What you need to know
- Star Wars Outlaws, developed by Massive Games and published by Ubisoft, is a third-person action adventure with stealth mechanics set in the Star Wars universe.
- Some early gameplay segments feature punishing stealth requirements that have led to players struggling to progress.
- Star Wars Outlaws creative director, Julian Gerighty, revealed a patch for the frustratingly difficult stealth missions that would release “in about ten days”, around September 17.
- The team is also considering additional missions later in the game to retool and adjust for better difficulty balance.
Star Wars Outlaws just released one week ago, and the team at Massive Games is already tooling away at a patch to rework the difficulty of some of the game’s more controversial early missions. According to comments made by creative director Julian Gerighty to GamesRadar+, Ubisoft has a patch in the works that will retool the problematic missions after seeing data that indicates they are not working as intended. The patch can be expected “maybe in ten days”, according to Gerighty, which would put the update’s release around September 17.
Gerighty’s comments claim the game’s aggressively punishing stealth missions were to create tension, but are ultimately not performing as the team intended. Instead, players are struggling and finding those early missions unfair, which Gerighty agrees is an accurate take. Gerighty also stated that the difficulty spike was something that only crept in within a week or so of the game’s launch. He described the difficulty of the early mission on Mirogana as incredibly punishing and a mistake that the team would continue to work on.
While the first patch targets the difficulty of Star Wars Outlaws‘ early missions, that doesn’t mean later challenges are off the table. Additional updates and tweaks could be made to rebalance the game based on player feedback and collected gameplay data. “I think there are millions of low-hanging fruits where we can make it so much more enjoyable and understandable,” Gerighty said concerning reworking the difficulty.
Gerighty stated that the patch wouldn’t necessarily remove the fail states that are proving to be a problem for players, so much as it would aim to find other ways to help those who are stuck to progress. This could be done by introducing additional context clues or otherwise changing the context in which players approach the roadblock. Game director Mathias Karlson also made a statement on the struggles players were experiencing with progression, stating that the team wanted to keep players “in that knife-edge range” of tension. However, the team takes player feedback and data into consideration when determining whether a segment needs to be retuned.
Star Wars Outlaws has four difficulty settings available at launch: Explorer (Story), Adventurer (Easy), Outlaw (Normal), and Scoundrel (Hard). It has not yet been said how those difficulty settings will be affected by changes to the problematic missions. “The overall idea for a heist in the Star Wars galaxy is intriguing. However, Outlaws’ plot wouldn’t be able to stand on its own feet if it wasn’t propped up in Star Wars nostalgia,” said Windows Central’s own Rebecca Spear in a review of Star Wars Outlaws. While the difficulty didn’t seem to be an issue for Rebecca, frustration in the game’s stealth mechanics could be found in other opinion paces highlighted in our Star Wars Outlaws review round-up.
