Star Wars Outlaws creative director admits forced stealth sections are “incredibly punishing”, says next patch will ease up on them

rockpapershotgun.com:

Star Wars Outlaws' next patch aims to tone down some of the action game’s “incredibly punishing” insta-fail stealth sections, alongside adding tweaks for “narrative context” at other points in the story. That’s according to creative director Julian Gerighty, who recently spoke to GamesRadar+ about what players should expect in the next update, coming “maybe in 10 days.”

“You're probably thinking of one of the early missions in Mirogana, which is incredibly punishing. And for me, that is a mistake, and this is something that we're going to work on improving,” said Gerighty. "I don't think it means removing the fail state completely, but I do think there are millions of low hanging fruits where we can make it so much more enjoyable and understandable."

Players should be "in that knife edge range between, 'okay, I'm completely in stealth, oh shit: They're about to see me. They saw me, but I can still do something about it, as long as I don't raise the alarm. I can create chaos locally to be able to avoid that happening,” added Director Mathias Karlson.

For my money, it’s not the forced stealth in Star Wars Outlaws that were necessarily the issue, more that Kay has very few interesting tools to overcome them.

Gerighty also went on to mention tweaking certain elements of story context at other points in the game.

"if you tell me today that that's a blocker for people enjoying the game, then we're going to tweak the narrative context, right? We'll have an announcement on the PA saying [does pretend PA voice] 'well, stormtroopers have gone down Toshara and now we have the skeleton crew on site.' The context will change, just so that we can get people to enjoy those moments as much as possible."

Thank you, GamesRadar+. [Does pretend PA voice] is my favourite use of those journo brackets I’ve seen in a very long time.

“It’s hard to get enthusiastic about Outlaws’ weak stealth and combat, film-set worlds, and half-hearted nods at a more conceptually experimental game,” said I