Star Wars Outlaws may finally be out for all to enjoy. But it doesn’t mean developer Massive Entertainment is anywhere near done supporting the game beyond the two expansion packs already announced for the game.
The team has plans to implement “a lot of improvements” to the game well after its release, Star Wars Outlaws creative director Julian Gerighty said in an interview with Gamesradar.
“Outlaws has such long legs that this will be a game that millions of people are going to play for years and years, and we're never going to stop improving it,” Gerighty said.
Last month, Star Wars Outlaws received mostly positive reviews following its release. While its stealth and combat mechanics are somewhat simplistic, its sense of place is unmatched, especially when compared to other contemporary Star Wars games.
In an in-depth interview, Gerighty and the game’s director Mathias Karlson spoke about improvements ranging from balance fixes, like decreasing the early game’s difficulty spike, to larger changes like adjusting where players spend their time in the game’s massive open galaxy.
“One of the things we can see through data is that elements aren't working as well as we would like,” Gerighty said. “One of the earliest missions in Mirogana is incredibly punishing and, for me, that is a mistake — and it's something that we're going to work on improving.”
While it’s hard to know which mission he’s referring to specifically, it’s easy to understand this as a common gripe among players. Outlaws’ earliest stealth missions can feel like being doused with cold water because of how rigid success is. While I eventually got the hang of it a few hours afterward, I felt these later missions were way more forgiving, providing players with more pathways into enemy bases. Adjustments here would make things easier for players who jump in post-launch.
Gerighty also spoke about how one of the game’s upcoming DLC, A Pirate’s Fortune (starring fan-favorite space pirate Hondo Ohnaka), will allow the team to double-down on an underused part of the game’s open world.
“[A Pirate’s Fortune] is space piracy focused and really pushing the space aspect,” he explained. “We would have loved to spend more time in space in Outlaws. There's so much more for us to do there.”
From the sound of it, Massive wants to treat Star Wars Outlaws like a platform, despite its relatively slow sales out of the gate. While Ubisoft games have generally taken this approach (Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla for example received additional content years after release), Massive Entertainment has been particularly great about improving their single-player games months after release with free updates, just for the heck of it.
Last year, Massive Entertainment released the overlooked Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, an open-world game based on James Cameron’s science fiction franchise. Much like Outlaws, Frontiers of Pandora was a title that meticulously recreated the world of Avatar in a sprawling first-person adventure. Despite releasing a licensed product likely to make its money back due to name recognition alone, the developer followed up with months worth of free updates. These updates rebalanced enemies that leaned into how players wanted to engage with enemies, graphical updates, new difficulty options, new animations for mounts, and a wave of additional quality-of-life improvements.
Outlaws’ creative director all but confirmed that the team’s Star Wars game will get the same treatment as its Avatar counterpart.
“We've got such a great system, there's a great foundation. It's not as easy as it looks, because everything is level designed and that's a lot of work, but there's so much we can do there,” he said. "We're pushing. We don't want to let it go.”
Alluding to Massive’s higher-ups, he added, “They’re going to have to kick us out the door.”
