Star Wars: Outlaws, developed by Massive Entertainment, the people behind the Division titles and published by Ubisoft received “up to par” review from most journalists and reviewers, stating that there are some serious flaws in the general gameplay along with the story being reviewed as also “good enough”. People who paid for the Gold or Ultimate editions are getting to play it early since the official launch for the game is August 30th.
Just Reminding Everyone Of Ubisoft’s Pricing
From the moment it was first announced, players, journalists and critics alike have been bashing Ubisoft for presenting Standard, Gold and Ultimate “editions” of the game. All of these editions can be preordered but breaking down what each edition gives rightly, infuriates people to the nth degree.
The Standard edition would cost 70 dollars and people will get the standard game and the pre-order bonus if they still pre-order, no early access. The Gold and Ultimate editions costing 109 and 120 dollars respectively would have 3 days of early access, season pass but only the ultimate version would have exclusive skins and a digital art book.
What Is The Flaw This Time?
For players on the PS5, an update was pushed that made them restart their entire game from the very first, with their previous progress in game being completely wiped. For the eager players who forked out extra for the gold or ultimate in order to get early access got an email “urging” them to update the game to version “1.000.002” or rather ominously stating they will risk facing “progression blockers”.
Now as this email was sent after early access players had progressed quite a lot in game, they received this email where they were asked to update the game to this latest version and then to “start a new save file to fully enjoy the Star Wars:Outlaws as our team intended”.
Just to be clear, to get early access players had to fork over over 100 dollars for the gold and ultimate editions of the game Ubisoft was shilling out and now this multi billion dollar company could not find out about a game breaking bug like this two days after the early access period. The patch notes for this new update doesn’t say much in terms of what these “progression blockers” were, just stating “Numerous bug fixes across the game” as one of the patch note points.
The Problem Isn’t The Bugs
The problem and outrage here isn’t the game breaking bugs or as Ubisoft calls it “progression blockers”, the problem is this multi billion dollar company is putting out a game where the cost of getting early access is an extra 30 or more dollars and the people who paid this price to play the game early have to restart whatever progression they experienced.
Why weren’t this game breaking bugs found and fixed before the early access period? Can they really say they didn’t know, Ubisoft is a massive company, was play testing this game really too much to expect? They were labeling their Skull and Bones as a “quadruple-A” game, the CEO stated this in terms of trying to defend the 70 dollar price tag on that game. In the end what is being seen is Ubisoft will confidently say outrageous things (marketing) in order to market their games but when it comes to the game itself it is anything but, it certainly wasn’t remotely close to what a “quadruple-A” game would be.
Conclusion
It is becoming more and more clear that companies and in this case their CEOs will say anything with confidence if it means they can get you to open your wallet. We’ve seen the absolute disaster with EA’s Anthem and the media firestorm that erupted from its development. We’ve seen Skull and Bones being stuck in development hell for years only to come out be “mediocre” at best and now we are witnessing it again with Star Wars: Outlaws, a title where it’s gameplay was on IGN’s youtube channel had more dislikes than likes and comments ridiculing its sub par gameplay and insulting price point and now its a blow to the people who paid extra for early access only to restart whatever progression they had.
