I was staring at a wall. It was an early mission in Ubisoft\u2019s latest behemothic RPG, Star Wars Outlaws<\/em><\/a><\/span>, in which I was charged with infiltrating an Empire base to recover some information from a computer, and this wall really caught my attention.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/figure>\n It was a perfect wall. It absolutely captured that late-70s sci-fi aesthetic of dark gray cladding broken up by utilitarian-gray panels covered in dull blinking lights, and I stopped to think about how much work must have gone into that wall. Looking elsewhere on the screen, I was then overwhelmed. This wall was the most bland thing in a vast hanger, where TIE Fighters hung from the ceiling, Stormtroopers wandered in groups below, and even the little white sign with the yellow arrow looked like it was a decade old, meticulously crafted to fit into this universe. I felt sheer astonishment at the achievement of this. Ubisoft, via multiple studios across the whole world, and the work of thousands of deeply talented people, had built this impossibly perfect area for one momentary scene that I was intended to run straight past.<\/p>\n Except I ran past it three times, because the AI kept fucking up and I was restarted at a checkpoint right before that gray wall over and over.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/figure>\n I\u2019m struggling to capture the dissonance of this moment. This sense of absolute awe, almost unbelieving admiration that it\u2019s even possible to build games at this scale and at this detail, slapped hard around the face by the bewilderingly bad decisions that take place within it all.<\/p>\n To be excited about a beautifully crafted wall is to set yourself up for an aneurysm when you start to notice the tiny, inflecting details on characters\u2019 faces, or the scrupulous idle animations of a bored guard. Then as I tried to conceive that this same level of care was taking place across thousands of locations in multiple cities over a handful of planets, my genuine thought was: \u201cIt\u2019s ridiculous that we mark these games on the same criteria as others.\u201d How can someone look at this<\/em>, this majesty<\/em>, and say, \u201cHmmm, seven out of ten?\u201d And then a guard sees me through a solid hillside and ruins fifteen minutes of painstaking stealth, and I wonder how it can be on sale at all.<\/p>\n In 2024, we have reached the most deeply peculiar place, where AAA games are feats that humanity would once have recognized as literal wonders, and yet play with the same irritating issues and tedious repetition as we saw in the 90s. This contrast, this dissonance, is absolutely fascinating.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/figure>\n Ubisoft strikes me as the leader in this bizarre space. I have, for years, been delighted and bemused by what that company is capable of creating, albeit often not in positive ways<\/a><\/span>. The Assassin\u2019s Creed <\/em>series routinely builds entire cities, even countries, in authentic detail, to the point where we almost take it for granted. It has always struck me as the most horrendous waste that a game like Assassin\u2019s Creed Odyssey <\/em>can recreate ancient Greece in such wonderful detail, and then gets thrown away, that entire digital space never used again for anything else. It could be given to the world, offered as a setting for a thousand indie games, reused and recycled as such an achievement deserves. Instead, it\u2019s there for that single game, where we reasonably kvetch about the frustrating details of a broken quest, or at how crowd AI bugs out at crucial moments.<\/p>\n And this is only to touch on the art and architecture. We\u2019re not even mentioning the fantastic writing, the exquisite voice acting, the sound effects, the musical score, the lighting, the concept art that makes such designs possible, and the direction and leadership that can bring all these disparate parts together. All as a backdrop to my repeating the run across the gantry because a distant AI decided to be triggered by a Nix it couldn\u2019t possibly see, or because that time when I pressed Square it decided to throw a punch instead of trigger a takedown.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/figure>\n I\u2019m old enough to remember a time when we\u2019d lament that a beautifully drawn point-and-click adventure was no fun to play, and be so disappointed that such lovely artistic skill had been the backdrop for illogical puzzles and bad writing. Imagine the camera shot pulling out from that adventure game and revealing the room it\u2019s in, the house that contains that room, the town that house is in, the city that town forms part of, and the country in which that city exists\u2014that gets you close to the scale at which the same issue plagues us 40 years later.<\/p>\n Just that opening city in O<\/em>utlaws, Mirogana, is more than gaming was capable of ten years ago, let alone 40. It, alone, would be enough for an entire game, with plots and missions and characters. And it\u2019s a blip in this game\u2019s mindblowing breadth. I cannot over-express the scale of what\u2019s offered here, and how incongruous it feels that it can all feel so easily dismissed given such fundamental errors. Errors that mean the game attracts headlines like, \u201cStar Wars Outlaws<\/em> Is Too Simplistic For Its Own Good<\/a><\/span>.\u201d And I get it! I know what the article means! It\u2019s right that its stealth is banal and badly implemented, and yet such a core element of the game. But God damn, why are we able to reasonably call this creation<\/em> \u201csimplistic\u201d?<\/p>\n I\u2019ve no idea what the solution can possibly be, but I feel it sits somewhere in a new order of priority. One that involves scaling back the ambition of everything that a large-scale developer knows it can <\/em>achieve, and re-focuses resources on fixing the absolute basics that it so often cannot. Because the tragedy of a piece of art like Outlaws<\/em>\u2014or any number of other architectural masterpieces that we see come and go in this industry every month\u2014being able to be sniffed at with a (deserved) 7\/10, is too awful.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/i.kinja-img.com\/image\/upload\/c_fit,q_60,w_645\/83cfeb437d4a2ea4e66d14dc677ea744.jpg\"\/)
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