Week in Review 2024-09-02

It was a whirlwind week leading into the Labor Day weekend with everyone trying to get everything off their desks before the holiday, so work was chaotic most of the week until Friday. One of the great things about working in California is that for the most part, everyone pretty much agrees that the weekend starts sometime after 2PM on Fridays, and sometimes earlier before holiday weekends, so it was thankfully dead most of the day.

The dead time coincided with the release of Star Wars: Outlaws, a game that I bought off mostly positive word-of-mouth from sources I trust and it’s turned out to be a pretty fun game. It mixes game-play elements of Metal Gear Solid (sneaking missions reign supreme in this game), Assassin’s Creed, and Uncharted in an enjoyable way. My favorite moment so far came out of left field, especially since I thought I had a good hold on the tone and presentation of the game until this moment.

I saw a prompt about getting a meal in the game and hit it, when suddenly a quirky food preparation scene straight out of an anime started, and then it built on that with a QuickTime eating sequence that took me by surprise. I wasn’t expecting a “quickly press the correct controller button displayed on screen” moment, since nothing like that had been in the game up to this moment, but it seemed pretty forgiving by allowing second chances and the entire thing was delightfully charming. It was like a moment out of a Yakuza game.

Admittedly, I’ve been playing the game on Story mode since I’m an adult with a job. Like everyone else, I play life on Challenging mode, and I don’t need that nonsense in my games, so I play on the mode that makes the game the most enjoyable to play. It’s an ostensibly open world game, which typically means you’re free to travel around a particular zone and complete whatever quests you want in the order you want, while also discovering new quests or items out in the world on your own volition.

The problem with open world games is that they’ve been dominated by game studio Ubisoft over the last decade or so, and they have a very particular style that’s become tired and formulaic over the years, but this game dispenses with nearly all of their usual cliche’s and does something new (for them). It’s been a refreshing change of pace.

It’s the type of game that I’ve always looked for when playing an MMO. I’ve been playing online multiplayer games since Shadow of Yserbius on Sierra Online’s ImagiNation Network back in the early ’90s. But the one that really caught my attention was Star Wars Galaxies, an MMO that was truly a sandbox game with elements that were novel for the genre. Most MMOs are essentially theme park games where you choose what type of role you’re going to play — Tank, Damage Dealer, or Healer — that you can mostly level-up by yourself, but eventually must group with others to complete dungeons and defeat bosses.

Galaxies was different in that you weren’t on rails, either in the game play environment or what job you had. No one was locked-in to a particular role, as you could level-up in any of the dozen or so jobs the game offered in whatever way you preferred. On top of that, there was an entire player economy that emerged from those jobs, as people could open their own storefronts and serve as vendors offering materials, clothing (of their own design), healing items, and character enhancements.

It’s the only MMO that truly offered almost complete freedom of play that none has offered since. And I’ve tried almost all of them. The parts of MMOs that I’ve always enjoyed most is exploring new areas and doing things on my own, like I could with Galaxies. It turns out I really don’t like playing with other people. I don’t want to join a guild or a clan or whatever a game wants to call a group of people who squabble all the time about “loot” and who gets what after grinding end game content to get good gear.

Outlaws is the first game I’ve played in a long while that scratches that Galaxies itch, by offering what’s essentially my favorite part of MMOs — exploration, discovery, solo play — while also providing a degree of freedom in where I want to go and what I want to do. Plus, I never having to group with a bunch of people to complete a dungeon and see the end of a particular quest line.

Obviously, the game is a theme park, keeping you within boundaries and guiding you to where it wants to you to go. No contemporary game by a major studio is going to offer the absolute freedom that Star Wars Galaxies provided ever again. Even SWG eliminated all of that by radically revamping the game and scrapping everything that everyone loved about it and turning it into a complete different game.

It’s a rarity for me to find a solo game that reminds me of my favorite elements of MMOs that also maintains my interest over the long term. I’m only a few hours into it, so I don’t know if its elements will become too repetitive or rote after awhile, but so far I’m enjoying it and the long weekend has given me plenty of time to enjoy it.