I'm genuinely excited for Star Wars Outlaws, especially since the trailer debuted earlier this week. It might not set the world on fire, or anything, but I like my blasters, I like my freaky aliens, and I like making ticks in an open-world checklist. I am not above the 'Ubisoft Game Loop™'.
I am, however, exhausted by collector's editions that toss a few skins and items into the game for another batch of credits—and I'm not exactly alone. "Anytime I see charts like these it just makes me think: 'I can’t wait to buy the full game for $20 years later,'" writes an understandably-tired observer on Twitter.
The response isn't exactly glowing on Reddit, either. In the critique-focused (and aptly-named) Star Wars subreddit "saltierthankrayt", one commenter writes: "If people choose to make what seems like an unwise purchase: go ahead and good luck. But I’ll happily hold off." It's not faring great elsewhere, either: "Jesus christ that's $176 CAD. That's more than any collectors edition I've seen but usually that would come with some giant statue of a character."
Personally, I'm stricken with more malaise than anger. But for fairness' sake, let's do a quick rundown of what you get if you want to shuck out 40-60 extra bucks on these things.
The gold edition of Star Wars Outlaws gets you three days of early access, ship and speeder cosmetics, and access to the "Season Pass." That's "two DLCs that will release after launch", plus a single mission that's exclusive to it for some baffling reason. Upgrade to Ultimate, and you get even more cosmetics and, uh, a digital artbook.
Ubisoft's DLCs tend to be decently meaty, but if we wanted to break down that Ultimate edition upgrade? That's almost twice the game's initial price for three cosmetic packs, two DLCs of unannounced size, and a PDF. That PDF's probably filled with gorgeous art that someone worked very hard on, I don't want to discount that, but—you know, it's a file, and 60 bucks is 60 bucks.
Even with the gold edition, that's about $20 a pop for DLC. That's a smidge cheaper than, say, Assassin Creed Valhalla's Dawn of Ragnarok, which has a base price of $40, so you might actually be getting a good deal here. But there'll be no way to know until the scope (and pricing) of those DLCs is laid out.
Ultimately, I feel like early access is the main carrot on a stick—which is unwise. If you're assigning value to line-cutting in a single-player AAA game, you better be sure it runs smoothly and doesn't have any issues on day one. If you're thinking "that's unlikely"—yeah, I agree.
It'll be lovely if Outlaws runs like a dream when it comes out, and while I'm sure the devs will have tried their level best to make that happen, we unfortunately live in the real world. One devoid of blasters, force powers, and my favourite guy BD-1. As some devs who were commiserating with Helldivers 2 studio Arrowhead Games back in February concurred—sometimes stuff just breaks. That's life.
If something does break, then a three-day early access period isn't long enough for devs to fix anything. Ubisoft (the publisher) dug up a rock, put an artificial hard place next to it, then squeezed its studio's devs and community managers right into the middle, and it just didn't have to be this way.
Either way, Star Wars Outlaws will be available August 30—or August 27, if you're willing to pay for the privilege of some shiny hoodies and jackets.
