Star Wars Outlaws title update 1.2 has gone live, and Ubisoft has brought a massive list of changes addressing pretty much every single annoyance I've had with the game. There's been a massive set of stealth changes, a broad range of fixes for the speeder bike, and a fix for the cinematic mode issue that's been driving me up the wall since the game's launch.
The patch notes begin with a doozy: "Tweaked the overall stealth experience by adjusting AI detection, the number of NPCs and their positioning, patrol pathing, camera detection and highlighting environmental opportunities to reduce player friction." We already got a smaller stealth patch last month, but these tweaks look much more substantial. Moving enemy positions and patrol routes around is the kind of thing that's wild to see tweaked in a post-launch patch.
But for my money, the most welcome changes are for the speederbike. The devs have "improved the speeder's response and reaction when called," which hopefully means that you can stop doing that awkward dance to get on the bike when you try to summon it. They've also "improved speeder collision with the environment to reduce being knocked off the speeder," and with the amount of times I've seen Kay clip the corner of a rock and transform into a crash test dummy, I'm thrilled to see that addressed.
The community is also thrilled with a set of changes to the speeder camera making it far easier to deal with. And my own biggest pet peeve: the devs have "fixed an issue where FOV was not working correctly when in 21:9 mode on consoles." The ultrawidescreen mode the game defaults to previously just cut off the top and bottom of your view, and now it'll actually show more of the game world, as it should.
It's a meaty patch in terms of download size, weighing in at anywhere from 3.8GB to 5.6GB depending on your platform of choice, and it's the first major update since Ubisoft made note of Outlaws' "softer than expected" sales and reiterated plans for a multitude of free updates. It certainly feels like Ubisoft is trying to position Outlaws for a No Man's Sky-style redemption tour, and while for my money this game already launched in a decent state, I'm certainly excited to see such big improvements coming in like this.
Ex GTA 6 dev says free and live service games are "eating everyone's time," and combined with "open world fatigue," it's getting harder to make players explore
"There are so many games": Legendary dev behind GTA 3, GTA 4, GTA 5 and many more says the industry needs to "get smarter" about what players want
