Star Wars Outlaws Stealth Bugs Make It A Worthless Masterpiece

I was staring at a wall. It was an early mission in Ubisoft’s latest massive RPG, Star Wars Banditswhere I was tasked with infiltrating a British Empire base to retrieve information from a computer. This wall really caught my attention.

It was a perfect wall. It captured the sci-fi aesthetic of the late 70s with dark gray cladding punctuated by utilitarian gray panels covered in dull blinking lights, and I stopped to think about how much work must have gone into that wall. When I looked elsewhere on the screen, I was blown away. This wall was the most boring thing in a massive hangar, with TIE fighters hanging from the ceiling, Stormtroopers milling about in clusters below, and even the little white sign with the yellow arrow looked like it was a decade old, carefully crafted to fit this universe. I felt a sense of sheer amazement at the achievement of this. Ubisoft, through multiple studios around the world, and the work of thousands of incredibly talented people, had built this impossibly perfect area for a snapshot that I had to run right past.

Except I ran past it three times because the AI ​​kept messing up and I kept getting restarted at a checkpoint right before that gray wall.

I struggle to capture the dissonance of this moment. This feeling of absolute awe, almost incredulous awe that it’s even possible to build games at this scale and with this detail, slapped in the face by the mind-bogglingly bad decisions being made throughout it all.

If you get excited about a beautifully crafted wall, you quickly get nervous when you start noticing the small, bending details on characters’ faces, or the meticulous, lazy animations of a bored guard. When I tried to imagine that this same level of care was taking place across thousands of locations in multiple cities on a handful of planets, I honestly thought, “It’s ridiculous that we judge these games by the same criteria as any other.” How can anyone look at thisthis majestyand say, “Hmmm, seven out of ten?” And then a guard sees me through a steep hill and ruins fifteen minutes of meticulous sneaking, and I wonder how it can even be for sale.

In 2024, we’ve reached that strangest place, where AAA games are achievements that humanity would once have recognized as literal miracles, and yet they play with the same annoying glitches and tedious repetition that we saw in the 90s. This contrast, this dissonance, is absolutely fascinating.

Ubisoft strikes me as the leader in this bizarre space. I have been delighted and amazed by what that company can create for years, although it is often not in a positive wayThe . Assassin’s Creed series routinely builds entire cities, even countries, in authentic detail, to the point that we almost take it for granted. It’s always struck me as the most horrific waste a game like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey can recreate ancient Greece in such beautiful detail, and then it’s thrown away, that entire digital space never used for anything else. It could be given to the world, offered up as a setting for a thousand indie games, reused and recycled as such an achievement deserves. Instead, it’s there for that one game, where we can reasonably complain about the frustrating details of a broken quest, or how crowd AI crashes at crucial moments.

And that’s just the beginning of the art and architecture. We haven’t even mentioned the fantastic writing, the wonderful voice acting, the sound effects, the music, the lighting, the concept art that makes such designs possible, and the direction and leadership that can bring all of these different parts together. All of this as the backdrop for my replay of the gantry run because a distant AI decided to get triggered by a Nix it couldn’t possibly see, or because that time I pressed Square it decided to throw a punch instead of causing a takedown.

I’m old enough to remember a time when we complained that a beautifully drawn point-and-click adventure game wasn’t fun to play, and were so disappointed that such beautiful artistry was the backdrop to illogical puzzles and bad writing. Imagine the camera popping out of that adventure game and revealing the room it’s in, the house that room is in, the town that house is in, the city that city is a part of, and the country that city is in – that gets you close to the scale of the same problem that plagues us 40 years later.

Only that opening city in Outlaws, Mirogana, is more than gaming could manage a decade ago, let alone 40. It would be enough for an entire game, with plots, missions, and characters. And it’s a blip in the staggering breadth of this game. I can’t overstate the magnitude of what’s on offer here, and how incongruous it feels that it can all be so easily ignored given such fundamental flaws. Flaws that have earned the game headlines like, “Star Wars Bandits Is too simplistic for its own good.” And I get it! I know what the article means! It’s true that the stealth is banal and poorly implemented, and yet such a core element of the game. But damn it, why can’t we reasonably this creation “simplistic”?

I have no idea what the solution might be, but I think it’s somewhere in a new order of priorities. One that involves scaling back the ambition of everything a large-scale developer knows. can reach, and redirect resources to repairing the absolute foundation that it so often fails to do. Because the tragedy of a work of art as Outsiders—or any number of other architectural masterpieces we see come and go in this sector every month—it would be too bad to be overlooked with a (well-deserved) 7/10.

Read more: Star Wars Bandits: The Kotaku Judgement

At Gamescom this year I saw a talk (currently embargoed) about how wind makes a game’s world behave differently, and on one level it was incredible stuff, a technological marvel. But on another level it’s absolutely Nothing if the basic loops of that game are boring, or if the enemy AI is endlessly running into beautifully rendered walls. It could be a 7/10 game with technologically stunning wind.

And so I come back to that wall. And I thank everyone who was involved in making it so special, the artists who worked so long to make it feel authentic, and the level designers who put it in, and the people responsible for collision detection who made sure I couldn’t walk through it, and the people who coded the Snowdrop engine so it could exist in the first place, and the producers who encouraged the developers who implemented it, and everyone who was somehow responsible for making that wall that I could stare at for a moment. And I wish I hadn’t had to sneak past it. rather so often.

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