Re: Star Wars Outlaws is buggy!

On Mon, 10 Mar 2025 11:33:21 -0500, Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com>
wrote:

On Sun, 09 Mar 2025 15:29:04 -0400, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
>

So playing "Star Wars: Outlaws", the
Ubisoft open-world game, is something of an eye-opener for me. It is
by far the buggiest game I've played in _years_, if not ever.

>
Wait. What? Why would you do that? It's Ubisoft. Bethesda has "buggy open
world" trademarked and then patented as a game mechanic. (USPO #32768:
"Open world game with annoying or gamebreaking bugs that will later be
fixed by the community")

Heh. Although the biggest fault I have with Bethesda isn't so much
that their games are buggy, but that their games have the same bugs
over and over again because they keep reusing the same engine. Given
the size and complexity of their worlds, too, those bugs are more
forgivable. There's a lot of emergent behavior and unexpected player
opportunity that makes Bethesda games a lot easier to break. "Outlaws"
is a much simpler game, with much less involved quests. The fact that
my discovering a location prior to starting the quest that sends me
there invalidates the entire quest is absolutely moronic for an
open-world game.

All the moreso since Ubisoft makes almost four times the revenue of
Bethesda/Zenimax (Zenimax revenue 2023: $510m USD, Ubisoft revenue
2023: $1,900m USD). Ubisoft can afford to take their time fixing their
bugs. ;-)

But even at its worst, I never had as bad an experience with a
Bethesda game as I'm having with outlaws. Yesterday I fast-travelled
to a city and it loaded me underneath the terrain. Had to force-quit
the app again because the ESC wouldn't open the menu to quit normally.
It's embarrassingly bad.

I bet Outlaws isn't moddable either, since Bethesda owns the IP for that.

There are mods for "Star Wars: Outlaws"* on nexusmods, so you'd lose
that bet. There's no workshop page on Steam though, and I've no idea
how difficult or not Ubisoft makes modding the game. I'd wager
Bethesda games are easier to mod, though, if only because people have
such long familiarity with the engine. ;-)

The few mods on Nexus for "Star Wars: Outlaws" are fairly routine;
various reshades and graphic tweaks, a few texture updates, some
changes to how the camera works, or tweaking the weapons. I don't
think there's really anything that's stopping more complicated mods,
except that people aren't as familiar with the engine (and it's only
been several months since the game came out), and that there just
isn't much excitement about the game to begin with.

I am truly sorry you got a poor game experience though. I tend to dodge
Ubi unless it's on a console or they're giving it away, myself.

Generally, I don't have _bad_ experiences with Ubi-games. They aren't
bug-free, but the problems are usually fairly minor. A bigger reason I
have to avoid their games is that they're all the same. "Star Wars:
Outlaws" isn't really any different in that respect, but I had to give
it a try regardless, simply because of its license.

I'm not proud of my addiction to Star Wars games, but it's something
I've learned to live with. ;-)







* I refuse to call it just "Outlaws" because that name is reserved for
LucasArt's seminal 1997 western-themed first-person shooter, and it
doesn't deserve to be associated with Ubi-trash ;-)