The first paid expansion for Star Wars Outlaws released this past Thursday and even regular players could be forgiven for missing it. Ubisoft have been promoting the title update released alongside it more than the DLC itself, which offers remarkably little content. I was unsure of the scale of the Wild Card expansion. Would it be like the Assassin’s Creed DLCs, offering an entire new area to explore with a host of missions and things to do, perhaps a new planet? Alas, it’s not. Wild Card is a disappointingly small addition, with limited new locations and about four missions, culminating in about three hours of content. It would be a total dud if one of those new missions didn’t turn out to be the best across the entire Outlaws experience.
The highlight of Wild Card is the mission which sees Kay infiltrate an illegal casino ship, the Morenia, and blend in with its high-class criminal patrons. It’s a new, very Star Wars location to explore, and while not large it feels relatively free and open in a way most missions don’t. Kay has to wander the halls and gambling parlour, eavesdropping on conversations and discovering clues to track down an invite to a special Sabaac game. This leads to an evolving mission, seeking certain players and criminal factions, discovering blackmail material, and stealing key cards to search rooms. There’s missable information that comes into play later, such as discovering the tells of the Sabaac players before the game, allowing you can call them out for cheating during it. It’s a unique mission for the Outlaws but I wish it wasn’t. The game would benefit from more of these Hitman-style levels which feel like a living, breathing world that Kay/the player is dropped into and has to navigate.
The big Sabaac game itself is a great set piece. I doubt Outlaws lets the player kriff it up too bad, guiding them to a predetermined result, but I was incredibly tense playing it. There are people watching, cameras flying around looking for cheaters, and high stakes; I was nervous I would mess up a cheat and expose myself, or not win the prize I was hired/blackmailed to collect. The ability to expose other players as cheats to eliminate them entirely is a great addition, too. Having all these extra elements going through my head while still playing the card game, which is addictive in and of itself, is more pulse-pounding than any firefight Outlaws offers. I wish the Morenia was available to access after the story: I want to keep playing Sabaac there.
So there I was, about to win the Sabaac game, and the ship gets raided by a gang who steal the prize: the location of a valuable moon. This is where Wild Card quickly goes downhill. I want to gamble and con my way to the prize, like a criminal, but as I felt with the main game, this isn’t the crime story I hoped for. It’s more of a rebel story with Kay as a straightforward Star Wars good guy. After the Sabaac game it becomes a MacGuffin hunt to stop an Imperial governor from obtaining the location of the moon Okala V. Lando, working for the Rebel Alliance, is along for the ride and Kay has no real conflict with him despite being rivals in the Sabaac game. If the baddie, Thorden (nice to put a face to the name after he was mentioned throughout Outlaws), was just trying to get rich off the moon’s resources then I would like that. It’s a low to medium stakes crime story. But instead the resources can be used to create a deadly poison, turning it into a superweapon that must be stopped to save the galaxy rather than simply criminals trying to get rich, the narrative this game seems set up to explore but keeps ignoring for more standard well-worn Star Wars fare.
Outside of the Morenia, the missions are poor. We’re forced to travel around Toshara to discover a location that turns out to be a hideout that I’ve already gone to in the main game, lazily repurposed here. Some developer must really love that location because I remember it being the focus of the first public gameplay demo. Slightly better is the new Imperial base in Mirogana City, which is a mixture of other bases but much larger to pad out what is a basic steal-the-plans mission. But the scale did make it feel more dramatic and, honestly, it’s a better heist than the one the entire main game is driving towards. Although that’s more an insult to the original heist than praise of this one. Facing an AT-ST and finally getting to destroy it after they proved an invincible foe in the main game was fun but I wish I got to blow it up during gameplay rather than a cutscene.
The new title update is getting more promotion than the expansion, with the free update of things that should have been in the game at launch somehow being more impressive and notable than the paid content. Having not played the game since platinuming it soon after launch, it did feel quite different. I imagine the DLC’s speeder mission was included purely to show off how it’s now possible to drive more than 10 meters without being thrown off the speeder bike by the smallest of obstacles. The DualSense noises when data-spiking make the rhythm game feel much better. I like the new ability to hold rifles without dropping them when interacting with anything else, like climbing ladders or accessing computers. The maps are cleaner and clearer, facial animations look better, and headshots are more satisfying. I managed to play through the three-and-a-bit hours of Wild Card without encountering any glitches or bugs at all.
I’ve read in the patch notes that the game no longer enforces stealth for certain sections, and as someone who liked stealth I found it harder to maintain being sneaky, like the game wanted me to have firefights to show off the reworked combat. Although that might be contained to the DLC missions or down to my rusty sneaky skills after a few months off. I wish there was a new upgrade available, whether ship, blaster, or speeder, because having unlocked and bought everything there was little impetus for me to open chests or collect treasures while playing Wild Card. I have plenty of credits but nothing to spend them on. And there remain some missions I’ve completed but the entries for them are still clogging up my journal list, as if incomplete, infuriating the obsessive compulsive side to me. I’m shocked they still haven’t fixed this.
With Wild Card complete, I leave Outlaws installed on my PS5 and look to the future. I expect a similar-sized, ‘unexpansive expansion’ for the second and seemingly final DLC, A Pirate’s Fortune, although hope for something grander. I do look forward to seeing Hondo Ohnaka in the game, who I’m also holding out hope will appear in Skeleton Crew. How can there be a Star Wars show about pirates without the Star Wars pirate? Ubisoft might have distracted people from the disappointment of Wild Card (other than one great mission) with the patch released alongside it, but the thing about fixing the game now is that Pirate’s Fortune won’t have such a significant title update to hide behind.
