After Initial Failure Of ‘Star Wars Outlaws’, Ubisoft Tags New Creative Director To Oversee Game’s Future
As part of their previously promised mission of bringing the widely-panned title into a ‘decently playable’ state, Ubisoft has officially handed the reigns of Star Wars Outlaws‘ post-release development to a brand new Creative Director.
This news regarding Star Wars’ latest video game outing was first broken to the public courtesy of a developer update published to the game’s official website on November 4th.
Therein, Ubisoft announced that not only was the game’s previous Creative Director, Julian Gerighty, no longer in charge of overseeing Outlaws‘ future, but also that he had been replaced in his role by Massive Entertainment’s Drew Rechner.
“I’m very excited to be stepping into the role of Creative Director on Star Wars Outlaws and to be working with the incredibly passionate team here at Massive Entertainment along with our talented co-development studios around the world and Lucasfilm Games,” said Rechner in his own personal statement. “I would like to personally thank you, our community, for your positive response to the game. We see and love all the fan arts, comments, and videos you’ve created around the game, and it continues to provide joy and inspiration to the team. We truly hope you’re enjoying your journey across the Outer Rim with Kay and Nix thus far.”
From there, Rechner admitted that the game’s dev team had been gathering information regarding its reputation “formally through our analytics, user tests, reviews and media feedback, our Star Wars Outlaws Bug Reporter, crash reports, and other mechanisms, but also informally when we see your YouTube videos and Reddit, Discord or other social media posts,” and as such had zeroed-in on “three key areas in which we’re looking to improve the game even further.”
“The first key area of improvement to the game is combat where we see a real opportunity to add more depth and excitement to the experience, further rewarding your tactics and precision,” the newly-crowned Creative Director explained. “Our second key area is stealth which is not only about improving the readability and consistency of enemy detection, but also providing choice in how you want to approach each encounter. Finally, our third key area of focus is centered around the character controls, which means improving the reliability of cover, increasing the responsiveness of climbing and crouching, and generally improving the consistency of the controls overall.”
Drawing his forward-looking roadmap to a close, Rechner ultimately asserted, “We will provide more specific details about the changes to these areas and more in the upcoming weeks as we provide further updates to you. All of this will culminate in the release of Title Update 1.4 which will release on November 21st alongside the Steam launch and first story pack, Star Wars Outlaws: Wild Card.”
As of writing, it’s currently unknown as to why the aforementioned Gerighty is no longer serving as Outlaws‘ Creative Director .
To this end, his departure is particularly curious given how, as readers may remember, Gerighty previously and publicly voiced a very optimistic outlook regarding the game’s future.
“I’m a little disappointed with the Metacritic [where the game currently holds a 76/100 critic score an 5.4/10 user score]; recognition from critics is very important to us, but I do think players are really connecting with what we did,” Gerighty told Games Radar’s Josh West in the immediate wake of Outlaws‘ launch. “We had a very ambitious target, we literally reached for the stars, and I think we were successful from so many different angles. There’s a magical, unique experience within Outlaws, whether it’s Star Wars or not.”
“I think 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,” he added before laughing, “Well, okay, that’s a lie, we’ll probably stop improving it eventually,but today my mind is not on stopping.”
“I’m still working on it, [game director Mathias Karlson] is still working on it – we’re pushing a lot of improvements,” he told West. “Not just on the base game, but it’s things that we’re going to deliver later this year and next with the downloadable episodes we’re creating. They are heavily themed, pushing a certain aspect of the game that we have even further.”
“There’s so much more for us to do there,” the former creative director ultimately concluded. “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. I’m still working on it, Mathias is still working on it – we’re pushing a lot of improvements. We just don’t want to let it go. They’re going to have to kick us out the door!”
Of course, given his almost delusion-level belief that the base release of Outlaws had been “successful” and was built on “a great foundation”, it’s possible Gerighty may have been fired for being too positive, and thus found unable to properly guide the game into a better state.
(After all, that’s what happened to Concord!)
As noted above, the 1.4 update for Star Wars Outlaws is currently on track to emerge from Hyperspace on November 21st.
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