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NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 09 Mar 2025 19:29:05 +0000
From: Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Star Wars Outlaws is buggy!
Date: Sun, 09 Mar 2025 15:29:04 -0400
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Buggy computer games aren't a new thing, of course, but for the most
part I've managed to avoid the worst of it. Oh sure, I've had my
crashes and game-breakers, but they've been the exception in games
rather than the norm for me. Even as a lot of people bemoaned the
state of modern gaming, I was able -in my own experiences at least-
able to dismiss the problem. 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.

And it _is_ a bug-riddled mess, with all sorts of problems from big to
small. You've got the random crash-to-desktops, with no error message
or logging to give any idea where to start debugging the problem. I
personally suspect its the DRM (apparently it checks every five
minutes or so and if it doesn't like the answer it gets, you get
booted) but I've honestly no idea. Honestly, this is actually one of
the bugs I mind the _least_, because it usually only happens after an
hour or two of playing, and it's become a convenient way for me to
stop playing. "Whoops, there it goes again; I guess Ubisoft wants me
to take a break".

Less fun is when the game just... stops. This usually happens when it
loads a new level, and gets stuck on the loading screen. The game
hasn't completely hung (the mouse moves, for instance) but there's no
way to interact with the game. Fortunately, a quick CTRL-ESC-SHIFT and
a kill-task outlaws.exe is all it takes to escape... but it's
annoying.

But really, it's all the in-game bugs that really annoy me. Like when
I complete all the tasks in a quest, but it doesn't get marked as
finished. Or items (or NPCs) for a quest just don't show up on the
map. Or you're supposed to interact with something and the interact
prompt either doesn't appear, or flat out refuses to work. I've shot
at exploding barrels and they decide to ignore me. My hoverbike
decided to fly upside down for a while. The game autosaved me in an
unsafe place, resulting in my repeatedly plummeting to my death. 

My personal favorite was when I loaded a game to find the entire world
had loaded correctly, but it forgot to load my character's model...
and the menu items that would let me save, load or quit (there was an
option to resume the game, or fiddle with settings, but obviously
neither were particularly helpful in that instance).

Fortunately (so far) most of these bugs are one-time events that can
be avoided simply by quitting the game and restarting the program. Not
all; there's a host of bugs related to sub-quests which are just
broken. Usually, when I encounter stuff like this, I wonder if it's
just me but searching online you find lots of comments like, "Oh yeah,
that quest is just bugged. It just can't be completed. Ubisoft has
made no comment on the issue". So far the main quest hasn't been
affected (at least, not for me) but I've no confidence that I won't
stumble upon some game-killing bug there too.

Which is, really, the biggest problem. Ubisoft --and their subsidiary,
Massive Entertainment, which actually developed the game-- have taken
a very hands-off approach to this game. The game was rushed out the
door. I can forgive a lot of the technical issues, just because it's
hard to program for the multitude of PC hardware configurations, but
quest-logic is all on Ubisoft, and they've failed miserably there. 

As for the rest of the game... well, I haven't finished playing it
yet, so I'm not willing to make a final judgment. It's pretty average
so far, though (I suspect I'll be a bit more loquacious on the topic
come April 1st, though ;-). Without the bugs, it would be passable.
But in the state the game currently is in, it's a must-pass for even
the most die-hard Star Wars fan. It's just embarrassingly bad in that
respect.