What they're fixing in Star Wars Outlaws, and why

Plus: Nintendo's very Nintendo reason for finally giving Zelda a game of her own

About a month ago, when I was playing a review copy of Ubisoft’s then-upcoming Star Wars Outlaws, it was obvious that the game had a glaring problem.

“The early stealth in Star Wars Outlaws is punishing and off-putting,” I wrote in my review on August 30, zeroing in on two missions in the open-world game’s early hours.

In those missions the game’s scoundrel protagonist, Kay Vess, must sneak through hostile areas without being detected. But she kept getting caught and I kept having to restart. These sequences were so frustrating that I texted some fellow reviewers in disbelief. Why would the developers do this?

I was startled again in early September when Outlaws’ creative director, Julian Gerighty, told an interviewer that yes, the early stealth levels were too punishing, that the issue “crept in in the last week” and they were going to fix them with a patch. 

My question about these frustrating missions changed: How did they not know? How did that happen?

So I asked Gerighty last week. And he talked to me about what went wrong, how they’ve tried to fix it and what else he and his team are monitoring (and what they’re not) as they work to improve this very high-stakes game for publisher Ubisoft.