The early access debacle

 

I think if there is one sensation that consuming gamers are most sensitive to, a feeling which we react the strongest against, it would be the inkling that at some point a decision to be lazy was made with the products that we pay money to access. And I think it bears emphasising the monetary investment that gamers commit into these relationships before continuing, just in case the knee-jerk cry of 'entitlement' is made. (Never could understand how that term entered the Game Journalist lexicon so long ago.) And this comes to blows greatly with publishers who long to half-ass everything about the game creation and marketing process to the best of their collective abilities. It's a great game of checks and balances for which both sides are guilty of letting the ball drop every now and then.

One of the more recent slip-ups that I can think of on behalf of us has been the way we've fully allowed the 'Early Access' meta to take hold. Essentially we're talking about situations where brand new games that are entirely finished have their release date held off by a couple of days so that those fresh thirty six hours can be bundled on top of a special edition and sold out. Now that sounds hugely cynical and weak- except for the fact that these publishers know very well how to exploit the audience to get what they want. Maybe you have an audience that would very much like to play this game during the weekend, but you delay the global launch to Wednesday? See the arm twist, watch the ants scramble to their wallets. It's the way of this twisted world.

But it's lazy to try and squeeze extra money out of people like this. Even more lazy than the typical Ubisoft method of cutting out a couple of missions, throwing together a random skin and calling that thirty extra dollars worth of content. You're literally trying to package time away from people. How utterly pathetic. Still, at least it's relatively harmless. I mean- you really have to posses no control over your faculties to really be pushed into spending 1.5 times the price you are usually willing to over a three-day head start for a single player game. And as for the developers themselves this is totally easy money that they would have to be utterly gibbering morons to screw up. Wait... oh, how long until Ubisoft screw this up? Wait- they did already. Didn't they?

That's right! Remember how the formula is supposed to work? You sell the illusion of early access by a few days or even a week to people by really delaying the global launch and letting people pay to access the real launch day. That's how you handle this if you're not a dangerously incompetent buffoon. But what if I told you that Ubisoft- the butt of evolution themselves- actually gave people access to the early unfinished build of Star Wars Outlaw and watched it sincerely bite them in the ass? How could a company be that unbelievably stupid? And what kind of light in this going to end up shining in what I honestly consider to be the industries least destructive modern grift- monetising time?

First off you should know that giving out early access to games ain't anything new. Reviewers are never given completed builds of games but rather get the gold version before the final finishing touches that are stapled onto release via a day one patch. Might not be the ideal 'completionists' way to finish a project but it's the way that modern game design has worked for at least the last ten to fifteen years by now. This period of time between gold and release is a haven for bugs, crashes, optimisation issues and all the other things that journalist have to choose whether or not to include in their reviews as the studio promises all will be right by launch day. This is what you don't let the consumers see. It's less than finished- this isn't viewing ready.

You see where I'm going with this- Ubisoft let customers into this period of time with their expensive early access bundle and in doing so subjected their heaviest spending customers to a litany of bugs and mismatched polish to sour their experience. Ontop of that, they managed to defeat the entire purpose of a 'headstart' by publishing a day one patch so transformative that anyone who did play the game in that window would be required to totally erase that save and start from scratch or else face fatal progression bugs that could and would leave them incapable of finishing the game. Taking back the time that they sold without compensation. Totally ruining the deal. Ubisoft just pulled off a scam of incompetence. How very like them.

Now steps have been made to 'make things right' in the loosest sense of those words. Ubisoft first just handed out a 'sorry' message, before having their arm twisted by the backlash into actually doing something tangible about what was essentially a grift. Now they offer- 100 dollars worth of within ecosystem currency- which is utterly hilarious. Essentially Ubisoft have offered literally nothing up, currency that can only be spent within their digital environment, and are calling that a boon. A mercy. Instead of giving people, oh I don't know, a differential refund? That extra thirty I spent to waste my time would definately look better in my bank account- but oh no- Ubisoft would prefer you spend that on digital cosmetics please! What a total disgrace.

I can only imagine the distrust this will engender towards early access schemes which may even see them shrivel and become less common- which sucks because I honestly don't think this is anywhere near the worst grift trend that the industry has pulled. Taking advantage of the impatient to play a game two days early for twice the price of admission is meaningless to the everyday person and a great way to reel in whales with more money than sense- it takes nothing of value out of the game itself and keeps the ghouls in charge still feeling like their stealing from their customers: which is all they strive for out of life. Leave it up to the utter wases of sentience at Ubisoft to screw it all up by being unfathomably  useless cosmic jokes on humanity.

Ubisoft Star Wars- not impressed

 

And with that the pact has been sealed. Ubisoft has done all they possibly can to try and shill Star Wars Outlaws before it's release- and I honestly wonder why they bothered so much. Why all the trailers? Why all the coverage? Why stick this on the side of buses? It's not like the marketing is doing anything more for the optics of a Star Wars game made by Ubisoft. Both are brands so ugly and garish that people just flock their way with cash-in-hand regardless of what they get in return. Ubisoft could be selling bottled farts labelled with the Republic's insignia and make a mint in the process. All that marketing effort could have gone into supporting something that could have actually used it- like, I dunno... The Division 2? (But I digress.)

Outlaws is a Star Wars property (urg) being published by Ubisoft (Urg, brother) that is an open world. (Brother, URG! What's that brother?) I cannot imagine a more detestable combination of ingredients plopped into a single cauldron if I tried... actually yes I can. They didn't make it a Live Service that is NFT powered. (I imagine that took great restraint on Ubisoft's end.) The Star Wars brand has been dragged through the mud in recent years, as Disney milk it dry with piddling TV show after TV show, squeezing out the last goodwill they can whilst all potential and promise fans once saw in the series sizzles and drys out under the boot of executives complaining about how 'hard' and 'expensive' it would be to make something ambitious and interesting. (I've heard really worrying things about that Acolyte show- and I'm not talking about from the typical chuds.) Ubisoft, on the otherhand, are the bottom-feeding wastes of the Games' industry- it is any surprise why I find the paring of them physically detestable?

Then again, Star Wars games do have a tendency to be on the whole better. The Jedi Series is one of the better Souls-like games on the market that has a rapport with it's audience enough that we actively like to seek out and consume content with these characters in it- which is quiet the high praise for Star Wars content! And we even get some high budget experimental games like Star Wars Squadrons which brought flight-simulator rules to the Star Wars mythos. Unfortunately the game didn't quite sell as well as everyone might have liked- but those who did play the thing attest to it's quality! Of course, then we also have the mobile game which recently released, Hunters, which was every bit the over-monetised waste of potential we all knew it would be. So just as in the Star Wars universe, the brand holds the potential for great good or great evil.

Ubisoft already set us of to a poor start by trying to suck our wallets out through our eyes through merely watching the trailer and selling their pitifully understuffed deluxe editions for an arm and several more legs than can grow on a single human. For prices like that you'd think the company earns them, and aren't just the laughing stock generic-factory of the AAA gaming sector. These are the kind of prices that Rockstar can, and largely do (if you count their eye-watering shark cards for GTA Online) get away with. But after giving us a significant showing of gameplay, and inviting journalists around to see some behind the doors goodies- (simply to try and ingratiate themselves with such an important community vector) maybe the game is finally that one step up and forward that Ubisoft have been hesitating to take all these years. Afterall, this isn't just a Ubisoft game. It's a "Wicked Wicked" Ubisoft Massive title.

Perhaps the most prevailing sense that this new game gives off- both to me and to those unlucky enough to sit down and see the curated 'behind curtains' preview- is that of dire unoriginality. Say what you will about the open world genre AAA gaming, how they all kind of ape that Uncharted feeling of exploration, dot a little bit of forgettable busywork to keep you interested and linger on just those few hours too long- but at least most of them have something unique to spice them up just that little bit. The incredibly fun saber combat of the Jedi games make it a blast to master, Hogwarts Legacy carried the tourist-friendly appeal that kept people playing, Horizon has it's very unique world concept and spectacular machine hunts- and Outlaws has... well you see in Outlaws you can...

The idea of Outlaws is to try and make the Smuggler style of story work in Star Wars without chucking in any lightsabers- and that's an idea that can really work if you put forethought into it. Disseminate the archetypal smuggler to their base-most form and you get an anti-hero in a cowboy movie- then all you need to do is find a way to bring that feeling to life in a way that doesn't ape at Red Dead 2 because even after all these years that is a fight Ubisoft will never, ever, win. Instead what we've seen is just... generally serviceable. There are the Ubisoft stealth sections, said to be as pointless as always because general mayhem is all-around more reliable. There is the uninspired wall climbing which at this point has become such a headscratching trope I genuinely think it would be a surprise to come across a game character not capable of supporting their entire weight with an iron grip. And apparently there is a sprinkle of Space Combat too, but I've never seen Ubisoft do a space fighting game before and the team are functionally incapable of creating a decent mechanic that hasn't been regurgitated through the guts of five previous attempts- so I'm guessing it's dull as dishwater.

Is there any point of praise I can raise? Well, technically there is- but it's the exact same thing I say about every Ubisoft game such that it doesn't even feel like a compliment anymore. It's like a lingering, festering curtsey we perform in front of the ailing wad of distended tissue we once deemed a sovereign, paying some false shadow of gratitude and respect upon a station long-since alien to it. Performance for the sake of routine alone, serving neither us nor them. Indeed- Outlaws looks pretty. Actually, 'pretty' isn't a full enough picture. It looks like 'Star Wars' and all the baggage that carries. Typical alien landscapes of vaguely terran-looking worlds with maybe a palette swap, that exact same style of interior which seems to be the uniform of every cantina in the galaxy, that unimpressive palette smudge of 'frontier grime'- it fails to excite by brand alone as it once did. I guess that goes for Star Wars as a whole though, doesn't it?

Now to be clear, even if this is the single most made-by-numbers video game in Ubisoft's entire history it wouldn't be their worst and I don't wish to imply that's what I'm saying. That crown is still rested pretty squarely on the head of Legion. I just think that once again Ubisoft are treading waters and getting rewarded for the effort. Just as they did when they created a serviceable, but systematically cannibalistic Avatar game, or a vastly expanded but clumsy and fat-fingered Ghost Recon Wildlands follow up. To quoteth the bard: "They'll never change. They'll never change. Always the same. Ever since 07, couldn't slap a coherent game design doc together to save their lives. But couldn't be Ubisoft, not our precious Ubisoft! Robbing them blind. And they get to sell the game for $130? What a sick joke!"  

Ubisoft and the value question

 

At this point I have a problem, clearly. At this point I'm pretty much a K-Pop stan except replace the love for hatred. But in my defence, the target of my disdain has been responsible for wasting copious amounts of my passion for this hobby as well as actively has a part in ruining the outward perception of this industry. (I would even say they've negatively influence the direction of the industry a couple of times.) So I'd say the ire is a bit justified on my end. Ubisoft- the Canadian boogey men, are entering something of a threat phase for me once again as they tackle a property I inexplicably still care about. Star Wars Series do nothing for me anymore, I can't be bothered to watch any after Andor. (At least I gave up on their high.) Their movies haven't interested my since The Force Awakens, and I doubt that will change anytime soon. The games, however, I've always loved the games.

In many ways my greatest ties to the Star Wars world has been through the interactive mediums through fantastic projects like 'Dark Forces', wish fulfilment like 'Jedi Knight Academy', anime wackiness like 'Force Unleashed'- there has never been a shortage of diversity present in this world. Thus it was with something of a stark astonishment I realised there hasn't really been anything implicitly 'Ubisoft coded' in this franchise up until now. You know what I mean: Checklist open worlds where you run from map marker to map marker across a world you'll become increasingly desensitised to as every gameplay mechanic reinforced your detachment to it has a breathing world. A ramshackle narrative stitched together from missions that would count as side quests under any actual high achieving studio in similar work. Ugly and rampant single player cosmetic monetisation.

Which is why I am not the least bit shocked that the new Ubisoft Massive developed Star Wars Outlaws game seems to be doing everything it can to reinforce the 'Ubisoft formula' in all the most obvious and least risky ways. (Which is what art is all about right, being predictable and safe?) But that's neither here nor there, what I want to discuss is something of the interesting rhetoric that has been drummed up around the game's interesting form of nickel-and-diming some of those sweet exorbitant pre-order bucks out of the audience. We've got the three days early access- the Han Solo outfit- (Jedi Survivor literally already offered that exact same cosmetic. Ubisoft can't even grift creatively!) And the exclusive pre-order quest with Jabba the Hutt. Nostalgia baiting at it's most prime.

Now apparently there was some confusion about whether or not this meant that all interactions with Jabba the Hutt were DLC exclusive, which they are not it turns out, but the community team coined a very interesting topic of discussions as they tried to waive away the significance of this issue. Quite simply, people were upset that key content was being withheld behind a $30 upcharge edition of the game for which the team assured- this content is not massive, nor is it key- so people don't need to get so worked up about missing out and just playing the base game. But then- if we are to assume that is true then the question should really be- how can the value proposition of the content on offer not be considered woefully inadequate?

Think about the Catch-22 they've built for themselves here. By the very existence of these special editions that come package with the season pass bundle, the team have infused a supposed value on that content. The extra 30-50 bucks they demand is their assertion of how valuable that extra content is, which means that cutting through the low-effort cosmetics on offer and pathetic early access crap- they believe their extra missions to be worth about $30. This includes the season pass for content they haven't detailed or developed yet- that's pretty much just a promise they'll make something decent, which after Assassin's Creed Valhalla's groan worthy DLC slate- that absolutely cannot be taken for granted. If we are to take that all at face value, then Ubisoft are plucking content about half as valuable as the base game itself and locking that away behind an upcharge.

But here's the likely reality behind it- it's all smoke and mirrors! The Jabba mission which they've thrown onto the season pass, Ubisoft content development history would insist that such a mission is actually a limp five minute distraction the team hardly thought more than two seconds about during development, which was cut out for how inconsequential it was and given a retroactive price tag. I speak with suppositions, no doubt- but borne from having experienced every major Ubisoft release ever- that is the kind of content they play with. Which would mean the company has unwitting admitted to the fact they overcharge for their content and play off the alure of exclusivity to peddle throw-away cut content at painful prices.

Value is such a tricky thing with the games industry, as everyone wants to believe themselves the highest value product on the market right now, whereas in truth the market decides value of each product by their participation with it. Suicide Squad kills the Justice League will insist it is worth the $70 price tag on the box, but when they have to slash that price in half within the first two months in order to make any sort of decent sales- it would seem the market has decided their game ain't worth half that price tag. Baldur's Gate 3 hasn't gone on sale since before it fully released- thus the market is pretty happy stating that game is absolutely worth it's full RRP. (Which is $60 by the way. Yeah, Suicide Squad thought it was more valuable than Baldur's Gate... ain't that a trip!)

Comparison is the thief of joy, so they say- but when finance is involved I consider comparison to be the highest art of discourse, for the ethereal art of value is but a shadow puppet play in the face of solid competition. As games insist on driving up their prices, ramping up microtransactions and even angling towards subscription access models if you're Ubisoft, (They're just the actual worst living people in the industry, what can I say?) the steel cogs of comparison turn against more and more- sternly judging the colour of their character. I applaud to see the weak and unimpressive churned within the guts and spat out on the otherside- and the very moment Ubisoft's caustic, yet ever tested, 'broad market appeal' withers enough to be subject to that 'comparison machine' is the exact moment we'll see an empire crushed into kibble within the space of a single console generation.

Ubisoft and Star Wars Dress-up.

 

There's a certain idea that a company called 'Ubisoft' are the bottom-feeders of the Games Industry, and I don't want to make it sound like I'm supporting that brazen attack on the companies honour! I would never think of Ubisoft so highly as to believe it a being of sentience. Rather I believe them to be soulless automatons crushing every bit of personality and soul through the rigors of their metal-robot innards like a steel-press: delivering factory-print games delivered to an increasingly bland specification. In an industry of artists, Ubisoft have become the creative equivalent of that cloudy smudge that gets plopped onto your plate at the school cafeteria. It's unspecific, formless, tasteless and you only really eat it because you're used to it by this point. If anyone offered you something with the slightest amount of flavour, even dust scrapped off the floor, your tastebuds would enter cardiac arrest from the shock of having to actually work again. That's Ubisoft.

Which is probably why I did not give them the time of day when it was announced they were working on a Star Wars game, no more interesting then that Avatar game they made and then put out to absolutely zero culture impact. To it's credit I've actually heard that Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is not just a Far Cry clone, however, but a Far Cry clone with a bit more sprinkled ontop for the sake of interest. The game tries to have a bit more depth in the way it handles the gameplay loop and even the action has some differing quirks to it. Non of it is achieved to any impressive degree, but you have to cut the team some slack. They're only newbies to game development, right? I'm sure they'll start settling into a rhythm with a few more games under their belt. (Hmm? They were founded 27 years ago. Uh oh...)

Massive Entertainment are the team that are going to be behind Star Wars Outlaws too- which is why I can at the very least hope this game isn't more utter toxic sludge spewed from the same factory flaw as core-Ubisoft titles most commonly are. That being said- these guys still have a way to go to prove themselves a serious contender. Which is such a shame because after all these years I am just starved for Star Wars games, I should be flocking to this like a flea on a starving seventeenth century peasant- but I'm not. And that's because when I look at this game, at the open-world slathered with places I'm sure will be stuffed with open world fluff, the bustle towns of certainly space-filling NPCs and the obvious padding story-block cutscenes they're stupid enough to actually publish in their preview trailers- ("You're new to this world, come back when you're not." Who wants to bet that's immediately followed by a 'increase you reputation to X in order to unlock this story mission' objective?)- I'm not seeing 'Star Wars'. I'm seeing Ubisoft playing 'Star Wars' dress up.

I guess when it comes to modern action games within the Star Wars license, the biggest comparison we have to put Outlaws against is 'Jedi: Fallen Order' and 'Survivor'- to which Outlaws feel at best like a younger brother trying to mimic it's older sibling's natural swag and personality. There's a genuine character to the gauntlet-like wild vistas of the 'Star Wars Jedi' series, with it's plethora of challenging and gameplay influencing enemy types, parkour break-up sections, mutable combat abilities and a decently serviceable plot. I'll say it- I really enjoy those games and what they bring to the franchise, even if I have Umbridge with some of the narrative directions that Survivor took. Outlaws, so far, does nothing for me. It looks like it has 'anti' personality. And that's saying something, looking at how Jedi features a protagonist so generic looking it was literally memed before people realised it was actually modelled on a real actor who just happens to look at like. (Apologies once again, Cameron Monaghan.)

And that doesn't even touch on one of the most shocking parts of the game footage I've seen- the actual vocal performances. I'm not an acting snob by any stretch of the imagination, but there's a certain level of general performance I expect from higher budget games that just isn't there. The protagonist in particular sounds perpetually bored to be reading her lines, and she does sound like she's reading them. Honestly it reminds me of the performances from a lot of the side cast in Assassin's Creed Valhalla, which I chalked up to the game being so garishly unwieldly that the team just didn't have the time to brush their QA brushes over the entire development process. Does that indicate Outlaws is going to be yet another unfocused mess? I certainly hope not. (I barely survived Valhalla.)

Perhaps the biggest sin I fear from this game is the one Ubisoft are most common of, and for which all of Star Wars is currently suffering. I fear that the game will be boring. The Jedi series spread it's wings a little bit and stretched out with Survivor- I can see a potential for interesting directions with a fun cast of characters that I'm interested to see develop. Outlaws has a slight chance to achieve the same, but it's going to have to overcome the Ubisoft cliché of 'style-over-substance'. From Far Cry 6 to Valhalla and double so for Legion- these concepts travel furthest on the design documents but wilt and die in the writers room. Characters who spout out empty affectations in place of character development, narratives that meander pointlessly and muddle potential set pieces into more bland action and themes that get lost and fail to meet us at the finish line. Outlaws doesn't spark hope in any of these directions thus far.

Maybe that's just the way of things. Afterall, we know that Ubisoft are going the 'smash and grab' route with the selling of this one. Triple digit editions with pre-marked out post game DLC and cosmetic packs stitched atop the package, as well as Three Days Early access for a single player game for literally no other reason than the rubes down in marketing saw some other games doing that and thought it would be cool. (That they think their game has nearly enough hype for that to be some sort of serious consideration is honestly adorable.) There is no faith in this game being solid enough to build the sort of traction that we've seen the best sellers of this year doing, so instead Ubisoft resorts to their faithfuls. Hard upselling at the door to rank up sales figures. True cretins, those Ubisoft are.

Now, I actually do want Outlaws to be good. I don't think it will be- but considering this is the only payoff to those years of rumours of a third person shooter Star Wars game- I'm willing to take the hit to delivery if the final product is at least serviceable. I'm told that in skipping Ubisoft Massive's last game I actually unintentionally skipped Ubisoft's last serviceable game in order to feast on their slop, so in reputation alone I have to put my faith in the better than trash team currently up to bat. But this marketing campaign has been a balloon of deflating expectations with every other reveal. And I already know this is going to be the kind of title I get in a year or so at serious discount. Which is a shame, honestly- I wanted a Star Wars game this year.