When I reviewed the Star Wars Outlaws: Wild Card DLC at the end of November, I said it represented A New Hope for the first open-world game in a galaxy far, far away. The content itself was pretty good: varied, different, even glamorous… However, the various updates and patches up to that point, the Massive team’s hard work (which I know was arduous), still wasn’t enough to deliver a fully polished and bug-free experience.
Fast forward to now, at the end of May, when the second and final DLC or expansion pack for Star Wars Outlaws, entitled A Pirate’s Fortune, has been released, and I find myself in the same situation: similar content to the previous one and a game that still doesn’t work properly. And nine months after release, I’m sorry, but it’s much less acceptable. And it hurts, and it annoys me, because I love this game, but the bugs I encountered transcended the category of hilarious things you laugh at and went as far as crashing the game, having to close the software and reload the previous save point to move on. Several times.
There are some serious memory leaks and issues, because you notice that certain elements don’t load at all and the game becomes limited, as if it were cut off from features. The two strongest cases were at the height of the battle, in the midst of the fights before the end of a key section to advance the story. In case you’re enduring the same, the first was just before fleeing the prison area with Hondo Ohnaka in the Trailblazer, in the “Disable the Gravitational Lock” search area, on the landing pad of the Khepi Tomb. The second, back in this scenario already disguised as the Rokana Raider, when you have to open the barrier to sneak into Stinger’s quarters. As was already happening in the base game, it is suddenly impossible to interact with R3 on the relevant console, but it is so broken that you can’t switch weapons, or even pause the game to load the previous point. You have to close the game completely from the PS5 Start menu…
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Naturally, this disrupts the enjoyment and must be denounced. It can’t be allowed at this point, as much as I like everything this additional adventure has to offer. In fact, the minor glitches are still there, including characters getting stuck or clipping or absurd reactions from enemy AI. I even got to an Imperial terminal camp on Tatooine where, for some reason, an Imperial soldier’s voice was stuck on a loop, as if grunting after an injury. His screams were repeated for ten minutes on all the loudspeakers, making it impossible to find him to end his (and our) suffering. A grotesque and very annoying sequence that I did not want to close so as not to ruin my mission.
If you want to continue turning a blind eye to all this, A Pirate’s Fortune is a package of activities and valuable content. Like Wild Card, it relies on a hodgepodge of sections of varying dynamics, a sort of “gameplay greatest hits” of everything that can be done in this game, which is a lot. Of course, to the detriment of the Sabacc cards, so prominent in the ship-casino of the previous DLC, there are other alternatives such as platforming sections, shoot-outs, infiltration, and above all a renewed emphasis on space dogfights.
The latter even brings the possibility of piloting a ship other than the Trailblazer, the one the Rokana Raiders use. Similar to a B-Wing, its handling and different possibilities (e.g. resisting ionisation spectacularly within nebulae and even exploiting this to your advantage), coupled with new smuggling missions linked to a new affinity and reputation branch with the Miyuki Trade League, which in turn means new cargo hold upgrades for the Trailblazer itself, makes for some good… ehem, star warring. In my case, it has also served as a considerable filler and excuse to keep playing even after finishing the Hondo Ohnaka arc.
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The content also takes you to a new system, Khepi, which is limited to a space station (The Carrier’s Fortress) and the plot’s cratered setting, and thus does not bring a new planet. In any case, the stories surrounding their civilisation are interesting, and all the additional writing is of quality. Although the “villain”, Stinger Tash, is weak, Hondo Ohnaka maintains his great Jack Sparrow-style charisma. There is much to learn about pirate and smuggler life in general, and Star Wars Outlaws remains the best video game recreation of the entire Lucas universe, with some truly beautiful new scenes to wonder at.
That said, there’s also nothing really ground-breaking in the four or so hours I’ve played A Pirate’s Fortune. Rokana’s ship is limited to the Khepi system because it can’t jump into hyperspace, and after a while of searching for contraband and getting rid of some winged creatures you’d rather go back to your beloved, upgraded Trailblazer and to ND-5, who has a bit of a repetitive role this time around. I don’t regret playing this DLC and I had a pretty good time, but I’m not crazy about it, nor can we accept it to remain so broken. With Star Wars Outlaws recently ported to PS5 Pro and coming soon to Nintendo Switch 2, one of the big problems with Ubisoft, open-world games, and the industry in general is once again evident: ambition gets out of hand in a hurry and what could be grandiose stays just “big” for too long.
