The latest in what will likely be a long string of updates for Star Wars Outlaws has seen the forced stealth aspect removed from most major quests. It’s a decision I simultaneously do not care about at all, think makes a lot of sense, and feel is a terrible idea. These are confusing times indeed. While this is a popular move the remaining players will support, and will probably improve the game, I can’t help but feel a little bit of the ick around it.
I have no real horse in the Star Wars Outlaws race. I didn’t play all that much of it, but what I did felt solid and also not quite for me, despite generally liking more traditional open world games. I’m not a major Star Wars fan, and Ubisoft’s shine has dulled after repeating the same trick over and over again for the past decade. It’s a game that arrived too late – for the sort of tropes it employs, for the popularity of Star Wars in video game form, and for the prestige of Ubisoft. But do these fixes help?
Outlaws Has A Long Road To Recovery
Here’s where the ick comes in. Outlaws had a bad launch at a time when Ubisoft desperately needed a win. The flop was severe enough that, after a string of so-so showings, Ubisoft delayed Assassin’s Creed Shadows a few months into the crowded traffic of February 2025 in what feels like a sink or swim moment. Some of the problems with Outlaws stem from Ubisoft’s reputation, but many others were rooted in the game itself.
Did it deserve more of a shot? Maybe. But few of its defenders would say it’s anything more than ‘pretty good’. Plenty of pretty good games are a lot of fun to play, but from a company with the size and experience of Ubisoft taking on a property as iconic as Star Wars and bringing it to the open world genre for the first time, you expect more than ‘pretty good’. Outlaws was below expectations, and not just in terms of sales.
But the developers have been resolute. Games have turned their fortunes around before. It’s rare for a single-player game to, but it has happened. Removing forced stealth is part of the plan to do that. My only question is, who’s plan? Julian Gerighty was creative director on this game when it shipped, and in a fairly unprecedented move, was replaced post-launch by Drew Rechner. The explanation for the update comes from Rechner directly, suggesting he is the hand on the wheel behind the call.
“Our first step in expanding player choice is removing forced stealth from almost all quest objectives,” Rechner reveals in a statement alongside this update. “This doesn’t mean that sneaking is no longer a viable or even preferable option in some cases. Rather, if you’re caught while sneaking, the objective won’t fail and reset you to the last checkpoint. Instead, you’ll seamlessly transition into combat.”
When Does Fixing Become Changing?
Does this change make the game better? Almost certainly. Forced stealth is one of the least popular aspects of game design, and is rarely used effectively. But what is the game now? You see how I’m conflicted. I’m unlikely to return to Outlaws, which is why I mostly don’t care. And removing unpopular restrictions naturally makes sense. But it still feels bad.
This game was never Julian Gerighty’s alone. I don’t even really feel that games belong solely to names like Neil Druckmann or Josef Fares. Hideo Kojima is probably the only developer who can stake a claim at making games in his own singular vision, and even then he has a team of a hundred or more behind him. It’s not that Outlaws can never deviate from the path Gerighty set out for it, especially when that path is ‘fairly generic open world game with a bike and Star Wars stuff‘. But the nature of this update and the reveal gives me pause.
Also in the update is the ability to carry weapons while climbing. That’s exactly the sort of post-launch fix you expect, great work everyone. Patches are commonplace, and they do help. This feels like (and perhaps more importantly, is being billed as) ‘the old guy made Star Wars Outlaws wrong, so I’m going to make it right’. I don’t know what happened behind the scenes. Maybe Gerighty was stubborn, maybe most of the devs objected to the stealth sections, maybe a lot happened that we don’t know about which caused Outlaws to launch in a state destined to flop.
Ultimately, it’s not a big deal that Outlaws is making a popular change to a minor part of the game that removes nothing and only adds more options. But in a world where even Baldur’s Gate 3 is not immune to constant, fan-driven updates, and when AI is being positioned as a saviour that lets players build the exact game they want with no effort or artistic input, the idea of games being constantly changed post-launch to suit the whims of the loudest fans is not a hopeful one. This change might be for the best. I fear many changes made like it across the industry will not be.
- Top Critic Rating:75/100
- Released
- August 30, 2024
- Developer(s)
- Massive Entertainment
- Publisher(s)
- Ubisoft , Lucasfilm Games