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S01E22: Outclean with Star Wars Outlaws
36 Plays1 year ago
The newest AAA Star Wars video game, Star Wars Outlaws, hit the market last week. What's our review? Find out here! Plus, some thoughts on the untimely demise of The Acolyte.
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Transcript
Introduction to Topics
00:00:00
Speaker
We're talking about Star Wars Outlaws, plus some thoughts on the end of the Acolyte. Grab your drugs and proves it's a Star Wars cleaning crew.
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome back to the Star Wars cleaning crew. As I record this, it is the evening of Monday, September 2nd, which is Labor Day here in the States. So we've had a long three day weekend. It's been nice. I also was kind of sick last week. I've had this nagging cold.
00:00:27
Speaker
which
The Acolyte Cancellation Discussion
00:00:28
Speaker
is irritating. So it means I might have to hit pause a couple of times to cough on today's episode, but I thought we'd just kind of have a kinder, gentler catch up today on a few different things. One of the things I wanted to talk about was the cancellation of the acolyte, some sad news that came out a couple of weeks ago. Wanted to share with my thoughts about that. But before I do that, I want to talk about something a little happier.
00:00:53
Speaker
which is Star Wars Outlaws.
Star Wars Outlaws Gameplay Overview
00:00:56
Speaker
So last Friday officially was the release of the new video game, Star Wars Outlaws. And this is an interesting game. It it hadn't been announced like years and years ago like these AAA game titles often are. It was just announced last year. I think maybe about you know spring of last year it was announced.
00:01:20
Speaker
And people thought it would be coming out earlier this year. It wound up coming out towards the end of the year. That's fine. I've worked in the games industry. I have a kid who worked in the games industry. We know how hard it is to get games done. But it was released officially last Friday. Now, I, being the Star Wars nerd that I am, paid for the special edition that actually got me three days early access. So I've had the game for almost a week now.
00:01:48
Speaker
And like I said, I had a cold a lot of the week last week. And so I spent a fair amount of time lying on my couch playing Star Wars Outlaws. So I'm not done with the game. I haven't completed the entire storyline, but I'm pretty close. I'm about four or five missions away from being done.
00:02:10
Speaker
Now the idea of Star Wars Outlaws is, as the name implies, you are an outlaw in the Star Wars universe. So it kind of taps into that smuggler scoundrel fantasy that a lot of us have had since May of 1977 when we just thought Han Solo was the coolest thing in the world and we wanted nothing more to be like Han Solo. Well, in this game, you get the chance to be like Han Solo. You're not playing Han,
00:02:37
Speaker
but you are playing a character named K. Vess and K starts off as a small-time slicer, which is Star Wars language for being a hacker. She starts off as a small-time slicer in the underworld of Canto Bight, the casino planet that we saw in Star Wars Episode 8, The Last Jedi. So that's where everything starts and You progress, you you know you kind of grow in your infamy. you you you you start with a ah This is a little bit of a spoiler, but not much. You start with a mission that kind of goes bad. and As a result, you get a death mark on your head.
Exploring Star Wars Worlds
00:03:17
Speaker
So you're really spending the rest of the game trying to redeem that, get rid of the death mark, and hit the big score. And kind of by the end of it, it turns into the Star Wars version of Oceans 11, I would say.
00:03:31
Speaker
would be my that'd be my my assessment um it's fun i like it now here's the here's the thing is is it everything that i dreamed it would be honestly not quite you know when they first started announcing it they showed some early gameplay videos it felt very, very similar to Grand Theft Auto. So in some ways it is like that. ah It's an open world. The worlds that you have to explore and so far there have been ah four different planets that we've explored. So you've got Canto Bight. You've got, ah um maybe it's five. ah You've got a world called Toshara. ah You've got
00:04:19
Speaker
Kojimi, which we saw in The Rise of Skywalker, that was kind of the wintry planet where they ran into Keri Russell's character. ah You've got Akiva, which showed up in some of the novels. And of course, it's Star Wars, so you have to have Tatooine.
00:04:36
Speaker
So you've got these planets and let me tell you, they are vast. They are absolutely huge. And one of the nice things is almost right from the beginning of the game, you get a speeder bike because I'm telling you, you need a speeder bike to get from one side of the planet to the other.
00:04:55
Speaker
You really do. ah It is very, very big. And getting around ah takes some time. So it's fun. It's fun riding on your speeder bike and cruising along and seeing all these different sites. There's a lot of little Easter eggs, especially in the planets that we're used to. Like when you go to Tatooine, you get the opportunity to go to Chalmun's Cantina, the Cantina made famous in the original Star Wars movie, A New Hope.
00:05:24
Speaker
And you can even see at a little table where Han Solo and Greedo had their last standoff. And you see the the blaster mark on the wall where Greedo missed Han after the revisionist history. That was the special editions. But there's a lot of little details like that that are really cute. If you are somebody like me who who memorized the Orabesh written language, it's like a field day because there is so much Orabesh to read.
00:05:53
Speaker
Uh, that part is just kind of fun. Lots of times I just hit pause and read the signs and see what's on there. So, so that's really cool. But like I said, the
Game Features and Mechanics
00:06:01
Speaker
the gameplay was kind of promised to be like grand theft auto. It's not quite as free as that. It's a little bit more restricted. Um,
00:06:12
Speaker
you know like You only have the one speeder bike that you can drive. You can't take any other vehicles at all, like you can in grid theft auto. or Pretty much if it drives, you can take it and you can drive it. Same way with weapons, your base weapon is a blaster. And while you can take weapons from enemies that you defeat, they only last until they run out of charge or until you drop them.
00:06:39
Speaker
And you you can't, you know, you can't store them. The only thing that you actually store is your blaster, which, you know, I suppose you could argue that in the fantasy of the game, that makes sense. You know, like you you don't often see heroes running through Star Wars with eight or nine different weapons strapped to their back. They might pick up another weapon and shoot it for a little bit and then get rid of it and go back to their old trusty blaster. So I can live with that. That's fine.
00:07:06
Speaker
But you know in this game, it's really fun. You've got a bunch of different missions and it's an open world game, so you don't have to take them in order. You can pretty much do them in what whatever order you like. One of the things that I find the most compelling about this game is the system of progression. So oftentimes in games like this, as you keep going, you get more powerful and you know you you progress, you get new skills and new powers that you can start using. It's like that in this game, but whereas in other games, it tends to be, you know you get a certain amount of experience and then you level up and you get some points and you can decide what skills you want to invest them in.
00:07:50
Speaker
With the skills progression in Star Wars Outlaws, you meet people who wind up being your experts. And they're kind of like your trainers in that skill. And once you meet them, you have to accomplish certain tasks and challenges to unlock the next skill in your skill tree.
00:08:09
Speaker
So maybe to, say, be a better stealth takedown artist, you have to sneak up behind 20 different people and take them down without being noticed. And then you get an extra skill in that capacity. And I think that that's a really cool thing. It it really adds to the realism of it.
00:08:29
Speaker
Another thing that I really like about this game is the system of your reputation. Your reputation is very, very important. And there are four main syndicates, underworld syndicates in this game. ah There is the Ashiga clan, which I'd never heard of before. Maybe that existed in some book or comic book or something. I'd never heard of them before. ah There are the huts, which of course we know the huts, Jabba the Hutt.
00:08:56
Speaker
Tatooine completely covered with huts. There are the pikes, which you may know from the Clone Wars or, you know, the other animation series, but especially from Solo a Star Wars story. They're the ones who are running the minds of Kessel. And then, of course, there's Crimson Dawn, which you definitely know if you watch Solo a Star Wars story, because that is who Kira ultimately wound up working for.
00:09:22
Speaker
And spoiler at the end of that movie, she winds up taking over, which is one of my favorite things about this game. So I absolutely love Solo, a Star Wars story. I know a lot of people are kind of meh on it.
00:09:39
Speaker
This was a movie that I enjoyed the first time and I liked it more and more each successive time that I watched it. And now it's kind of like if I just feel like watching some Star Wars, more often than not, I'll put on solo. I really enjoy it. So I was very disappointed when Well, i I am very disappointed that they have not yet greenlit a second movie in the solo series. Maybe they will someday, who knows? ah But I wanted to see what happened with the rest of the story. I wanted to see Kira at the head of Crimson Dawn. And they did wind up making comic books that kind of told the rest of that story. But I really, really like that character of Kira. So I made it my objective in this game and to get in really good
00:10:28
Speaker
with Crimson Dawn so that I can meet Kira. And what I've done so far is I am at the top of the reputation chain with Crimson Dawn, so I have a complete Crimson Dawn uniform I can watch.
00:10:41
Speaker
I can watch, I can wear, but I have not yet meet met Kira. I am waiting for that moment where I get to meet her. Cause I think that she's just the bomb. She's just great. Complaints about the game. It took me a while to get used to the controls. I felt like I was kind of fighting against the controls a few times.
Game Review and Recommendation
00:10:59
Speaker
There are times when the the stealth, you know, I hear a lot of people who are saying it's more of a stealth game than an action game.
00:11:08
Speaker
But I think that I do better when I go in with my blasters blazing than I do when I'm trying to sneak around. um Another thing that is just fantastic about this game though is you have a little sidekick character.
00:11:24
Speaker
He's a little cat-like character named Nix. And he is just great to send on little errands for you. And he'll distract enemies for you. He'll fetch things. He'll even attack enemies for you. He's just a lot of fun. So all in all, Star Wars Outlaws, it's not the perfect game. But I do recommend it, if you like Star Wars games at all. Is it as good as like the Jedi fallen order or survivor games?
00:11:51
Speaker
Not quite, it's a little bit different, but I think it's a good pickup. So I would recommend it. If you listen to this podcast, you will probably enjoy it.
The Acolyte Cancellation Reactions
00:12:00
Speaker
Okay, so that's Star Wars Outlaws. Now let's talk a little bit about the Acolyte.
00:12:05
Speaker
I have to say that when I heard that the acolyte was not being renewed for season two, the only thing I was surprised about was the fact that they announced it so early, because usually they don't make a point. It's just you don't hear anything again, you know? And so I was really surprised that word came out, no, there will be no season two of the acolyte.
00:12:27
Speaker
My reaction to it is, like I said, I wasn't surprised with all of the, you know, the the vitriol and the negativity around it. I wasn't surprised by it. I was disappointed. There were so many good hooks, especially in that last episode. We saw Darth Plagueis. I love the character of Khaimir. I think it's amazing bad guy.
00:12:49
Speaker
It's really, really sad to me that we're not going to see the next thing that comes down the pike for those characters. I know we'll probably get novels. We'll probably get comic books. Maybe it'll come back someday. But I was disappointed in it. I i thought it was really, really sad. Now, you know, I've read a couple articles and about why it got canceled. And what makes sense is the fact that apparently it was very, very expensive to make. I think that the budget per minute of produced video on this movie was more than, or on this series was more than any other Star Wars series that's been made yet. And the numbers, ah the viewership numbers were just not where they wanted it to be. So ultimately it's a business decision and that's why they make that call. But it does make me wonder
00:13:42
Speaker
with all of the negativity around it, with all of the people who really tried to sabotage the show from being successful just because they didn't like the politics or the sexuality or you know whatever of some of the people who were working on it. That just breaks my heart because it was good. It wasn't the best Star Wars show in the world, but it was good.
00:14:06
Speaker
And I just hate seeing it
Community Engagement and Toxic Fandom
00:14:10
Speaker
that way. um I don't like toxic fandom, and that's why I want to stay as positive as I possibly can. So those are my thoughts on the end of the Acolyte. Would love to hear yours. ah Feel free to respond back. Let me know what you think. You can drop me a note, drop me an email. I mean, most of you are probably friends of mine, so just give me a call. and i will I will share it with you. ah But in the meantime, we'll be back next Tuesday with the next episode of Star Wars Cleaning Crew. Until then, keep your kitchens clean. May the force be with you. Make sure you like, make sure you subscribe, really tell your friends, hype it up, let's get the crew bigger, and we'll see you next week. Thanks, bye bye.