Star Wars Outlaws is an offline single-player game that came out over two months ago, but Ubisoft is increasingly treating it like a post-launch live service game with continual updates and, now, a new director. The French publisher revealed that Massive’s Drew Rechner is the already-shipped game’s new creative director, and he shared three areas the team behind it wants to focus on improving in the months ahead.
“I’m very excited to be stepping into the role of Creative Director on Star Wars Outlaws and to be working with the incredibly passionate team here at Massive Entertainment along with our talented co-development studios around the world and Lucasfilm Games,” wrote Rechner in a new developer update open-world sci-fi adventure. The associate director on last year’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is taking the reigns over from The Division 2‘s Julian Gerighty,
Alongside existing title updates that have already gone out focused on improving certain mission mechanics and various bugs, the new director outlined three areas for future updates: stealth, combat, and responsiveness. Here’s how he described what that means:
The first key area of improvement to the game is combat where we see a real opportunity to add more depth and excitement to the experience, further rewarding your tactics and precision. Our second key area is stealth which is not only about improving the readability and consistency of enemy detection, but also providing choice in how you want to approach each encounter. Finally, our third key area of focus is centered around the character controls, which means improving the reliability of cover, increasing the responsiveness of climbing and crouching, and generally improving the consistency of the controls overall.
While Star Wars Outlaws is scheduled to get a third major title update on November 21 when the game comes to Steam and gets its first story pack DLC, the new job title and talk about “more depth and excitement” certainly make it sound like Ubisoft is working on even more improvements over the long haul. The game has a lot of flaws but also a lot to offer, even if its sales were so bad, the publisher decided to delay Assassin’s Creed Shadows by four months.
Time will tell if these final polish passes and quality-of-life adjustments are enough to turn Star Wars Outlaws from a good game to a great one or if some of the problems ultimately run deeper than that.