft faces questions over its future.” Which, given the crappy masterpiece that is Outlaws has sold a million copies, shows you just what a fucked up situation we’re all in.
Called “Title Update 2,” for some reason, the new patch promises to finally address the utterly broken AI detection when stealthing in the game. (This game has been out over a month, and it’s bewildering that something so important has taken so long, not least because Ubisoft gets this feature so right in its AssCreed series.) The patch notes say,
Tweaked the overall stealth experience by adjusting AI detection, the number of NPCs and their positioning, patrol pathing, camera detection and highlighting environmental opportunities to reduce player friction
If you’ve not played the game, you could easily interpret this as a difficulty nerf. But those who are more familiar with Outlaws will most likely release a breath they’ve held in since the end of August. Being spotted through walls, hills, and so on and then that impossible sighting causing an entire camp to telepathically spring into simultaneous laser-honed attacks is not so much a difficulty issue, as a fun issue.
The other big change is that the speeder will fling you off less often, like perhaps not when you drive within eyesight of a pebble. The unwieldy bikes have been too fast to control in busy areas, while too slow to be a satisfying means of long-distance travel, and buck you off like a furious bull every time you go anywhere. So this getting addressed is quite the relief.
Also among the “notable changes” listed in the notes are two game-breaking bugs that absolutely fucked me over. One is getting stuck in the hyperjump to Kijimi—Kay would start talking, cut herself off, and then it would enter a silent infinite hyperjump sequence. The second is fixing an issue where you couldn’t take off from the planet after finishing a mission called The Wreck. This was especially infuriating, as the story mission arc also prevented any fast-travel off-planet, and I had to reload a save from two sodding hours earlier. So, at least new players won’t experience that.
Which is all to rather make the point that so much of what’s being addressed 35 days since release has already long put me off persisting with a game I’d almost finished. In fact, I found Assassin’s Creed Valhalla on Game Pass, and having missed it when it was released, starting playing that instead—and it turns out to be the Star Wars Outlaws I was looking for, only with Saxons instead of Stormtroopers, and the sea instead of the stars.
This patch is tempting me to return, not least because it finally adds a button for throwing grenades, rather than requiring you to juggle through UI prompts in the heat of battle. But then, I’m loving Valhalla so much, I’m not sure I’ve got the willpower for Outlaws any more. It’s wonderful that Ubisoft is working hard to make it into the game it deserves to be, but I fear a lot of damage has already been done. Perhaps I’ll come back to it when they release a disappointing Far Cry 8 in 2028.
It’s a sizeable patch, 3.8GB on PS5, 4.7GB on Xbox, and 5.6GB on PC, so you’ll want to get it downloading well ahead of intending to play. Here are the full, extensive patch notes:
PATCH DETAILS (version 7063935.TU2):
NOTABLE CHANGES:
FULL PATCH NOTES:
Performance & Stability
General Gameplay
UI, HUD and Settings
Graphics
Audio
Cinematics
Camera
Worlds, Fauna and Flora
Sabacc:
Photo Mode:
Accessibility:
Miscellaneous
MAIN & SIDE QUESTS (beware of spoilers)
Canto Bight
Toshara
Tatooine
Akiva
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