Outlaws and Replayability: A Star Wars Gaming Experience

TheDirectEdition, Darktrooper, and Master Juishin discuss the playability, lore, and various features of the game 'Star Wars Outlaws.' They highlight the game's strengths, including its detailed graphics, diverse skill tree, and the immersive Star Wars universe. The dialogue touches on the importance of replayability in games, the impact of well-integrated lore and Easter eggs, and the potential for vehicle and character customization. The hosts share personal anecdotes and tips, such as using the character Nix to cheat in the in-game card game Sabacc. Despite some missed opportunities in customization and gameplay mechanics, the hosts find the game compelling and worth exploring for both Star Wars fans and general gamers.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction: The Cost of Gaming
• 2:09 Star Wars Lore and Easter Eggs
• 6:27 Gameplay Mechanics and Features
• 13:20 Replayability and Final Thoughts
• 24:55 Conclusion: Final Recommendations

Transcript

no, that was another that was great about me. I had is that you couldn't use the, the Walker. You couldn't steal the Walker.

You couldn't steal the Walker. Cause they were there, they were walking around and then there were also parked. And if you were able to, if you played certain, you know, bases like I did, cause I was sneaking in from, I was like, you were able to, I was able to get over there where he was at. If they just edit a feature where you could jump in and.

Start walking around, cause some major damage. Dude, I would have been blowing everything up. Absolutely. I would have been stepping on all, everything white, everything in white armor. But I guess, I guess my original question was, are you seeing a lot of different cannon lore type weapons throughout the game that let's say the DC 15 from the Clone Wars, the rifle that the clones, did you see a lot of those?

It depends on where you are. Because I do remember a particular anybody using a bowcaster. I know I didn't see a bowcaster, but I did. I can't remember what mission it was, but I was on Tatooine and it was a talk about a particular speeder and the speeder was, they kind of made the hint that it had belonged to Owen, was it Uncle Owen's speeder?

The speeder that Luke and Obi Wan went into town with. Oh, yeah. Ooh, yeah. When I talked to the He ended up selling it to a merchant in Anchorhead. So they made reference to that speeder. So the lore, the DM, like I said, when I was going through Jabba's Palace, You saw solo on the wall in carbonite Mm hmm.

So the details and the easter eggs and the lore is they put it there. It's in there and Would it be a Star Wars game if it wasn't though? Absolutely. Yeah, I mean come on and and with the setting I mean we're looking at a time frame between Empire and Jedi Is when this is set? Yeah, so it's it's It's like a no brainer that you see Solo on the wall at Jabba's Palace.

And it's killing me. That you, that you do certain things. So you didn't see Solo on the wall. I missed Solo. You missed Solo. But, knowing the time frame is though, it's, it's kind of like, because it's, it's kind of like a tease to it. Cause, I, I, I love the Legends aspect of Star Wars. The everything that came in Legends.

Because EA had a great lore, mythology that they had built up over 20, 30 years. That they just placed on hold, put aside. Or in a box Cherry picked From Cherry. Yeah. Which their cherry pick from. And they kind of did the Crimson Dawn from Black Sun. They kind of took Black Sun and turned into the Crimson.

Dawn Black Sun was the gang within the, it was the original. It was the original criminal empire that, yeah, that was opposite of the huts in Legends. Okay. And they were in league with the Empire. And during one of the missions during the story. Between Empire and Return of the Jedi, The Prince Shijo, the commander or the leader of Black Sun, Was trying to make a play for power in the Empire and also Princess Leia.

Yeah. While they were trying to figure out what they were going to do to try and get Han. How they were trying to get Han out. I think I remember that. Now that you said Prince, Prince Cesar, that was the green guy with the ponytail. Yes. Yes. Huh. So it came, it came from the book shadows of the empire and they made a video game.

They made a video game. They had some comments. Very good. Yeah. It was a good storyline. It was a great character. He was the, he was the foil to Vader because he was trying to take Vader spot as kind of like that second person in the empire. He was playing up to Palpatine during the whole time, but he was never on the up and up.

He always had, he didn't know it. He always had a scheme going on. Okay. You know, a backward scheme with Leia, like you just mentioned. It was great. And just like you said, when I first saw Mall and Solo Astor, the, the solo movie. Yeah. It really felt like that was the replacement for Black Sun. Black Sun.

Black Sun and Black Sun has really been woven into the, the lore lot in Legends, but you don't see 'em anywhere in Canada. Crimson Dawn is the replacement. Okay.

Last question on weapons is I haven't run into any lightsabers. Nope. Throughout Outlaws. And you haven't seen any either? None, yeah.

Good decision or bad? Good because we're trying to, for the, for what they're trying to explore, they're trying to say that you can, you can have a Star Wars game, And not every game has to be a Jedi related. And, and that's the whole thing about stars. Not everything is a star is related to, to Jedi. And, and, you know, and that's what this is about.

It's like you get out there, see what the universe is about, not, you know, not everything can be solved with a lightsaber head. And that's, and that's been one of my concerns over the years, is that we're talking about a galaxy full planets. A lot of beings. A lot of species, da, da, da. There's more going on than just what happens with the damn skywalker.

You know what I'm saying? That's one of the reasons why I love, I love Rogue One. Let's get over Luke and Leia kissing and get on with this. You know what I'm saying? And, and there's not that many Jedi. There's not that many Force users. Great story. So we don't have to have a lightsaber in every Star Wars story.

Rogue One was a great story. Great story. For no Jedi. You saw Vader, but you know. Yeah, right. But for the most part it was it was a whole yeah, no Jedi, I mean and or was a great series no Jedi at all I Only get halfway through it That's your back and or it's probably to me one of the best Shows that they've done so Star Wars TV shows that they've done Right behind the Mandalorian.

Okay. Oh, it's that to me. It's that good I was going to say, we have a call it to debate. No, I'm kidding. I've only six episodes. He will, he will die on this one.

Last thing I got vehicles, the vehicles throughout the game. Of course you have your ship, your stolen ship and your speed. Yep. And only thing that disappointed me. Again, with the weapons, and you brought this up earlier. You can't jump into an AT AT. Or you can't hop into a speeder that's sitting on the side of the road.

Because I mean, really, outlaws are supposed to just snatch I mean, if you're a true outlaw, you can grab whatever's in front of you. Absolutely. They had those missions where, if you were on If you're on Tashara, and you're You're speeding through, down the path, wherever. And you hear the radio call. That the Empire has found their stolen goods and you go find where that's at And you help whoever to, to get those stolen goods for yourself.

When you finish off all the damn store troopers, that ship is sitting there by its damn self. And you can't get in that bad boy. It's just sitting there looking at you. I'm like, man, this isn't. That's that to me, that's a real failure on the development team there. You should be able to, if you can walk on it, you should be able to fly it.

If you can, if you can break the security code. Take off. If you can jump in and you know how to drive it, guess what? 'cause if I could steal a shuttle and sell it , I wanna be paid . I don't know if you'd be able to sell it, you know, Hey, if I know some huts stole, I know. I know somebody in the huts can sell it.

You know, somebody in the hut, I could sell it. That is true. So I can sell it. But another thing is that they. The modifications weren't all what I thought, like for the, for the trailblazer, you could mod the weapons until you can maximize it that way. For those that haven't played the trailblazers, the ship that you saw.

Yes, sorry for the ship. But for the speeder bike, the only mods there are is basically just the design that make it, you know, to give it a look, give it a certain look. Yeah. I would, for a speeder bike, I would like to try and, you know, change the design a little bit. So anyway, you know, it looks different than, than just because you put a helmet, a stormtrooper helmet on the side here or there.

Yeah. Give it a different, instead of giving it a different design. I mean, think about it. There's got to be thousands of speeder manufacturers in the galaxy. They can't all look the same. Yeah, speeders, swoops, you know, so it's like They're so common, they should be, you know, interchangeable. It's like, it's like a Jeep. How many add ons can you add to a Jeep? Right? Speeder bikes should be the same thing in the Star Wars universe.

So many modifications, so many of those type things, but you know, We don't know if those parts are interchangeable though. I mean, they should be. I, I think it would be more beneficial if we were able to maybe build your own speeder bike. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, it definitely would've helped. And you can design it the way that you want.

'cause when I, when you say speed or bike, the first thing I think of is returning the Jedi when they're going through the forest. Exactly. That's the very first thing that I think of. With Leia in the Ewok. That's the first speeder I think. That was our first introduction to a speeder bike. So that's what we automatically go to.

We're going to talk a little bit more about that in just a second, but first, let's Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, there's got to be so many different ways that you could customize these, these vehicles. Exactly. And that's, and I kind of think that that was what was kind of missing. Cause I think if, I don't know, cause I remember the, the, the legend of 16 the, the, the rumor of 1612 when they were trying to build that game, 13, 13, 13, 13, 11 or 13, 13, I think it was 13, 13, 13, but it was a, that self contained world they were building on Tatooine no, on, on Coruscant.

And it was supposed to be that was supposed to be the first open world Star Wars game. That was supposed to be the first Star Wars game. It makes me wonder, did they just steal concepts from that game into this? And, but they didn't put too many things into, I don't know. Oh, absolutely. Do you think that they just let a lot of that stuff go?

They just, if you saw, if you saw any of the production steals that 1313 was supposed to come out, you're going to see a lot of the same things that they took from that. And they added to Fallen Order, to Survivor, to this game. It was, it was going to be a real big, it would have made a big impact if they had brought it out when they, when they first proposed it.

A la Disney, reusing those scenes. Yeah. I can't, I can't blame them though. I mean, there was some really expensive to make. Some of the, yeah, they spent a lot of time trying to develop that. So they had to use what they got. But there was also a lot of good ideas that they used. They were. And that.

Yeah. Last, anything else before we step up? That was, that was all I had. I got a question. We covered a good range, so anything else? I got a question. We talked about it a little bit earlier, and like I said, I haven't gotten that far into it, but apparently you gentlemen have. Play, replayability. You did, you did ask replayability earlier and we kind of glanced over that.

I would say. I don't know what I looked at. Let's go with a scale from 1 to 10. What do you think? I'd say 7. 7 is a replayability. That's not bad. Cause there are, like I said earlier, I would say 5. Cause there are the core story parts that I went one way, I do want to see if I go back and do it another way.

But knowing now that I've, you know, that I've nearly gone through the game, that you can still, no matter what you do with that, however you play the game, you can still improve your You can still improve your relationship with that, with that, but it's still kind of drops you in the same spot, right? Yeah.

It may, we may be with different characters, which, which I, I might want to see, but you don't think it's going to totally affect the outcome. That's not with the way of the mechanics. Cause like you can just go up and you can piss somebody off here, but then go out, steal a ship or, or run out there and you know, all of a sudden the hardships are getting jumped by the pikes and you just jump in and help the, help, Help out the huts.

And next thing you know, you're back in there. You're back in with the huts. And then my replayability comes from, because I'm not finished with it yet. Cause it is a, you can fast track it and finish it in what? 36 hours. You could, but there's a hundred hours worth of material within the game if you want to 100 percent it.

So I'm thinking as replayability, like I'm trying to finish this 36 hours and be done, and then I can come back to it. And. That's the whole thing. It's because once you get started in so much to explore, like I spent, I don't know how many hours I spent just running around on Tatooine just alone, just going back and forth because I just wanted to cruise down the desert or right now because of where I'm at now, I I'm either playing, I'm either trying to get a mission done or I'm flying in space, just trying to mess with stuff up.

Were you, were you kind of distracted during that mission? Trying to look for maybe some of the Easter eggs? Things like. The Lars homestead I was actually beggars Canyon the needle were you looking for the doomsday for beggars? Canyon, but did you see did you see the do see did you see the escape pod?

Yes from I went to go find Jabba's Palace I went to see, I didn't go find the escape pod and didn't find that. I did find the crate, the crate, dragon skeleton, skeleton. I did find the S the Sarlacc pit. And then, but you'd find the large homestead, but you did spend time finding those particular locations.

So we pay replayability without doing that. Could you have finished the Tatooine mission without doing those? Yeah, yeah. You could have, but you can actually go back, do that Tatooine mission and find all of those You definitely have the option of finishing, because as you're there, you have a main mission.

And then if you're talking to people, you're getting side missions. And side missions may be able to improve your blaster, improve your ship, get some extra credits on bounties, whichever and whatnot. Those can be your side missions. You can just do the main missions and then leave and go to the next planet.

But your side missions are still there for you to come back to. Still there to do. So that's, let's be honest, video games, depending on how you're playing them, what you're paying for them is different. It's very expensive nowadays. So replayability can become a big factor in whether you're going to purchase this game, whether it's fun for you, whether you like the genre, whether you're just a video game enthusiast.

I'm going to change my number back to 7. To 7 from 5. Because I also didn't think we didn't take into Sabacc. The game Sabacc. It's not the same as in the books, or however they say the books, but The way they, you have it in this game, in this game and how they explain it. It's actually pretty, it's actually pretty interesting.

And it's kind of, it kind of, once you get the hang of it, it's kind of like, Oh, I want to play it again. And I would dare say each planet almost has different it's it's Cybex. It's if you're on Tatooine, there's high rollers on Tatooine that you can play Sabbath against. If you're on Kojima, there's high rollers on Kojima that you can play against.

But, they don't have the same tactics. Yeah, they have different tactics, and it's crazy. Different tactics, and I haven't got all the cards. That's my one, my one thing right now is I Tatooine. My full deck and I'm missing cards. So I'm like, I gotta go here. You can also, why, why am I foreseeing that every time you play Savick, you're going for any idiots array.

Hey, this is one thing I had to tell Jushin about. You could also use you can use Nick's for a lot of things. You could also use Nick's to cheat at seven. You can send him around and look at the cars and then he'll come back to you and report like, I have not got the handle in him cheating. I've been kicked out of the game because I didn't get it right.

I've been kicked out of the game. I was like, nope, can't go back. But there are, you, you do learn special things to other things, to the cheat you, you learn from, from Lando, you learn the double draw. Like you can draw two cards. You can, if you do it quick, you do it right. You can draw two cars without being caught.

Or there's this one where you can where you can like just, ah, what was it? I haven't met Lando yet. Yeah, you run into him eventually, but yeah, you learn certain things that where you can cheat or it's like where you can when you get the diced, where you get the dice to try to figure out because there's this one card you can roll to match and you have to roll to match.

You can match the card that you have so that way you can have sabic and if you don't get it right. You're going to be out of luck. So you have to, so you have to cheat to get there. You have to do a magnetic thing. So if you miss there, be like, Hey man, we're watching you. I'm like, what? Oh like I'm, I'm not, I'm over here just rolling some dice, playing some cards.

Which we didn't talk about customization at all. And I just want to throw this out. That was one of the letdowns that I've, that I felt that this game kind of lacked. Yeah. It forced you. Into one role. Whereas a lot of the other open worlds, you get to customize your character and how they look and what they're wearing and this and that.

And I, I kind of felt that that was lacking in this game. I would have liked that because I, in an open world environment, you should be playing as yourself to me. That's how you would do it. Not as a character now for fallen order. You're a secret Jedi. You're, you're just learning the blah, blah, blah. You had, you had to be a character, but when you're talking about open world.

Why are you not their true open world is star wars online? The old republic the old republic That is a true on that was a true star wars open world because you could be anybody you could go anywhere And it was great. But why couldn't but why couldn't we add that feature to man? I I wish they would add that feature to this game.

I wish they would add it They already knew it because they already knew how to do it. I would be playing this all the time Why are we not adding why isn't it really a standard feature? Why am I having to be forced to play Yeah, because customization really did stop at outfits and trophies. Yeah, and, and I'm going to be honest, outside of two outfits, that I discovered.

I was just basically, yeah, three, three outfits that I just, that everything they had on there, I was like three outfits. I was cool. And that's true. And then the ones that I look forward is either allow you to carry more stems or carry more grenades. And that's it. Absolutely. Because you're, you're playing in the way that you would actually clean up when you would actually navigate this world.

And that's what I think it's really kind of lacking. Yeah. You know, the, the, the skills tree is another part. Yes. Because it was being able to focus on one particular skill versus another skill. No, their skill, her skill tree, I will say was quite diverse. So I'll give them that. It was certainly interesting the way that they went about applying the skill tree, I would say, as opposed to just having it there.

It was, it felt like to me, it was more dependent on the people that you met and were able to teach you. And that's opportunity, and let's be honest, that's kind of realistic. Yeah. You may not be able, in the real world, you might not be able to develop a skill because you don't know somebody that can do that particular skill.

Right. Then you meet Dave, and you can actually know how to put, how to lay down wood, how to build a deck. And I, I did enjoy that, when you, that, that difference in the skill tree, where it was just, it's, it wasn't like other games, where it's there, you pay. Money or credits or, Oh, I think, I think you gotta, I, to me, it's not really a skill unless you earn it.

You do X amount of things to earn that skill, right? And that's what I enjoyed about, about this one is that you meet a person, you have these skills available, but you'd have to complete this set in order for you to learn, to learn that skill or advance in that skill. Yeah. So yeah, I definitely enjoyed the skill tree that they had.

I'm still stuck on a skill trying to shoot people that distract that are distracted by a Knicks. And that that's one other thing. They don't give it to you either. No, no, no, no. Definitely have to work for it. Yeah. And I do, I do appreciate that part of the game because if they just gave it to you, then what's the, what's the use of even getting in there and doing anything.

Yeah. So they make it worth your while. Overall, I think it's a good game. It could have gotten some tweaks in the gameplay and the mechanics to me. He's calling it Starfield after this. Nope. Nope. I already got my payments. They sent you the check. They sent me the check. So they're done. They're done for this week.

But visually, it's an astounding game. I love how it looks. I love the graphics. The, the feel of the Star Wars universe. I was not a big fan of the third person playing. Mm-Hmm. because I haven't first person experience because I haven't played th third person in a long, long time. That used to be my go-to, yeah.

But then I got into the first person and now it's hard to transition back from first person mechanics to third person. Yeah. That took me a little while to get used to, but overall, the, the game visually is astounding. It, it's good in what they've done. I just think that they maybe missed a couple of spots in Really getting a truly outstanding open world game a couple of opportunities.

They could have capitalized on agreed agreed. I enjoyed it. I do and it's in The veil of so many games. It's one that i've stuck with for two months. Oh, absolutely. So absolutely. I mean when ea took over and did redid battlefront one and two I got Halfway through them and then I kind of just put them down You Because they, they, they were essentially the same game.

Yeah. But essentially, there wasn't enough storyline to, to motivate somebody to continue through. Gotcha, yeah. And it was kind of like the same thing over and over and over and over. Yeah. And if that's what you're looking for, that's great. If you're looking for a multiplayer online, No problem, but when you're talking about a story based campaign type game, you want enough to keep you interested and want to keep playing for hours and hours.

That's, I didn't get the feel. Outlaws gives me that feel that I would continue to keep playing because there's enough stuff to do. Yeah. It's not the same thing over and over and over. Yeah. I feel you on that. I agree. That's why, that's really why I like the open world concept. Can't knock on that one.

That was, they did their job on that, the game. They really did. All right anything else before we close it out? I'm good. Reinforce me with you. I'm good. Thanks for tuning in. This is we're talking about Star Wars Outlaws. Go in and pick it up if you're a Star Wars fan. Even if you're not, go ahead and check it out.