Star Wars Outlaws - Launch Impressions

[Music] what's going on everybody morom here this time bringing you some launch impressions for Star Wars Outlaws as the Embargo for it lifts for reviews as I received a review copy for it but due to black myth Wukong releasing so close to it I haven't quite finished it yet but my actual review should be up in time for the game's official release date of August 30th with the Early Access period for the game beginning just tomorrow from the time of this video however now if you follow the channel much you are probably aware that I took part in a remote early preview event and I made a video on that so I have played the game a little bit before but here I have access to the full game so let's dive into that a little bit now coincidentally the preview event that they showed off was actually just right after the prologue of the game I don't want to go much into the story at all here besides just a very general setup because of course we are ahead of the release of the game here but essentially our main character K VES is from a city known as Kanto bite which you may recognize from Star Wars the Jedi our character K VES is a scoundrel with dreams of hitting it big which is what puts her onto a job that ultimately goes sideways which is why she's on the run and that situation ultimately leads her to trying to set up for a Big Heist which is what is going to lead us to the four big areas of the game which are the starting planets of of toara cold and dreary kajimi verdant AKA and of course the ever desolate tatouine now across all of those areas we have access to open areas of differing sizes that house the game's open world which is including a little bit above the actual planet with some explorable space sections now it's the systems around exploration and engaging with all of our scoundrel oriented theme here including reputations with various syndicates and tells we're going to meet along the way and how that fluctuates and informs some of that exploration I think is really where this game shines the most surprisingly so and especially the thing I want to get across in this Impressions video before the entire review what I like the most about this game is actually how it handles the exploration in particular and tries to mix up that traditional Ubisoft formula in a way that I did not necessarily quite grasp from the preview event so let's start there so rather than say go to a tower find a bunch of points of interest go explore those and check them off the list that we've seen in a lot of open world games here however they try to do something a little different you can either just go out into the world and explore it freely and stumble across things but what you're much more likely to do is stumble across information or Intel this comes in a few different forms but a lot of times you can either run up and talk to people directly or you can just listen to conversations happening in the more urban areas around you and this will lead you U of course various points of interest in the world map but the catch here is that sometimes this is environmental like you go there and there's some task to be performed sure or treasure to be found other times though this Intel actually leads you to Side Quests and that's just a little basic part of it but what really makes this come together is actually The Syndicate and reputation system so there are four syndicates in the game The Pike Crimson Dawn ASA and the Huts all of which represent of course a criminal organization and we will have varying reputations with each at any given time these are meant to fluctuate they go up and down you get rewards for the first time they go up all the way up to the maximum but they are very much so meant to change with the breeze so to speak and the reason that's so important is that every single one of these factions has territory throughout the various places in the open world and your reputation with that faction determines how they react to you in those spaces if they like you you can come and go free if you have a really high reputation you can even take stuff and explore even more though every faction has places that you are not allowed to be period and because you are not actually tied to these reputations in a more permanent way it's very easy to Simply use them to your advantage and Rob and steal from everyone in true scoundrel fashion which is important because a lot of these faction territories naturally hide things you need for various progression systems and of everything this game does and that I've experienced so far this is the part I like the most I think this system is a lot of fun and that's also because it adds a certain Dynamic element to a lot of like missions and quests and stuff so from smaller little side quests to bigger larger jobs you'll often get sent to these territories one way or another and in order to figure your way out of that and what you plan on doing about it all depends on your reputation do you want to take the time to get that reputation up to a point where you can come and go freely or do you want to sneak in against a hostile faction which may or may not lead to a gunfight F and I really like what that does for exploration on top of what they're doing to try to avoid those more traditional open world feelings and the fact that they managed to do all that while also making you feel like a scoundrel as opposed to the run-of-the-mill space Wizards that Star Wars is very fond of feels great to me personally I'm really enjoying that aspect of the game now you may be wondering how you can change allegiances here well basically it's really easy to lose reputation just start doing things you shouldn't shooting the place up stealing from them Etc it'll go down in a hurry but to get it back up you have a few different options there are a few Dynamic events that can happen every so often that will help you out but then there's also stuff like contract Brokers or people who can give you jobs and this works more like a radiant Quest system where you can get sort of randomized little missions that pay a bounty and increase faction reputation for whoever you're working for and that's a more targeted way to make sure you can affect reputation outside of just what you're going to be doing throughout the story which will cause it to rise and fall but also various side quests these factions outside of just what they do there also do have dedicated side quests that pop up that you can take part in now it's important to know though that it's not all positives there are a lot of negatives here in fact some contract Brokers simply will not work with you if you don't have a certain reputation for the faction they work for and if it gets low enough they'll even start sending people to try to kill you now as this is an open world game it is inevitably going to come up so let's talk about our ability to blatantly murder everyone we see so there's a little bit of this it's not like full monty but you can acrw a wanted level at which point the Empire typically will start tracking you down as your wanted level goes up they will start sending more and more troops and at a Max Level they're kind of everywhere crawling all over the open world space typically speaking if you are in space you can go to a beacon and have your Bounty removed there if you're on the actual Planet you can find a corrupt Imperial officer to bribe however there is an event that I stumbled across basically if you get your wanted level super high you can trigger an event with death Troopers basically your wanted level is so high that they will not stop searching for you and you cannot bribe your way out of it and the only way to get rid of that wanted level at that point seemed to have been to go to the Death Trooper camp and find their specialized computer software to basically say that you've been neutralized and they have finally move on which is a really fun Dynamic little event that I happened to cross after terrorizing an imperial Outpost but well that's the stuff I wanted to focus on because it's what I've had the most fun with there are a few other things that surprised me so let's talk a little bit about progression systems this comes down to ks herself her equipment and her ship so let's talk about kaves herself most of her progression directly comes from equipment and her ability trees now your ability tree if you want to put it that way is more about finding experts who know all about something and then performing a variety of tasks to learn more so first have to encounter the expert which can be done through the story but sometimes you'll find leads to find them and once you've done that little introductory quest You'll unlock them on the ability Pane and then clicking into that particular expert will show you a whole host of tasks you can complete to then upgrade your abilities and this is everything from like passive Health upgrades more storage for things like grenades or healing items to more specific stuff like unlocking actual abilities and that's been kind of fun to mess around with and then there's K's blaster it's a highly customizable Blaster that can be fitted with a couple different types of attacks a basic Blaster pistol of course but also an ion charge that will allow you to hit droids and Destroy Shields or charge things up and then finally an explosive bolt that can be charged to both destroy environmental things but also act as like a little pseudo grenade launcher which I thought was fun so there's a decent amount to the Blaster as well but my favorite part because it caught me off guard was actually what K is wearing so initially I thought this was all Cosmetic in the preview event cuz that's all I saw but as you progress a little further you'll actually start to get equipment that comes with bonuses and eventually even set bonuses so wearing all of a particular set bonus of course gives you a big benefit so it turns out that the gear you are picking up is more than just cosmetic it will have tangible effects on your character which is a lot more than I thought they were going to do and then we start getting into the ship and the speeder those can all be upgraded to become better and better of course so there's been more progression than I thought and I've enjoyed the world quite a bit now there are a few other things I'll eventually wind up talking about in the review specifically like exploration and the mini games but I'm going to leave that alone for right now because I haven't seen all of Tatsu and only a little bit of AA so I'm not ready to speak on that too much at least definitively so for right now basically I want to talk about the things I didn't like now that I've already talked about the things I did so this is as good a time as any to mention the technical State for the launch version when they first gave me the review key which was about like the 21st or so when I fired the game up it was crashing a good bit like consistently every 30 minutes or so however the very next day they pushed an update to the game on top of Nvidia actually giving the drivers for it as well so both of those things combined seem to clear that issue up but because it was a concern with the initial version I received it'll be interesting to see tomorrow once people start getting into the Early Access period of it if they start running into more difficulties but the main problem I had was solved immediately and will hopefully not be an issue for everyone else but of course we'll see how that pans out now Beyond just that issue though there are a few other things here and there uh things like clipping can happen occasionally I've gotten stuck here or there uh animations will bug out I've seen a couple people te- posing when I walk into an area as it loads and then occasionally uh some things will become unresponsive and I'll either have to like walk away from it and come back or reload the game entirely and while each of those individually is minor once they start happening over and over again it can certainly get a little annoying so I would say definitely watch out for that but ultimately we'll see what the inevitable day one patch does about it another thing I'm not big on is the actual space areas of the game now this is one thing where I feel like they kind of had to be there and I also enjoy what they add for like immersion in terms of jumping in and out of hyperspace and then flying down onto planets and then of course off the planets as well and how sometimes you have to go to like space stations and stuff I like that part the part I don't like is like running around the space areas trying to find like treasures and stuff and it's just a little dull you fly there you shoot things they break apart you retrieve the loot and you leave and that's basically all there is to do which I mean I understand to be honest because it's you know space it's not exactly like there's a lot to do out there but visually I think it's really cool and there are parts of it that I enjoy but by and large I would say it's mostly not my cup of tea another thing is the combat itself it can get a little syy after a little while so right now I basically throw grenades and then shoot at everything that's still living now they've tried to mix this up with things like extra weapons and stuff but I mean you don't really need them and the other modes for your blaster let's say seem to come into play more for exploration than combat itself so I'm curious to see if that changes more over the course of the game I'm still relatively early speaking into the game so maybe there will be changes to it that make the difference for instance I ran into a mercenary as one of the experts for the progression system that specifically referenced using heavy weapons instead so I'm curious if that leads into like different modes for the combat system that maybe I just haven't seen yet that change it but as of right now it's definitely a little syy after a while for sure now with that stuff out of the way I want to talk about some things I'm still on the fence about because I just haven't finished the game yet and then one thing I just kind of really like in general so the thing I like in general is NYX kavas is not alone she's working with a small alien species known as a maral this one's name is NYX NYX is just as much a part of your team as K is as NYX is required for some exploration he can go hit buttons for you and activate things set up traps all that sort of fun stuff but they also in addition to that weaved in some content content specifically for you to like bond with NYX NYX actually has its own equipment as well you can feed it a treat which gives it specific bonuses or passives that it'll do for you and this is done by going to street food vendors and having like a little quick time event with NYX and while yeah it doesn't necessarily add anything huge to the game it is very cute and I enjoyed it but stuff I'm on the fence about for starters I have not actually gone to tattooine yet I've saved that one for last in terms of explorable areas just because it's a desert planet and I already kind of knew everything about it or at least I think I do so I'm very curious to see if going to taten actually winds up feeling different or if they manag to do something cool with it but I've seen it so many times and I've been there so many times in other games that I'm not particularly excited to go there if I'm being honest but I do hope they manage to do something cool another part is of course how the story is going to wrap up so I already know that they were shooting for a slightly shorter story as opposed to something long over the top and I like the general idea of the heist as a setup but I am kind of curious if there's going to be any big reveals or twists turns Etc to make it more than your standard like I'm assembling a team sort of Trope that you see in a lot of these types of stories and is quite literally the premise of this one and while that's fine I think there's enough that I like about this game already that I don't necessarily need the story to be like incredible truth be told it just hasn't hooked me in just yet and I usually usually do the story stuff when I'm out of all the exploration and stuff I actually want to do first which is fine I think that's clearly what they were aiming for here trying to recreate being a scoundrel after all but nonetheless the story's kind of been the least interesting part overall to me thus far which I think is probably as good a place as any to wrap up this Impressions video so again just to be clear the full review should be coming Friday on the 30th when the game actually launches I should be done with it by then the 100% for this seems to be pretty tame but with that in mind a couple of other things to note so this game on PC is only available via Ubisoft connect which is where I'm playing it and frankly I think stuff like that is a mistake just put it on Steam where everybody is to get it the most exposure possible the fans who really enjoy your platform will still use it or you get more direct Revenue which is why they do it but I still think it's a mistake not to give people the choice there but the other part of that is the price itself so the base game is $70 and then there's a gold and Ultimate Edition the gold comes with the season pass that one's $ 110 and then the ultimate edition is like $130 and that comes with the season pass cosmetics and the digital art book so that's a little expensive and until I've played the full game I just really don't know if it's going to be able to justify that price tag I'm having enough fun with it that I could see it being worth $70 sure depending on of course how the rest of the game pans out but once you start start getting above that it gets a little dicey because the Gold Edition comes with that season pass this is supposed to be two upcoming like narrative dlc's and maybe those are worth 20 bucks each maybe they're not it's hard to say as they obviously don't exist yet but the $130 version just seems outrageous to me now they did make this game available via their Ubisoft Plus subscription for I think it's like 18 bucks a month which if you only want to play through this game once and then never again I suppose might not necessarily be a bad deal and I'll talk more about that stuff in the actual review as well but all of that is kind of where my mind is at at the moment for this a fair bit of it that I've been enjoying some things I'm up in the air about and we'll kind of see where it goes from there again should be this Friday on the game's actual full release date for the review but in the meantime I certainly hope you enjoyed this video found it informative ahead of the gamees launch and if you did don't forget to like comment subscribe all that YouTube jazz but regardless of any of that Tru just thank you so much for watching I really do appreciate it may you wander in wisdom and have an amazing day [Music]