Star Wars Outlaws Launch Impressions - Luke Reacts

of course Star Wars Outlaws reviews went up this morning I can't show you like just extended cuts of the game unedited or anything but I can show you clips and that to be clear is very very normal okay there's nothing strange about that they just specify like hey can you not post like the entire game ahead of time which I think is fair but let me see if I can find this a clip of this character just to show you a little little something something cuz it's in infuriating but basically do you guys remember Vil the Bounty Hunter chick that is in some of the trailers she's got like the shaved head and like shows up and you're supposed to be like really scared of her well there's like at least three occasions where other characters just straight up call her incompetent they're like why are you still here like you're bad at your job you haven't captured her in all this time what are you doing like you're clearly bad at at this I thought you were one of the best in the outer rim but you don't seem to know what you're doing and then she just kind of sits there and takes it it's like yeah and then she just keeps showing up over and over and over and over again it's really really bizarre and uh I think my theory is that at some point in development they decided that she as a character just wasn't clicking it wasn't landing and so they started to write her out and cut scenes and stuff with her because there's a number of times where it's like implied that she has been around more than she has and they just move on past it really really quickly it's just really really strange and honestly not very not very uh good but I think it's cuz they were actively cutting her out of the the game didn't end up fully doing it but cuz like if you looked at the trailers you would assume she has like a pretty big role to play but she does not like she's barely in the game at all this is during what I would probably consider to be like a spoilerific scene so I won't show too much but this this person like other characters in the story openly call her like totally incompetent and she just keeps showing up and everybody's like why are you here what who invited you and she just keeps showing up over and over and over again and then like that's fine you know there's crappy characters in every story but Blake rogers5 through Super Chat than I saw Mr matd tear Outlaws apart I won't play a Disney property game cause they might un alive my family without consequences law yeah if you sign up for Disney plus yeah they can do that now um what's funny is they ended up dropping that defense or that that motion for dismissal based on that because they saw the negative blowback and stuff but they're like yeah we we decided that the cas should stand on its merits and not based on technicalities okay good job Disney like wow bear mind Disney like they've done a lot of crummy stuff like there was even that story years ago that was heartbreaking of the and I'm not the first person to mention this you know this is a common go-to for Disney uh bashing but there was a a little kid who passed away and he wanted to have like Disney characters his father wanted to have Disney characters on his son's grave like his whatever four or five-year-old son's grave and Disney sent them like a huge cease and desist thing instead of just being like yeah we're going to make a variance just for this in the in the case of putting it on a tombstone you can use our properties instead of that they were like nope nope suck it up get rid of that like just scummy slimy crappy stuff you know they're not like the loving caring company that they they pretend to be you know like it's it's just unfortunate but thank you for the five um I haven't seen Maddie's review of it so I I'm not familiar with his problems with it but there's just technically it sounds like on Console there's a good number of problems I played it on PC so I can't speak to technical problems on Console um cuz I just haven't seen them on PC there were a number of bugs and graphical artifacts and stuff but they sent out a patch like Friday evening I think it was and that fixed a ton of them and then they also sent out an Nvidia new new graphics driver and that fixed a ton of them as well so I like if I couldn't replicate the problem or see the problem again after the Patch and after the the new driver I didn't feel like it was fair to complain about it if it's not in the game when people buy it you know if I I say in the review if I have to put a score on Star Wars Outlaws I'd give it a s out of 10 not any higher not lower cuz I don't think it's a bad game I just think it's like it's fine it's pretty good it's pretty good there are plenty of problems AI is so brain dead I went through the game I broke my own policy I went through the entire game on the hardest possible settings uh and difficulties because the AI is so brain dead if you don't do that it will get really really boring real quick you got to crank the difficulty but once I did that I had a good time with it it's a fun Star Wars Adventure romp in the Star Wars hay and I I think think it will be a recommend for some people but it just kind of uh kind of depends after the patches I wouldn't say it's bad prior to the patches it was pretty rough it was pretty rough but the patch fixed a ton of those problems and it won't be for everybody I mean it is a Ubisoft open world game and they do a lot to try and like shake the the trends that you might be all too familiar with and then there's other strange things like they use pre-rendered cutcenes randomly but as you've seen in some of the cinematic trailers their cinematic version of KS doesn't really look like the gameplay version I don't know if it's because they did like a model swap I don't know what it is or if you remember that uh do you remember that that like cinematic Last of Us trailer where Ellie straight up doesn't look like Ellie it was the commercial the TV commercial that's right like this one kind of looks like Ellie okay but then some of these shots like they look less and less like Ellie as time goes on especially this one with her leaning back here I don't really think that looks that much like Ellie maybe it's just me but I don't like I don't think it looks that much like Ellie and it's kind of similar to that in the The Cinematic prerendered cut scenes that use in Star Wars Outlaws where you'll see K and you're like uh I can tell that's supposed to be K but it doesn't really look that much like K now to be clear the reason they did that was because there's at least two cutscenes that I can think of towards the end of the game one is like the final final cut scene and then the other is is like a big story beat cut scene and those two cut scenes are really badass and straight up could not be done in real time when the game comes out and I'm allowed to like spoil it I'll show it to you guys but like there's there's at least two cut scenes where they would have to pre-render it so I can't really blame them for that but it's just odd to be playing through the game and then you hit just a point where you're having a conversation with job of the Hut and it's pre-rendered and then 5 minutes later there's another cut scene with him and it's not pre-rendered and it looks way way way way worse you know just weird just weird yeah it's it's fine as a game and I think it'll get better with with patches and fixes and stuff I had fun with it I've still continued playing it even after the credits rolled and at the end of the day that's all that really matters is if you have if you have fun while playing a game like you know it's like the 360 era you look back at a lot of those 360 games and you're like yeah there's a lot of problems with a lot of them if not most of them but at the same time if you're having fun that's like that's all that a lot of people really care about maybe it's not $70 fun and that's fair and the thing with Ubisoft is like just wait a month wait two months you'll get it for 50% off let's just be completely honest if anything it's a problem for Ubisoft right now is that everybody knows that their games go on deep sale within just a few months so a lot of people just wait for that sale which maybe is all part of the design maybe they don't really care either which way as long as you end up getting the game but um yeah as of right now I would say unless you're like a diard Star Wars fan eh I'd probably wait for for a sale as for at that sale you know I think you can have a really good time with it I think it's better than than Avatar as a as a game there's a lot more here and there's a lot of interesting little clever ideas as well um the AI sucks ass but when you crank the difficulty you don't really have as much time to notice because it's much more deadly so you again you just physically don't have time to notice the problems but beyond that um yeah I I had fun with it you can't steal ships no well that's one of the things that you'll notice time and time again in Star Wars Outlaws is it's themed around Outlaws but the whole idea is that KES is supposed to be like she got caught up in The Outlaw way of life but she doesn't really want to be an outlaw you know this isn't like she's going around actively trying to screw people over you know that it's just she got caught up in a bad situation and is trying to dig herself out of it by working with bad people and I'm not sure how well it works frankly like I understand the theme it does come off though is like yeah I'm going to work with bad people who are doing bad things but I'm a good person so you should like me and I'm like I'm not sure if that totally forgives you you know I'm not sure if that's a get out of jail free card you think it is yeah you're not able to like steal ships you're not able to to do like really nasty things like at one point at one point I was it's like ooh Outlaws I'm going to go to a farm of like NPCs in a small town and I'm just going to kill everybody and see what happens and you can't do that like it won't let you okay the game's not built for that so it's not like the full open GTA simulator that you might expect which I don't know why you would necessarily expect that cuz I don't think they presented it that way but it's not like it's Star Wars Works without laws basically it's not really that K is is supposed to be a really bad person but it's also not an RPG even though it kind of looks like an RPG with a reputation system it's just again it's a it's a basic Star Wars story you can get through it in like 17 to 20 hours if you really rushed I would imagine otherwise it's probably like a 30 to 40 hour game with a lot of Star Wars stuff in it and I think you can have a good time with it won't be for everybody but I think if you like you soft style open World Games if you like games with a ton of content and if you like Star Wars you're going to eat it up how does it compared to Jedi Survivor runs way better combat I would say is not as good but Jedi Survivor had very good combat they're just different they're just different they're set up very very differently the exploration in Star Wars Outlaws is also much better but again Jedi Survivor wasn't really trying to do that so they're just different games it's like trying to compare Uncharted with with Elden ring like it just they're two different categories it doesn't really follow how's the story it's good enough like I said there are a couple of characters you could straight up cut from the story like literally just cut their scenes out and I really don't think the game would be that different like if different at all I I like Veil I don't know why she's here and neither do the characters there are characters that say you are very bad like why are you getting paid you're just bad at this like what what's the deal and it just doesn't make any sense let me show you one of the times where the AI is really stupid though cuz I don't want you guys to think I'm like making that up so there's these missions that pop up dynamically where you can find homesteaders or like farmers and stuff and they're being attacked by Pirates and basically just what happens is once it kicks off you you fight off waves of enemies that come in but these guys are so freaking stupid like this is the quest it's not really even a quest it's like an event I think is how they phrase it but it's like for some reason there's just a stormtrooper over there but you see like they just show up you kill them and then more of the other guys will show up and I'm looking for them looking for them oh are they going to flank me are they going to do something really cool maybe nope he just kind of shows up and they just stand there shooting like they're just really stupid they're really really stupid and it's too bad because I think if they were smarter and or if they had like like where's that person what are they doing she's shooting over there like it's just really really dumb and the thing is when you crank the difficulty like one or two shots and you're dead so you have to run around and you have to play it tactically and you don't really have time to notice how stupid they are you're just trying to survive which is the only way it's really playable in my mind when you crank the difficulty it actually ends up being fine but if it's on a lower difficulty like this they're just shockingly stupid I mean look what I'm I'm able to walk up in front of four guys with laser blasters and they're just letting me get up close to them not prioritizing me this guy still isn't really shooting she's starting to shoot but look they're just it took her that long to get aggroed on me cuz the orange isn't full aggro that's just investigating so it's just really really strange and then you hit the little cool down continue popping jump over here like she technically took cover I guess but that's not saying a whole lot then the quest is over and then listen to the dialogue this is like this is what's particularly frustrating to me is because like do you guys remember uh Assassin's Creed Odyssey some of the cut scenes in that game let me show you this is a game from 2018 I'll pull up my own old video okay this is a game from 2018 from Ubisoft a different Studio different engine to be fair but this is from 6 years ago very quickly established that I oh my God old Luke or I guess young Luke I'm just describing the quest but I just I just want to see how it goes this is a side quest you're just talking with somebody they had this dynamic system this is their lip sync back six years ago I think the cut scene honestly looks pretty good the lighting's pretty good the camera work is surprisingly good it's really not not bad it's pretty impressive especially six years ago built on the PS4 and Xbox One pretty good right this is what we have in Star Wars Outlaws okay wonder where they are now HS only help when it's good for Java here we don't have much but take this as our thanks six years ago six years ago now again different engine different uh different team you know so got to acknowledge that we're not pretending like they actually strip down because it's a totally different tool set okay but it's the same publisher and it's just hard not to notice you know like it's hard not to notice because there aren't side quest dialogues that are anywhere near that high quality even in the main story there's there's just a real lack of consistent quality and like I said the swap between like pre-rendered cinematics where K doesn't even look like K and then to in-game cinematics where the lip sync is sometimes good cuz they like hand keed or whatever and then other real time like in-game Cinema where the lip sync is just like that's it really really bad it's just all over the place and it it's kind of tough to to feel like the effort was consistent across the board cuz I just don't think it really was beyond that I do think the game looks really good graphically in the environments it is very very pretty and honestly runs surprisingly well considering um like even just this let me show you a clip gameplay recordings like this is just from last night Jacob needed a little bit of extra footage so we just recorded this and like this is on like the jungle planet and of course this is like double compressed it's recorded then it's also going through the stream but there is a crap ton of foliage being rendered on screen at any given moment Poppin is extremely low and minimal you can kind of see it off in the distance in the center of the frame if you're really looking for it but it's really impressive like this is very pretty not all the game is pretty like NPC faces are are a little dead inside occasionally but it is pretty solid as far as as presentation is concerned the music's really good sound Design's pretty good I think almost all of the performances with the actors and actresses are really good there's just a lot there's a lot here and that's why I don't think it's fair to just be like the game is bad full stop I think the game has a couple of bad elements but at the end of the day I think it's more than the sum of its parts I I've noticed that is something I've been saying about a lot of these games that make me think back to like the 360 era where there are problems but I still had fun you know I still had fun and if I had fun while playing a game even if I can point to problems or point to stuff that I didn't like you know was it actually that bad yeah like look at this this is a vendor so this is just somebody you find in the world she's hanging out again environment's beautiful look at how crazy DSE the foliages the plants all that and then I talk to her like what is she doing I don't know I don't know she's looking over there for something who can say but there's just a lot of weird little bitty things like that you get used to it so it's not again like with all this stuff there's a spectrum of offense you know there's some problems with the game that are extremely minimal where it's just not that big of a deal and then there's other things that are much bigger deal and can actually affect it in my view the terrible AI is a big problem the fact that you have to go through and change difficulty to the hardest one possible just to have a semide decent time is unfortunate and the game needs like that's got to get fixed but something like you know the cutcenes going between pre-rendered and then ingame and the quality being really inconsistent to me is that like therefore you shouldn't play the game at all no I don't think it's that serious of an offense it's noticeable and I'll point it out but still there how long was the play through I think uh by the time the credits rolled was probably like somewhere between probably 22 and 27 hours maybe like 24 25 something like that uh but there's a lot more after that and I kept playing after that and I'm still playing and I think you could easily hit 40 50 60 hours when all is said and done with how much stuff is in here CU there's a lot there's a lot but like honestly if you were just speedrunning the main story you probably get through it in like 20 hours I'd guess if you didn't crank the difficulty like I did maybe even faster Destin I'm surprised the cut scenes in the first moments has a character model that just does not look great then the 20 minutes they have gorgeous pre-run cut scene yeah let me show you guys that that cut scene because I show it in the review that we're going to put up where this this particular cutscene I think was pre-rendered because they needed to cover up a loading screen which is fine I mean that's that's a valid reason to have a pre-rendered cut scene games like Uncharted for example have done this um so it's not unheard of let me see if I can find it so let me show you one of the like in-game cinematics okay so this is like an in-game cutscene okay where K I honestly think looks pretty good like honestly not bad it's it's like hand keyed and hand animated or at the very least the motion capture is much better I don't know when they did hand stuff versus um motion capture but this is certainly better but then let me show you the pre-rendered cut scene where in my opinion K does not even look like herself okay right here now this is the cut scene I was saying that I think was done to cover up a load screen because you go from this and like see it's a beautiful shot they're showing stuff that they maybe not they might not have been able to do in real time like the the tracks that you make bets on all the time so I can appreciate that but it's just really jarring to go from this level of fidelity where I don't think K even really looks like K and then to transition back to the the in-game cinematics a little bit later is just jarring you know and then this is that same character with the in-game Cinematic not bad but significantly worse than the pre-rendered one you know so I I don't there's just a lot of weird things you know there's there's a handful of these like weird little things that you'll find while you go through the game and are they individually enough to be like yeah no I'm out I hope not because I think you're going to miss out on a lot of good games if you are quitting them just because there's like a couple little things you don't like here and there but when all these things get stacked on top of each other they they put a lot of weight onto a potentially flimsy structure and then maybe it's more fair to to draw the line somewhere um but on the whole like I said at the top I think that the the game is more than the Su of its parts there's a lot of quirks and problems with it perhaps the biggest one is that the AI has cascading effects for all of the other like Quest design for The Wanted system and all that and it's really too bad because I thought The Wanted system sounded really cool but do you guys know what happens when you're wanted in this game I'm just going to I'm just going to show you okay I'm I'm going to show you what would make sense if a character in a video game like this is wanted by the elite killing force in the Galaxy what pray tell would be a fair reaction to that probably to go and like try to to lay low maybe you know you do some sort of really covert Mission or something to sneak under their noses and and I guess call off the search or something uh in GTA it's like you just got to go hop on a boat or Swim into the ocean 50 fet down and hope they don't see you like that's how it works in GTA but here how it works I think is set up in a way based on how bad the AI is and how bad they are at tracking the player because what you do is you get marked and then you have to pursue the Assassins coming for you and then you have to kill them to basically get a key a key card to free yourself and to call off the search so you eventually find your way to them and then here's all the death Troopers you toss all your grenades and stuff and hope you take some of them out and this is like their little base before they even come searching for you and then you have to kill them and then you get the key card from the one guy and then you move on right I just like no part of it really makes sense it's like okay okay I'm being wanted by death Troopers so I'm going to go find them while they're searching for me or about to go searching for me I'm going to kill all of them and by committing a much Graver sin by killing this elite elite uh force from the Empire I'm going to then go and set myself free it's it's just really underwhelming cuz you would hope that with a level six wanted level like okay they're going to send like Tie fighters and stuff for me and they're going to really call out all the the big boys but instead like it's just basically another fetch Quest where you go to a station and collect a key card and it's just it's underwhelming and then you see how bad the AI is they just stand there and take it they don't try to flank you these are supposed to be like the elite assassins in the galaxy outside of like maybe Bounder bounty hunters and stuff I keep shooting the damn log cu the cover systems like keeping me a little too low that's funny um and then after that you take him out acquire the key card and once you've acquired the key card you're going to take it into this little computer there and they have some blasters there some supplies and stuff that's nice but like that's that's the extent of The Wanted system and it it's just kind of frustrating you know cuz it's like no part of this makes sense you put the key card in they call off the search and then they're just like okay we're just going to forget that you killed all of our Elite highly trained soldiers and took their base and like took their stuff look how much money or credit they spent on this search for k and then they're just going to forget about it cuz somebody swiped a key card I guess they're claiming like maybe it looks to the Empire like the Death Trooper claimed they had gotten KS and so they just swiped the card and called off the search like oh we got her moving on you're going to tell me they wouldn't notice that all of the death Troopers they sent never show up to work the next day like what it just doesn't make sense so in order to enjoy a game like this you do have to turn your brain off to some of that stuff cuz there's some things that just don't really make sense are just kind of weird and you're like okay but that's again something that we did all the time when we were like kids playing like games that had a bunch of features that didn't really make sense we just would do that because it was it was what she did because it was the one game you got for Christmas and whether it's perfect or not you're going to enjoy it because you don't have another game you know and I I just think that that there's some people that are going to be able to kind of turn their brain off to it and tolerate that and there's other people who won't be able to tolerate it which is totally totally fine um but that's why you know nobody's forcing you to buy this you like you don't have to buy you don't have to buy it full price you could wait and probably get it 50 60% off in a few months because that's just how this tends to work and maybe then you'll you'll be pleasantly surprised at the offering but that's why Ubisoft tends to launch these games at times like this but it's also why they're not doing a sequel to this they're they're going to do a couple of story based DLCs that another couple of studios are going to work on it's not even Ubisoft massive doing those and then they're going to uh just move on to the division 3 so they're like yeah even if even if this does pop off even if this does sell really well we're just moving on cuz Disney's taking a cut every step of the way and and even then a lot of people are just going to wait for sales and it's going to be very very difficult to to break even on it so this is a one-off I mean they haven't said outright word for word we're only doing one what they've said is that the team that made this game is moving on to the division 3 and they said that back I think even before Avatar launched so they said yeah we're doing Avatar Star Wars and then we're doing division 3 which is a live service game where their whole team will be on board like all Hands-On deck that's not a game they pump out in a few years then move on to something else you know that's that's a commitment a studiowide commitment so I think this was a fun project for them but it also is kind of tough to to get really committed to it when you know that there's not the potential for anything further but then again it's also kind of refreshing to have a game that doesn't end on a cliffhanger like Jedi fall in order where it was really short and then just ended out of nowhere and they set it up for the sequel like oh I kind of wish we had had like a complete story but okay whatever this is like the intro to the story whatever so anyway anyway I've I've honestly had fun while playing Star Wars Outlaws I think there's plenty of stuff to be fixed and there are problems to be found but on the whole I enjoyed it I'm glad I played it uh while I don't think it's probably full price some something you should get for full price uh for most people unless you're like a diard Star Wars fan or something I I I think on a sale it could be a good time so long as you're willing to put up with some of these like weird stupid excentricities you know I say in my review that is uploading now uh if I had to put a number on it I'd probably give a seven and that's when you crank the difficulty and when you really engage with a lot of the side content um at that point I think you can have a really good time but that's also based on the assumption that like seven is is like yeah it's good it's not bad it's not terrible or anything and I wouldn't I'd say parts of the game are bad but on the whole like I said I think the game is more than the sum of its parts so I think uh when you consider the whole package I don't think it's bad there's bad parts but there's also plenty of good parts he took my thing red flag red flag 16 times detail [Music]