Outlaws and Insights: A Star Wars Gaming Journey

In the inaugural episode of 'I Am a Nerd,' hosts dive into the latest Star Wars game, 'Star Wars: Outlaws.' Joined by enthusiasts Master Juishin and Darktrooper, they dissect the game's open-world environment, comparing it to other games like 'Starfield' and 'No Man's Sky.' They explore the various planets, discuss favorite and least favorite locales, and the replayability of the game. The discussion also touches on broader nerd culture, including retro games, anime, and comic books. Tune in to celebrate everything nerdy and explore the expansive universe of Star Wars: Outlaws.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Opening Remarks
• 0:08 Nerd Culture Anthem
• 2:01 Welcome to 'I Am a Nerd' Podcast
• 2:31 Star Wars Outlaws Discussion Begins
• 3:21 Open World Gaming Debate
• 4:14 Guest Introductions and Star Wars Enthusiasm
• 5:04 Exploring Star Wars Outlaws Planets
• 22:14 Comparing Star Wars Outlaws to Other Games
• 27:32 Closing Remarks and Next Episode Teaser

Transcript

A celebratory podcast about, those nerdy things we didn't use to be able to come out and admit that we liked, back in the day when it wasn't cool.

To be the nerd and now it seems that everybody and their grandma and their nieces uncles cousins are Into what used to be niche for us. I'm your host direct edition and we'll be diving into the first open world Star Wars game, Star Wars Outlaws with me here are my two guests.

 I've known these two gentlemen a very long time. I usually get my Star Wars cliff notes from one of them. And they are the first persons who came to mind when I was thinking about doing the podcast for Outlaws because they are I don't want to say fanatics. I want, enthusiasts. Star Wars enthusiasts.

How about that? How does that sound? Star Wars enthusiasts. Oh, Star [00:03:00] Wars enthusiasts. I get a little fanatical when I see the prices that Disney's putting out nowadays. But yeah, I'm enthusiastic about it. How long has it been? It's been Star Wars Outlaws dropped, what, August? End of August? Yeah, about that time.

So it dropped end of August. And, Yeah, almost two months. So that first, tagline, Star Wars first ever open world Star Wars game. How does that sit? Open world? I always think open world is it's a very, I don't know, it's, If you don't go hard at it, then there's no point to it.

Cause if you go open world and just give me three levels, I'm kinda like, I You're not really in the world, you're not living up to the hype. But with what they gave, I kind of say, it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. First off, how far have you gotten? I think Lionel's much further along than I am.

I'm about, we'll [00:04:00] say maybe five hours in because I've been involved. With Starfield, and their DLC just dropped. You keep on going back to Starfield. Oh, you keep on You know what, before I do that, my bad, I apologize. I didn't introduce you to You did not. we have Mastitution. Mastitution.

Yes, sir. And We're gonna stick with Background Dave. Dark Trooper. Okay. Over here. Background Dave. It's, more applicable. I saw your name the other day and I was thinking, I'm thinking of this intro and I was like, I'm going to have to introduce him as Dark Trooper instead of Background Dave.

The unfortunate part is Dark Trooper is my son. Yeah. And then I was thinking, I was like, well, hell, I should have been a motherfucking Dark Trooper. Well, I don't quite embody it quite like you do, I do play with the lights off. So there you go. There you go. Gotta do your part. As close as I can get.

 Jushin and Dark Trooper, how far have you guys gotten in Star Wars Outlaws? Like I said [00:05:00] earlier, Mr. Jushin is, is way further along than I am because I've been hobbled by Starfield playing. But, I'm about 5 to 10 hours in and so far, I really like what I see. Okay. As far as the open world concept. The flip side of that is, Coming from a game like Starfield, right?

Which is true open world. And that is truly an open world game in the vein of Skyrim, fallout,, fallout and open sky. I think, yeah. No man's sky man's true open world. And fallout and Starfield are both produced by Bethesda. , they're known for that type of, Gameplay, I enjoy it.

 But there are some things that don't quite mesh up for me. Purely coming from Starfield. Okay. Do tell. Cause , when I think Starfield, I think Starfield as universal, open universe [00:06:00] game, and for a franchise like Star Wars to do something like that, it's going to take. Some massive amount of time because you have more established planets, whereas Starfield, it's almost like you're discovering new planets, from the beginning.

Same thing with No Man's Sky. No Man's Sky more it's new planets and they're not documented, they don't have history, they don't have lore attached to them. You have to go in, you have to survey the world, you have to figure out what kind of resources are available, what kind of environments, that you can interact with, whether they be a, rural setting or a urban setting, there's a lot, there's a lot going on in Space Pirates.

Space Pirates. Space Pirates, yeah. I do shooting Space Pirates. I do shooting Space Pirates. I would think for Star Wars to do something similar to those. Those very broad [00:07:00] universal concepts. It's going to take them a while. I mean, cause it's what you have the outer rim and wild space, wild space, the core world, world's corporate sector.

But here's the thing about it. If you were to look at Starfield or excuse me, Star Wars as a whole, and if you take into account all the legends, all the new Canon, everything that's Really been done. Yes. A lot of it has been fleshed out If you look at let's say a planet where the twilight's come from right off.

Yeah, we like we Tomato tomato it is Depends on what side of town you grew up either way You've got almost two different versions so You know, we're definitely going to in this type of game. We're definitely going to go with the version that is You Most current, which would be the canon. But if you look and you dig down into the [00:08:00] information or the lore about Ryloth, it's still not completely fleshed out.

So you could have all these established planets like you do in Star Wars, but not all the information is there. You could actually use more of your surveying, you're, investigating, you're researching on those planets that are essentially established. But looking at the Star Wars universe or galaxy as a whole, inhabited planets only really make up about 10 percent of the, the known galaxy that's been, that's been surveyed, counting the, the core, the inner rim, the outer rim, mid rim, the colonies region.

Yeah. So when you're saying, when they're building the game as Star Wars first open world, you're saying they're falling short on the open world part as in relation to Starfield and No Man's Sky. I'm not [00:09:00] far enough into it to make that call yet, but I can see from what I've seen so far that whereas Starfield is truly an open world, Star Wars may be a little bit more contained than that.

Then what it was because you can't really get outside. Now, I haven't been, I haven't experienced it myself yet, but you have these certain designated areas where you're supposed to do something. Let's take the Pike's Guild. Yeah. With the first established planet. Very early on in the game, you're going to this planet.

You really can't do anything outside of that little settlement. Yeah. Yeah, until you fix the ship. What about the dark side of the planet? That's right. Because when you crash land, that first crash landing, you're on the planet named Tashar. Tashar. And you have a few cities within that map that you can journey to.

That only seems like a small part of the planet to me. Exactly. It is. That's, [00:10:00] that's just the light side of the planet, we call it, we can't venture to the dark side of the planet, so to speak. Again, when they say Star Wars first open world game, Is it truly hitting that open world mark? I have a hundred hours into this game.

No. No. But here's, and I think the reason why it's not is because As a dark trooper said, it's, it's limited, but I think it'd be limited due to the story that they were telling. So they only allowed you to go to certain places when you were jumping and me, I spent, once I hit a certain point in the game, I've been jumping like crazy going from one system to another attacking Imperials and pirates and whatnot.

And to get away, you got to jump and I just, Hey, in an open world, I would like to, in an open galaxy, I would like to just jump anywhere that I can jump so I can get out and say, Hey, okay, let's go back and do it again, or just go someplace else. But. So the, the planets they give you, and this may be a little bit of a spoiler to you Dark Trooper, it was T'Shara, [00:11:00] it was Aki, what?

Kijima, Tatooine, T'Shara, and Those are the only three I've been to. Yeah. Yes, those are the three you jumped through and then, of course, the starting planet. I can't remember. Oh, that's you. Canto Bight. That's Canto Bight Canto Bight. Canto Bight, that was it. I think it becomes the final plant to the story of where you're leading up to.

Because you have to get back to Canto Bight. Yes. So it's like a circle. Yeah. You're going and once you get off planet, you have to, you want to collect your crew for one last heist so you can be safe for the rest of your life. You get to Kanto, you're on Kanto Byte, you're trying to get off, and you take a job to rob somebody.

And you get enough credits to where you can buy yourself your ticket out. The problem is the crew that you joined on with, it turns out to be a bunch of rebels who were trying to rescue another rebel and then they fucking leave you behind. And then it turns into a, every mercenary for himself.

And she was just a, her by herself and her pet. And then she's just stole a shit to get out. Yes. Yeah. I know [00:12:00] you haven't gotten, or dark trooper, I know you haven't gotten very far. But, Out of the planets, which one would you say that you're more interested in visiting? Like, when you get more into the game?

So in my personal opinion, what I like is the urban settings. Okay. I like finding the different NPCs different locations within the urban setting to perform. The missions performed the task that you're going to, for me, exploring the cities is, is probably one of the more exciting parts of that type of game.

Yeah. I mean, for one thing I will say they did a very good job in giving each planet their own unique feel. That's for sure. Tatooine had the desert Kojima had the rain forest. No, that was a snow. Wait, was Kojima the snow? Kojima was the snow. Kojima should be [00:13:00] somewhat of a Tundra type.

It was Tundra. Tundra, right. Type sub, sub arctic type. There's four. What was the fourth one? Because that was where you run into that was, that was the more jungle atmosphere, jungle jungle planet, and where you ran into What job was it? I think it was the slicer. Akiva. Akiva. Yeah, that was it was.

Akiva was my least favorite planet. I couldn't stand, I couldn't ride my speeder. Trying to You had that upgrade. I couldn't even, even with the upgrade, I couldn't even avoid all of the, the rainforest trees and oh man, trying to stay on the roads. You got to look for it. You keep turning around and look behind you.

You're going to run into a tree. You say that like I wasn't looking forward. I wasn't, he would have made a good scout trooper. Exactly. Now, when I got to tattooing, And that open desert. Oh, man, I cried. I cried. I literally cried. I was like, this [00:14:00] is Tatooine. This is what we first saw in the first Star Wars movie, we all grew up on.

And I was in that open desert and I was like, damn, dude, this is fucking outstanding. Sorry, my language. This is outstanding. But to say, and here's the thing about it, as amazing as Tatooine is, as embedded in the lore, as many things has happened on Tatooine. At some point we gotta stay away from Tatooine.

Can we go away from Tatooine? We gotta quit going to I like the introduction of new locales and new places and stuff like that. No, you can't do that. Because they keep killing Uncle Ben, and they keep killing Martha and Thomas Wayne every Batman movie, so no. We gotta go, keep going to Tatooine.

We gotta keep starting off, that's our starting off point in the Star Wars universe. But you, but you've never seen, you've never seen Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, you've Fired up twice, although we only got one time. We don't keep going and revisiting the origin story. There you can find this, though.

You can't find the farm. You can't go out there to the homestead. That's that's one thing for sure. And but before we get off topic with Marvel and DC movies, they will [00:15:00] repeat the same origin over and over again. Star Wars has not done that. They have not done that. They may revisit the same planets.

But it is adding additional lore to the game. Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. That is the one thing I would give them, yes. And, and, and whether you disagree or agree with Disney Purchase, whether you like the canon, you like the new movie, da, da, da, da, you do have to give them credit that they are not rehashing the same story over and over.

They are trying to add to the overall story. I do give them, I do give them props for that. Now. was the same screenplay for a New Hope and And I was about to Same. Force Awakens the same. I was about to say it depends. Depends. So you ask absolutely the same. But we had new characters, we had new locales, we had new situations, and it killed on solo.

He gotta die sometime. I mean Were you more upset when Han died or when Chewie died when he got a planet dropped on him? I was actually mad when Chewie died. I was more mad [00:16:00] when Chewie died than when Han died. Let's be real, that's why we're true fans. Well, he went out with a moon coming down on top of him.

Is Chewie technically dead considering that was reverse canon? No, that's all Legends, so that's gone. That's all Legends, so yeah. Yeah, he's technically dead. He's live and kicking. He's the only one left. Now. Jushin, same question. Your most and least favorite planet while playing Outlaws? My least favorite planet is Kojima because it's not as open as all the other planets.

It's just that one city, you're just walking around there's no area. There's nothing for you to go out into the world and visiting, rent to the links, whatever's, wampas, or whatever it was. They ate that guy in that first episode of Mandalorian when he dropped him off at his ship.

Yeah. You didn't get to see any of that. You just were in the city walking around, doing your thing, trying not to freeze your tail off. That was my least favorite city. But my favorite, my favorite, I would say it was Tatooine. Cause once I was there [00:17:00] in Tatooine, I had open sand. I was. Although I'm a speeder bike, I was all over the place a matter of, and my favorite thing to do now is to go out into the dune waste and mess with mess with the the great dragon.

I was gonna say, you need to leave them Tuscans alone. No man, I leave the Tuscans alone. They ain't bothering nobody. I don't mess with them. I don't mess with them. You do Mission 4, I don't mess with the Tuskens, but the Krayt Dragon I mess with all the time. Take a shot or two at the Jawas, but leave the Tuskens alone.

I don't know, the Tuskens had enough grief with Anakin. Yeah, let's leave them alone. They've been through enough. They didn't show enough of him, in my opinion. They didn't show enough of him killing the kid the Jedi, the young ones, in my opinion. But, that's just me. That's cause you're bloodthirsty.

I wanna see it. I wanna see him go dark. If I'm, if you're gonna allude to it, show it. Here we go. Yes, I wanna see the kid. I can see the kid get shot down by a trooper, but I can't see a kid get cut down by Anakin. What is wrong with this picture? I mean, come on. You see how a lot, he's very Yeah, [00:18:00] I think I may need to change it from enthusiast to, to back to fanatical.

You see how, you see how his volume dropped. Go back to Star Wars fanatic on that one. Tatooine favorite, least favorite was? Was Kojima. Kojima. Yeah. Okay. Why Kojima? Because it was just a, no, you didn't get to explore the planet, it was just there in the city. Okay. So there wasn't really enough to do Yeah, exactly.

To warrant a, a whole scene or a whole part of the mission to Did the, did that part of Kajima, did it really advance the storyline at all? That's all it was, was story. That's all you did was just go around talking to things, finding people here and there. Do but there was a reason that you had to go? Yeah, of course.

Yeah. I mean, there's, there's a few of those reason why you had to, there's a reason why you had to go to all the planets, but, there's, then there's always gonna be a few of those type. Locales in any of these type games every last one of them Except for Kojima, you were allowed to explore the open land the [00:19:00] wildlife I don't know if they just didn't bother thinking about it or they just thought hey, you know Let's just get off here real quick, not repeat another half, but I'm just saying well and and we can relate that like I said, I've got a lot of Current experience playing starfield.

It's like going to the eye You can go to the eye, the space station that's, that's orbiting Jemison, right? But there's not a whole lot to do, but you have to go to the eye to get certain pieces of information from Vlad to continue the storyline. So Kojima could possibly be in that vein of, it's, it's not the, not maybe the best locale, but you need it.

To be able to continue the story, the stuff, just stuff to do. I thought that was more Tashara that the first planet you crash land on. Cause I, a lot of my missions that I was going through seemed I had to go back to that planet in order for a completion or to a continuation. So I figured Kishara was more in [00:20:00] relation to the eye than Kojima.

I think Kojima was just, it seemed more like a pit stop. And then exactly as far as exploration goes. That's a great way to put it. It's a pit stop on the way to the rest of the story. Yeah. But you, but you absolutely had to go there to advance the storyline. I use it as it was my second, after I left Azshara, I went to Kashima.

And then I, once I did that, then I went to Tatooine and that's where I basically just hung out. The pikes hated me all the way up until just recently. The pikes have been on my butt the whole entire time. , but I don't make it easy for him. 'cause I was always killing so well, and that's, and that's where I'm kind of stuck at, is I need to weirdly work on my stealthing.

My stealth for the pikes was just garbage. It was, it was straight up garbage. I mean, I got caught so many times. I just used the, the little animal, what's his name? And I use him just to distract somebody. And then I get 'em over there and either I either pull 'em around [00:21:00] the corner. Or just shoot him while they're looking at him.

Or now, now that I got him up there I got an upgrade where he can, he can detonate detonators. So just send them over to somebody detonate. Is a cause wreckage feet that Nick says, is that the one that you're talking about? I think so. You can use him. There was, there was two that I had one. He can it was, there's always like an alarm panel on the wall.

And I could use him to set a trap to the alarm. And then the other one that I just recently got is called Cause Havoc. Cause Havoc, yeah, he just runs and he jumps on somebody and he's he's just scrambling on their face. Yeah, and when he does that, they, every time that I've done it where he jumps on them and he causes them to like open fire and start shooting everything in the environment.

And it's, I don't think that's very useful because it alerts the rest of the troopers. I've only used it once. I was going to say, it doesn't, it doesn't sound like it's very stealthy. I've only used it once and I was trying to get in and all of a sudden everybody was looking for me. I was like, oh, time to go back into the [00:22:00] tunnel.

That doesn't seem very stealthy like. Not using that one again. It was either I go back into the tunnel and wait it out or I shoot it out with everything, yeah, with the walker walking around, I basically went to the tunnel. Before we jump into the missions, I did want to say, not to keep going back to that open world feat, but with the release of the most previous series Jedi Survivor.

Okay. And Jedi, Jedi Survivor was the most recent one, what was the one before that? Fallen Order. Fallen Order. It seems like it's a similar layout, because they both had, set number of planets that you can go to now outlaws does its best to expand on those planets, but to actually, and I'm glad you brought that up because it feels like the exact same game to me.

Whether it's Outlaws, Fallen Order, Survivor, it feels like the same game. Just like you said, it just opened it up just a little bit more than what [00:23:00] Survivor and Fallen Order had. Yeah. It seemed like Survivor and Fallen Order was more focused on specific cities instead of, open, like you said, open it up to more than one city or town that you could go to.

I even felt like it was more, not more, but maybe a little similar to Knights of the Old Republic, too, without the, the RPG aspects of it. So it's just, we're kind of getting the same Star Wars games rehashed, and again, they may add a little bit more to it, and a little bit more to it, and, It's not really showing their range, I would say.

That's a good, that's a good way to put it. Because if you, if, let's just say if we were to compare open world games. Yeah. And, and games of that, that type. Look at Halo Infinite. Way more open world than anything else that 343 [00:24:00] or Bungie had put out to date. Okay. But yet it's not completely open world because there are boundaries.

There are out of bounds. There are places you cannot go. Doesn't matter how much you try. You just can't get to. Right. But I think what you were alluding to was that really the folks at LucasArts Kind of need to expand their idea of what an open world really is. Because what I was going to, and I didn't know if we were going to get to this later, but when we're talking about game mechanics and your actual interaction with the environment, I find outlaws and even the other ones from Lucas Arts to be somewhat limited, especially coming off of Starfield, where you can interact with just about.

Every piece of the environment that you're in. You are hyping the hell out of Starfield. Are they paying you? I really wish they [00:25:00] would. How many times have you actually reset? You realize rent due today, so I wish they would. How many times have you reset or gone and started Starfield over? I've been through the Unity probably about six times.

And I've had to, and I've had to restart the game twice, so I'm on my third game. I'm on my third game. Is how many hours did it usually take to get to this? I'm probably at least 500, 600 hours in. He has to be, cause he was talking to me about starfield when we were playing, when we were playing starfield.

And I just haven't been on it since. I'm actually trying to finish outlaw so I can move on to a dragon age. Yeah. I'm trying to get back on Starfield because I didn't finish the game, or the first game. I got close to getting to the Unity, but I never finished it, so I need to go back and finish that.

Well, and here's the thing about it, you've just added a DLC with Shattered Space a [00:26:00] couple weeks ago. They added the modding for the Xbox. If you were on PC, you've had mods from pretty much the entry of Starfield when it first came out. But Xbox finally got the ability to mod the game a couple of months ago.

So it almost made it like it was a brand new game. Cool. So the, the, the replayability for Starfield is very high. I don't know what the replayability on outlaws is going to be because I'm not that far in yet, but what do you guys think? Well, is this going to be one good question? Because with the. With the relationships you have with the syndicates every action you take, or whatever mission you take will make one love you more and one hate you more, so it's a, it's a balancing act trying to go between them trying to do the missions and whatnot.

As I said, I was going through this [00:27:00] game the whole entire time and the pikes hating me like I got to a point where they were basically, they had a hunting party on me they were shooting me on site like. If I was in there, they would shoot me on sight. If I was on my speeder bike on Tatooine, they had a party out hunting me.

Chasing me down every time I was on my speeder bike. No matter where I was at, chasing me down. Not surprised the way you did. Totally not surprised. Absolutely not. Well, they had it coming. I'm sorry, that first boss, he was just damn rude. Threw me out. I was like, you know what, screw these pikes. After that, it was just, hey.