We’ve all seen what’s been coming out of the Triple-A game studios (Quadruple-A, if you’re Ubisoft) of late: lack of graphics, lack of optimization, lack of imagination. What’s the reason? Simple: they’re lazy. They want a quick cash grab without doing actual work.
Like our friend Bob Iger put it, the “IP mining” of our favorite franchises comes at a cost…a cost most often pulled from the pockets of us plebeians they expect to buy their product. Yes, they expect these sales; after all, they’re entitled to our money. Why? “Don’t ask questions,” they say, “buy our product. CONSUME!”
Those two lines of thought meet with a loud thud with Star Wars: Outlaws. This is a game no one asked for, using a trope no one understands (apparently), and graphics quality from 20 years ago. And they demand our money because, “Star Wars.”
There’s just one problem…NO ONE IS ENTITLED TO OUR MONEY! They have to earn it–and Outlaws does the exact opposite. It’s laughable, it’s stupid, it’s repellent–and that’s without talking about the PC specs needed to play, which is what we’re focusing on here (soap box not withstanding).
This “game” is published by Ubisoft, the afore mentioned Quadruple-A game “studio” (I’m in a particularly snarky mood, if you can’t tell). They’ve published the PC specs for this game, and it’s made me question the previously-thought levels of their insanity. Do they really think anyone’s going go for this?
Check this out:
If you don’t already own this equipment, you’re not playing this game unless your making the kind of money that Ubisoft execs think you are. They’re wrong, but they still think it.
To be fair, you can probably enjoy this game at 1080p/60fps with the Recommended specs. But let’s break that down a little. The CPU they have for that in an Intel 10th Gen i5 or equivalent AMD, but let’s be real–if your gonna buy a new system to play this game, at least get a 12th Gen or equivalent AMD. Who’s going to buy a 4 year old CPU to play one game when you can buy a 2 year old CPU to play several. Anyway, as of this writing, that alone is going to cost $200. The matching 16GB DDR4 will be at $50 to $60 depending on brand. A motherboard to mount those on will be a minimum of $100, but for stability you’ll want something in the $150 range. The NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti GPU, however, is almost $400. Adding case, drives, power supply (oh, a Solid State Drive is required, by the way), we’re up to a total of around $1,300.
BTW, I’m focusing on Intel and NVIDIA because they are superior, in my opinion. AMD users, I imagine, will see costs around the same.
For a generally bare-minimum gaming PC, that’s not bad; but again, bare minimum.
Ubisoft wants you to enjoy this game, though; and to really enjoy this game, according to the “Enthusiast” standard, you need more power. Hiro and I suspect (conspiracy theory time) that the hardware manufacturers are in bed with the game developers to make sure they can profit off new games, as well. To that end the claim is that you’re going to need an Intel 11th Gen Intel i5 CPU (handled) and NVIDIA RTX 4070 with 12GB NVRAM. At the time of this writing, that’s a $550 card, depending on brand.
All told, that’s not that big of a boost, if your wallet can take it. If not, well, you must not make as much as Ubisoft execs think you make. Or…you’re not the customer they’re looking for. But, that’s a different discussion.
Finally, for those who want to play their games on Ultra (despite the complete lack of necessity with this game), let’s look at the CPU and GPU price bumps. Going from Intel i5 to i7 isn’t going to be that much. When I looked up the prices for writing this, the Intel i7 12700K was the same price as the Intel i5 12500. Someone’s overcharging. No memory upgrade? That’s interesting. GPU? Oh, boy. $960? $1,080? $1,200! We have a winner!
There you go! We just went from a modest (heh) $1,500 computer to a $2,200 computer. You might as well buy a console at this rate. Not a bad idea really, except I think this game will melt your PS5 with how badly it’s been optimized. And that brings me to my next point.
The reasons for these expensive specifications? It’s what I said at the beginning of this article: these game devs are lazy. Star Wars: Outlaws looks like a half-hearted attempt to make a game, from the design to the execution. Early game-play previews we saw also don’t justify the specs we’re seeing here. Many reviewers point to the fact that the graphical quality calls back to the PS2 era. If that’s true, why the high-end specs even at the Recommended level? The answer is very little, if any, optimization. If the devs had made and honest attempt to optimize this game–at the graphics quality we’re seeing, it should be easy–the computer specs needed to play would be far less and much cheaper. If they’d made an honest attempt to put some care into the quality of the visuals, then it might be justified.
Now, for the sake of argument, let’s acknowledge the possibility that all the graphics we’ve seen were recorded on the minimum or recommended specs level equipment. It could be that on a PC with the Enthusiast or Ultra specs, this game looks AMAZING! X to doubt–but we’re pretending for a moment so bare with me. Would this game be worth it?
Absolutely not. Game-play footage still shows that this game is borked to high heaven. It needed to cook for at least another 2 years, with chefs that knew what they were doing, and cared for their art.
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