Star Wars Outlaws

I would say that was Jambo's point. Classic Star Wars games from the Lucasfilms/Lucasarts period are classics for a reason and not just because they were Star Wars games. Modern Star Wars games really are just x game, but Star Wars!

And that can be good enough, if you like Star Wars and like the games that it is cribbing from. As I said before, you are probably going to be able to add a point onto the average score for this if you like Star Wars and take one off if you are bored with Ubisoft. Personally, I can probably take that extra point and not deduct one, as I don't play a huge number of Ubisoft games and I like the Star Wars aesthetic.

I like Star Wars. But I'm far from obsessed with it.

CBA with the world if the underlying game is mediocre. That's why the Respawn games hold some interest to me because they sound like decent games elevated further by being in a cool Star Wars world.

I will wait and see, I really liked both division games but disliked avatar. So they have a 66 percent success rate with me so far with their games.

Hogwarts legacy was fairly ubisoft in it's setup but that got a lot of praise despite being a ubi game in a wizardy wrapper.

wasn't expecting to see Mafia cited as an example of the Ubiformula

Yeah, Mafia 1 and 2 just use the city as a backdrop to tell their story. In the main game, it mostly just was used for you to travel to your next mission or the setting for chase sequences.

The first (maybe the second too, but can't recall) did have a free-roam mode, which I think added in a few piss about things and possibly some wacky vehicles, but it was still fairly barren. A lightweight GTA rather than an Ubisoft game though (unsurprisingly, as the Ubisoft formula was a long way off).

The first was a great game at the time. Second also was pretty good, but went even further into focusing on narrative over the gameplay.

Never played the third, but it did look like it was Mafia in name only and was a fairly generic open world game

Ditto! Though disagree on the longness, I thought it was massive! Matron.

Where are you on Survivor?

It doesn't seem unreasonable for them to re-use the formula with different themes... kinda like how action movies and romantic comedies have been using the same basic formulas for years, just with different characters and settings.

But once you've cottoned on to the formula, the length and size of these kind of games seems to make it much more glaringly obvious, because you're doing it again and again in each game, and then across games.

I'd have killed for an open world star wars scoundrel game 15 years ago. This one at least looks the part, although it's hard to get that excited about it.

Cyberpunk had quite a bit of open world bullshit as well but it really gets called out for it because the story was engaging. The world itself was quite dead feeling when you were out and about in it a lot of the time though.

In spite of that, I loved the game and would have happily played more if they wanted to do another.

I will counter that Harry, I thought the combat in uncharted 4 was poor and the guns felt horrible. Still enjoyed the game though.

Ha! What I liked about 4 was that the combat was zippy, and each encounter felt like a bit of a puzzle. I remember enjoying it, even though I wanted far less combat in the previous games.

I've no doubt I'll play this and probably enjoy it, but the footage I've seen isnt very inspiring to me.

Same, if a game forces me into engaging with the filler side content, i'm out. I used to grind through it but I now realise that's a complete waste of my life! Rise of the Ronin had a fair amount of crappy side content, but it never felt necessary to do it unless you wanted to, which I really liked. 

Played it twice! I think its a bit longer and has more unnecessary filler things added, but I do like it a lot. Another fun one to replay and again i liked the story and characters, the new powers and weapons are ok and i enjoyed having mounts and a firelink like hub you can add npcs to.

Ah yeah, by saying not too long i wasnt very clear, more intended to mean its a game i can get through relatively quickly compared to the 100 plus hour rpgs i usually play.

Playing Cyberpunk at the moment and can't say I agree with this. There is a lot of side content in it, but I would say it is far from the filler copy and paste content you find in Ubisoft games.

I've probably spent more time engaging with side quests than the main quests, as they feel almost as developed as the each other. They have their own characters that have their own arcs that progress over multiple missions. Something like the racing missions could have just been the races themselves, but I'm doing them as much for that as I am for getting to know Claire and her backstory. Even the boxing fight side missions has interesting ideas and characters, such as the twins that share the same mind.

All of it feels much integrated into the world than some just random "collect 1000 feathers" that you find in Ubisoft games. The closest to that sort of thing are probably the random crimes, but those just pop up as you travel, rather than cover up half the screen when you open the map.

As for the city being dead, I would say that it is pretty bustling. I would agree the npcs are brain-dead though and feel like empty computer game characters, whether they are on foot or in a car.

Cyberpunk is very much alive, even more now than at launch, there's a lot of stuff going on that you probably won't notice if you're speeding along in your car most of the time. A good open world gives you stuff to see and experience just going for a walk, Rockstar continue to be the best at that really.

I have some hope about Outlaw, some of the previews seemed to have different things happening (like an Imperial shakedown happening at a shop you visited that didn't happen in a different playthrough for example) and it's probably a bit of hyperbole but one site compared how it felt to RDR. Given the license it's probably not something that will crater in price as fast as most Ubisoft stuff but fuck paying for that ridiculous 100 quid version!

As for the Jedi games, didn't like Jedi Fallen Order and I don't like Souls games so even a "lite" version did nothing for me.