I was staring at the wall. It was one of the first missions in Ubisoft’s latest, giant RPG, Star Wars: Outlawswhere my mission was to infiltrate an Imperial base to recover information from a computer, and that wall really caught my attention.
It was a perfect wall. It absolutely captured the slow 70s sci-fi aesthetic, gloomy grey cladding broken up by utility grey panels covered in uninteresting, flashing lights, and I stopped to think how much work must have gone into that wall. I looked elsewhere on the screen and was overwhelmed. That wall was the most flat thing in the expansive hangar, where TIE fighters hung from the ceiling, stormtroopers roamed in groups below, and even the little white sign with the yellow arrow looked like it was ten years aged, painstakingly crafted to fit into this universe. I felt pure amazement at what had been achieved. Ubisoft, through multiple studios around the world and the work of thousands of incredibly talented people, had built this impossibly perfect area for a single momentary scene that I was about to run past.
I ran past it three times because the AI kept messing things up, and I kept starting at a checkpoint right in front of that grey wall.
I’m trying to capture the dissonance of the moment. That sense of absolute awe, almost unbelievable awe that games can be built at all on this scale and with this level of detail, slapped difficult in the face by the mind-bogglingly bad decisions that go into it all.
Getting excited about a beautifully crafted wall is like preparing for an aneurysm when you start to notice the minuscule, shifting details on the characters’ faces or the exact, idle animations of a bored guard. Then, as I tried to fathom that the same level of care was taking place in thousands of locations across multiple cities on multiple planets, my straightforward thought was, “It’s ridiculous that we judge these games by the same criteria as others.” How can anyone look at ThisThis majestyand I say, “Hmmm, seven out of ten?” And then the guard leads me over a solid hillside and ruins fifteen minutes of tedious sneaking, and I wonder how this can even be for sale.
In 2024, we have reached that most deeply peculiar place, where AAA games are feats that humanity would once have considered literal miracles, and yet they play with the same annoying problems and tedious repetition that we saw in the 90s. That contrast, that dissonance, is absolutely fascinating.
Ubisoft seems to me to be the leader in this strange space. For years I have been amazed and amazed by what this company is able to create, although often not in a positive way. This Assassin’s Creed series routinely builds entire cities, even countries, in real detail, to the point where we almost take it for granted. This has always struck me as the most appalling waste a game like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey can recreate antique Greece in such gorgeous detail, and then it gets thrown away, all that digital space never being used for anything else. It could be gifted to the world, offered as a setting for a thousand indie games, repurposed and recycled as such an achievement deserves. Instead, it’s there for that one game where we reasonably complain about the frustrating details of a broken quest, or how the AI of the crowd bugs out at key moments.
And that’s just the art and architecture. We’re not even mentioning the fantastic writing, the exquisite voice acting, the sound effects, the soundtrack, the lighting, the concept art that makes such designs possible, or the direction and leadership that can bring all these different parts together. All of this as a backdrop for me replaying the gate run because a distant AI decided to be triggered by a Nix it couldn’t see, or because when I pressed Square it decided to strike instead of trigger a takedown.
I’m aged enough to remember the days when we complained that a beautifully drawn point-and-click adventure game wasn’t fun, and were so disappointed that such attractive artistic skill was a backdrop for illogical puzzles and bad writing. Imagine a camera panning out of that adventure game to reveal the room it’s in, the house it’s in, the town it’s in, the city it’s part of, and the country it exists in—that brings you closer to the scale of the same problem that plagues us 40 years later.
This is the city that is opening ABOUTutlaws, Mirogan, is more than gaming could do ten years ago, let alone 40. That alone would be enough for an entire game, with stories, missions, and characters. And that is a minor thing in the dizzying breadth of this game. I cannot overstate the scale of what is on offer here, and how incoherent it seems that it can all be so easily ignored given such fundamental flaws. Flaws that make the game attract headlines like:Star Wars: Outlaws It’s too simplistic for its own good.” And I get it! I know what the article means! It’s true that his stealth is cliché and poorly implemented, and yet it’s such a key part of the game. But damn, why are we able to reasonably call this creature “simplified”?
I have no idea what the solution might be, but I feel it’s somewhere in the up-to-date order of priorities. One that involves scaling back the ambition of everything a large-scale developer knows Power achieve and refocus resources on fixing the absolute basics that it so often fails to do. Because the tragedy of a work of art like Outlaws—or any number of other architectural masterpieces that come and go in this industry every month—the fact that they can be ignored and given a (well-deserved) 7/10 is just awful.
Read more: Star Wars: Outlaws:This My city Review
At Gamescom this year I saw a talk (currently under embargo) about how wind would make the game world behave differently, and on one level it was amazing, a marvel of technology. But on another level it will offer an absolutely Thread if the core loops of this game are dreary, or if the enemy AI keeps crashing into beautifully rendered walls. This could end up being a 7/10 game with a technologically astonishing wind.
And so I return to that wall. And I thank everyone involved in making it so special, the artists who spent so much time making it real, the level designers who put it in, the collision detectives who made sure I couldn’t go through it, the people who coded the Snowdrop engine so it could exist, the producers who encouraged the programmers who implemented it, and every person who was in some way responsible for me being able to stare at that wall for a moment. And I regret having to sneak through it. quite So many times.
.
