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Celebrating Star Wars Day with SW Outlaws

Matt

10 May 2026 • 11 min read

In celebration of all things Star Wars, I returned to Star Wars Outlaws and enjoyed it much more than expected!

Here is some early feedback about my experience with the Ubisoft title after 16 hours of gameplay. Please note that this is still an early impression, as I am continuing to play the game and some of my thoughts may change by the time I complete it.

Join the fun and interact with me as I will continue to the play the game until the end of May 2026 on Youtube and Twitch at 9:00 PM (BST)

My first experience was a catastrophe

I started playing Star Wars Outlaws on PC around Christmas, but my RTX 3060 could not cope with the load required by the game, making it almost unplayable.

Depending on the speed at which I entered levels, textures, NPCs, physics and renders would lag significantly, to the point where Kay fell through the 3D volume to her own death (or eternal entrapment) as the models eventually rendered around her.

This was not only impractical and frustrating, but also extremely disappointing. It felt as though Star Wars Outlaws had not been optimised for average graphics cards instead of high-end PCs and new-generation consoles.

After a few days of trial and error, I gave up.

A new hope for Star Wars Outlaws

I love Star Wars, and I will take any opportunity to celebrate the fandom. So, when Star Wars Day aligned with the acquisition of a PS5 and a decent discount for Star Wars Outlaws on the PlayStation Store, I jumped in - confident that the game would run properly this time.

Once the technical challenge was out of the way, I was ready to embrace what fans have been looking for over decades: the ultimate Star Wars open-world experience.

A perfect recipe?

It is very pleasing to admit that Ubisoft has delivered on this promise, although with varying levels of success and execution.

There is a lot to enjoy here - the exploration of different worlds and space maps, a large diversity of biomes faithful to the franchise, a storyline coherently inserted into the large tapestry of the saga, a rogue character with an adorable sidekick, villains who look like villains, amazing vistas, excellent soundtrack and sound design, and more.

While all the ingredients seem to be in place to deliver an ambitious game experience, the quality of those elements and their overall balance is a different challenge of its own. This is a recipe that requires balance, finesse, character depth and motivations deeply anchored to justify investing 80 hours of gameplay or more. Balance and character depth is very much the crux of the issue I have with the game, as I continue to explore below.

We are the good guys, right? Right!?!

This is where things get a little itchy.

In Star Wars Outlaws, we follow the footsteps of Kay Vess, a local street rat turned Most Wanted criminal after crossing Sliro, a crime lord taking advantage of the disruption caused by the Rebel and Empire conflict to build his influence.

In no time, we are made aware that Kay’s presence will bring chaos and destruction to her loved ones. She leaves her planet to make things right, meaning taking Sliro and his syndicate down, supported along the way by a group of misfits with varying levels of cohersive control and loyalty.

While this premise is very serviceable on paper, it is contradicted very early on by Kay’s behaviour. Although we understand that she is new to the whole 'crime game', her naivty is staggering considering her upbringing in Cantonica (described as 'home to the casino city Canto Bight, which was a destination for wealthy tourists, gamblers, and war profiteers') and related priors in her local district - against all odds she openly discloses who she is to every law enforcer and gatekeeping droid (despited her most wanted status), gives away her entire strategy if asked politely, has very little ability to negotiate the outcomes of her own undoing, does not seem to suffer from any of the stakes at play - and, as a character, has very little agency over her own destiny.

This headlock approach of linear storytelling would go the extent that the game occasionally makes choices for the player by agreeing to certain pathways on your behalf, invests winning conditions into the completion of narrative milestones that may contradict your own decisions, uses deus ex machina moments for narrative convenience, bends the laws of physics (even for Star Wars) to frame the character, and remove your ability to choose alternative outcomes via multi-choice decisions, and more.

On a positive note, the affiliation system gives social leverage a bit more depth. Kay can decide to align with, destabilise or betray the syndicates active in each biome, unlocking certain favours and benefits when trading locally or offering safe passage through certain areas. However, the linear narrative can contradict your efforts when you land on a planet where the main quest forces you to support the interests of an opposing clan. This feels counterproductive and paradoxical from a character development perspective, and it certainly raises the question: why bother in the first place?

One final point - these hard-edged constraints are also reinforced by the breadcrumb progression system, which unlocks new skills and gear upgrades by completing a lengthy list of local contracts mostly unrelated to the main storyline. It feels like a necessary grind wrapped into false narrative pretext, as it doesn't add much to the core storyline and has little to no causation beside the fluctuation of your reputation with local syndicates.

Motivation, empathy and jeopardy

The other point of concern is how little Kay seems to care about her own motivation and the people around her, except for Nix.

I find it problematic to direct a character with little understanding of causation, moral dilemma or appreciation for what she has left behind and sacrificed for her quest. It risks creating a very surface-level pay-off when the story reaches closure.

This is very similar to the experience I had with Hogwarts Legacy, where our playing character is leaving their life behind but never mentions the hurdles of personal adjustment, the people they miss, or simply expresses a sense of wonderment at the view of the magical world they are experiencing.

As a result, it feels as though the player character is stripped of their own individuality so that the player can inhabit them more effectively. This comes with the risk of displaying an idle emotional state during gameplay sequences, in direct contrast with the heightened emotion of cutscenes, which are distant from player agency.

At the opposite end of this spectrum, you find Ellie Williams from The Last of Us: a character who is constantly assessing her environment, expressing her opinions, values and perspectives while the player is actively involved in gameplay. While it is easy to develop a bond with Ellie and remember key lines of dialogue from The Last of Us Parts I and II, I doubt this will be the case for Kay Vess.

After more than 16 hours of gameplay, Star Wars Outlaws also displays very little pressure, jeopardy or personal stake for the protagonist, and falls short when it comes to reframing and reminding the player why this journey is so important to Kay.

This is a critical omission for an open world game, especially considering that players may experience Star Wars Outlaws across a series of weeks or months before completing it. Baldur’s Gate 3, on the other hand, constantly reminds players of the stakes at play, the risks of being underprepared when passing narrative thresholsd, and reinforces a sense of urgency around the tadpole situation.

This lack of pressure is further accentuated by the dissonance around the character’s notoriety, especially when Kay’s status as a Most Wanted criminal does not seem to raise an eyebrow in general public settings. This seems to undervalue Sliro's authority, and his overall influence as a crime overlord.

A good game, not a great one

Taking all of the above into consideration, it is very likely that I am seeing Star Wars Outlaws through the wrong lens. Perhaps I should simply enjoy it as a fun, low-stakes, serviceable Star Wars open world game doing its hardest to satisfy the world’s biggest fandom.

For titles of this scale, it is very hard to strike the right balance between exploration, tactical levels, parkour, combat, space simulation and a good story. In fact, there may even be too many ingredients in place for anything to stand out sufficiently and turn Star Wars Outlaws from a good game into a great one.

The risk of trying to please everyone, and of offering such a wide range of game styles and mechanics as part of a large Star Wars buffet, is that it will inevitably be divisive and leave some people on the sidelines. This is especially true in my case, considering how little patience I have for resource management, fetch quests, tactical stealth and out-of-context mini-games.

But when the game moves into a phase that matches your preferred playstyle, it generally does that very well - and it is satisfying!

The David and Goliath of the crime world

However, if I consider the storyline to be the common thread holding these modular elements together, the overarching plot and character development feel too distant and polarised to be taken with the seriousness assumed by the game. While the 'David and Goliath' pattern is often seen in Star Wars, it struggles to find legitimacy in Star Wars Outlaws.

Looking at another Star Wars title similar in tone and themes, Solo (as a film) does a much better job of delivering an origin outlaw story by keeping the focus on character building until Han becomes the character we all know. Star Wars Outlaws would have benefited from this approach by lowering the scale of Kay’s ultimate objective as a collaborative ally to a greater cause, offering her opportunities to develop social skills in addition to her skill tree, allowing her to identify who she wants to become through conflict and critical choices, supporting polarised characters who foreshadow the outcomes of those life paths, and completing her cycle by caring for others as much as she cares for herself.

And lying. Kay needs to learn how to lie.

So, what now?

Does this early review of Star Wars Outlaws mean that I will put down the controller and move on to the next adventure? No.

I am having a very fun, if not especially profound, time with the game, and I have started to accept it for what it is: a generours and ambitious title driven by the desire to please Star Wars fans in more than one way.

Similar to my experience with Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which deeply challenged my preferred playstyle, I had to learn what the game expected from me and was rewarded with a great narrative experience and reveal. Arguably, requiring players to adapt to an enforced playstyle is a major red flag for creativiy and agency, especially in the context of an open-world RPG where a variety of solutions should be able to resolve the challenge at play.

Finally, I wish to underline SWO is game created by incredibly gifted indivuduals who deserve to be celebrated for their creative and technical acheivements, regardless of individual preferences and expectations. Ubisoft has addressed early feedback with a variety of patches since release, making this version of SWO a very stable and optimised game for recent PCs and consoles.

I am very keen to find out how the game unfolds beyond my latest save, revise my position, confirm some of my assumptions, and celebrate the amazing time shared playing SWO online with the community.

Join me on Youtube and Twitch @mattgoesroguelp for more SWO at 9:00 PM (BST) until the end of May.

Stay Rogue!

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