I was a huge fan of Wing Commander: Privateer when it came out. Back then, space flight sims were quite common and very popular but the star of the space sim very quickly faded into a niche with the rise of the first person shooter. Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is a call-back and directly inspired by Privateer, replicating and updating most of the gameplay systems whilst adding some new aspects. Let's take a look!
Though the game is not super heavily story-based - here be spoilers!
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| Careening to a screen near you! (The game has a nifty screenshot feature and video feature. The screenshot feature is easy enough to understand, the video feature not so much...) |
This is set to a backdrop of Tatiana being head of a pirate clan and having constructed a cruiser with an unknown (but very powerful) weapon based on jump gate technology - which is really improbable and, if I remember correctly, is not explained in the slightest.
There are two branching points that I discovered. The first being whether to join your mother to form a space empire or don't, ratting her out to the police (who capture you in a cutscene and try and force you to go along with their plan to destroy the cruiser). The second instance is when you reunite with Brace - you have the choice to drop the relationship or make another try of it.
Seeing that I've only played the game once and I sided with the police and dumped Brace's ass, I can't say that I know each and every ending but I have the suspicion that they all end on a similar note as the game allows continued play after the ending.
However, I really wanted something a little less tepid in the denouement to this story... Tatiana escapes the super-cruiser as it is destroyed and Juno meets her in a bar (of course) to tell her to go screw herself. Then she meets Brace in a bar to tell him that they weren't happy together and to end it or make a go of it. I mean, even the final battle with the cruiser felt like a little bit of a letdown because in normal gameplay I had experienced more difficult fights. Quite frankly, the super-cruiser wasn't that visually impressive or as big a threat as it was made out to be.
At any rate, the story has left open the world and all characters for expansion in some form or another going forward.
Characters:
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| Most of the characters remind me of Arnold Rimmer from Red Dwarf - with personality only filling their little finger... |
Outlaw draws its characters in very broad strokes - some of them not all that inoffensively. I actually dislike pretty much all the characters with the exception of Juno, Marla and the synthetic lifeform, Satchel. The remaining cast are grating stereotypes which, in short doses, are okay but the game has a propensity for pushing them on the player with a "do my work for me" kind of relationship. The dialogue is severely lacking in these one-note talking heads and it's mostly antagonistic to both Juno and the player. Juno really doesn't need most of these characters and has very little reason to fear them (in the cases where they threaten her). Ultimately, the characters display the worst aspects of GMPC-ism (Game Master Player Character) - they're untouchable (mostly) assholes who Juno lets run amok with her life.... and thus, the player's time.
Now, Outlaw isn't a game where the player character has much agency except in determining which missions they accept or refuse or which ships to target and destroy in which order (or possibly try and convince them out of attacking/their cargo). So it's not as bad as a character in a proper RPG, for example. However, why Juno puts up with any of their crap and/or hangs around them is beyond me.
Seriously, the characters are simultaneously the weakest and worst parts of this game. I know not everyone will be riled by their droning idiocy or malevolent arrogance as I am but they really sapped the joy out of progressing through the stories that are to be had here. It never felt like Juno was building relationships (antagonistic or not) with these guys so her continued willingness to do "milk runs" with them was really inexplicable.
Mechanics:
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| Accessing the function wheel slows down in-game time, allowing you to perform any function on the wheel, call in a friend to a tough fight or re-balance the power distribution of the ship without worrying about being turned into space dust. |
I've been playing with a PS4 controller on the PC and have had only small annoyances with the setup but I'll get to that later. One thing that is really lacking from the game is any sort of tutorial or even pop-up boxes which help the player understand the functions of the game they're playing. As a rather stupid example, it took me around 20 hours to realise that "Transfer power to shields" is not the same as rebalancing the power distribution to the shields. This is more clearly labelled in the key/button mapping options as "Dump power to shields". I also do not know what the stars in the upper left corner of the screen mean - they seem to be "wanted" stars, as you would find in games like Grand Theft Auto or Saints Row but don't result in the police attacking you when you get them and you appear to accrue them when you destroy pirates in front of the police. I don't think I ever managed to gain three stars - they also appear to reset after a while.
Perhaps this behaviour is the police "looking the other way" as I was aligned pretty strongly to the "Lawful" side of the scale - as you can see in the image above. Again, this was another aspect I hadn't noticed until well into the game. I could see my reputation was being altered through my actions but couldn't see where that was displayed. It actually wasn't until looking back at these screenshots that I saw the quite innocuous and semi-transparent gauge there at the bottom of the wheel menu.
Moving on, if you've played Privateer or Freelancer then this game will be very familiar to you. You navigate through semi-static station screens using a third person point of view using a menu that is listed across the bottom of the screen when you are not flying your craft.
When you're flying in your space ship, you're using the controller, flight stick or keyboard and mouse to control pitch, direction and acceleration as well as the targetting, weapons and shielding systems, and navigation.
There's not much to really dissect for the on-station/planet sections. They're perfectly functional at best and annoyingly setup at worst. To give an example of the latter every "activity" on a station's menu is a different selection, e.g. Buying/selling commodities, mission board, the bar, the weapons dealer, the ship dealer. However, there are two notable exceptions to this - the mercenaries' and the merchants' guild. These two rooms are just offices for you to use to sign up to the respective guild (though paying a fee, of course). These guilds, where available, provide access to better-paying jobs. However, once you've paid for membership, you still have to enter through this office space to then access the mission computer and THEN have to select to see the missions.
That's three button presses and two unnecessarily 3D-modelled spaces that do not need to happen/be rendered. It's an egregious waste of the player's time for no benefit. I understand that the developer spent time on those animations and on those virtual spaces but they are not necessary after the first time. Granted, this is literally replicating what Privateer did back in 1993 (I don't remember the specifics from Freelancer) but, given that Double Damage games have updated other systems for a more modern, streamlined experience, this seems like a huge oversight.
Moving onto the main aspect of gameplay (the flight and fighting), Double Damage have done an excellent job of translating the mechanics of Privateer/Freelancer to current day. Movement and direction control is smooth and responsive and the biggest innovation that they have added to the experience is a "pursue" button which allows the player to automatically follow and speed-match their currently selected target once close-by. This allows ease of navigation during firefights in a three dimensional setting while monitoring enemies on a 2D radar.
While some purists may not like this addition, it is completely optional for the player to use or not and it's use is not a complete panacea since the player still has to aid it for effective targetting of weapons. It's not a "win" button. Personally, I find the feature very useful in cutting down in time spent finding a target in space because you can sometimes head the "wrong" direction when following items on the 2D radar screen, resulting in you taking much longer to get them in front of you.
Finding targets to shoot, however, has not been updated all that fully to modern expectations.
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| Good use has been made of the limited selection of buttons on the controller but the options that would make things a little better aren't available in the vanilla release... |
First of all, I must give acknowledgement to the developers for providing a game that can, on the fly, switch between inputs. i.e. The game can switch between a gamepad and a keyboard/mouse control. I also think the devs did a fantastic job of squeezing as many controls onto the button-limited controller as possible.
Secondly, I must complain over their handling of targeting:
Ideally, targetting is a simple affair: You are able to select an element of the game that you wish to focus on and then apply whatever effect you can to that element. Unfortunately, this does not work as often as you'd like. Multiple nested items upon which you can focus disrupt this feature very quickly and result in a system that cannot function under undue stress... i.e. in the middle of a large scale combat. Otherwise, this is known (in the Outlaw universe) as the "I can't find a target" syndrome.
Seriously, Double Damage has conflated targets with sub-targets - that's a fighter, freighter, frigate/cruiser or a dropped bit of loot with a hardpoint (turret) on a huge frigate or cruiser. This is not very useful in a large scale encounter since you must cycle through fighters, dropped items and large hulled ships as well as their hardpoints - which can be quite a long list. It's not easy to focus on dodging fire or flying whilst performing this list scanning.
Further to this, the game has a feature, indicated in the picture above that the player can lock onto the nearest hostile which negates the problem with the dropped bits of loot. However, this results in the same predicament: players cannot distinguish between individual combatants and hardpoints on those combatants..... i.e. the system will choose the nearest "enemy" which could be a hardpoint that is close-by instead of the frigate that turret is placed on or a fighter which you might really prefer to be chasing down.
Since the developers have done such a good job of scale in the universe, it's difficult to visually see fighters when they're at 5+ k ranges (This isn't a complaint, it's pretty cool, to be honest and realistic) which means that you struggle to find and select a target you actually wish to be firing against. Sure, when your targetting reticle passes near or over a targetable element, you get a grey box outlining that element (same when you perform a scan with your sensors) and you can then target that element but it isn't always easy to find enemies in the midst of combat in three dimensional space....
One thing the developers have gotten absolutely right is the feeling of speed in the game. Ships zoom past each other and the changes in velocity from increasing and decreasing your engine output is really noticeable. Again, linked to the targeting and speed is the ship design, this is another really nice thing Double Damage have done - they have really cool and interesting ship and station designs which visually pop and are easily distinguishable from each other element in any given scene.
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| You can choose to antagonise an enemy using the in-game comms. This can result in a single or double bird or a "gun" shooting action in the cockpit. It's nice touch! |
Outside of this issue, I found that there aren't many opportunities for re-mapping buttons on the controller to functions that aren't already on the controller. I personally don't like fighting in 3rd person view so I swapped that out for the "dump power to shields" function. Aside from the d-pad down, the only other non-essential item was linked or staggered fire. I didn't really understand the difference between these two settings because I couldn't manage to cause an observable difference in gameplay. Every other function already mapped to the controller is required for play so there really aren't opportunities for adding other functions to the gamepad. It would be nice if the option to have multi-function toggle buttons as there is on the default layout you can see in the image above where left shoulder button allows the double-assignment of duties to the d-pad buttons.
As in privateer, enemies and allies will occasionally chat to you through the ship comms. This results in an image of the person talking on your multi-function display (MFD) - that's the one that is not dedicated to your shields, velocity and weapons readout. Unfortunately, while you can use your MFD button to switch between the information on the target, ship's log and weapon reserves, you can't override these little conversations. I would prefer to be able to see the info and have the conversation take place in, say a little holo-window that pops up in one of the corners of the screen. That way you can switch targets or loot during these relatively long (in terms of game-time) conversations.
It's also important to note that each weapon type has a range. What wasn't immediately obvious to me (because of a lack of explanation in the game) is that each weapon installed has a separate targeting reticle which will only display once the targeted element is in range. (That's those amber cross-hairs in the picture above) This is important to know when you're really supposed to be firing or not. Prior to this understanding I was using the distance on the targeting display.
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| The sector map. Useful for planning shortcuts (the red jump lines) since the autopilot will not plot through those "dangerous" jump points. Other useful info for traders or for times you want to purchase specific commodities can also be found by mousing the cursor over a system and selecting the relevant station - the produced and desired items for that station/planet can be found on the left hand side. |
Travelling around in Outlaw is a bit of a chore. This is also another area where I would have liked the developers to have a more modern take on things. Basically, you can do one of three things within a system:
- Fly manually to a destination (very slow)
- Autopilot to an in-system destination (fast)
- Sub-light engine travel (in-between)
Each of these options is perfectly fine in isolation but players will find themselves ignoring the manual flying very quickly in favour of the autopilot because flying manually has no real benefit other than wanting some realism but then the realistic thing for people to do in-universe is to use the sub-light engines to travel between points in a system. Unfortunately, autopilot is disrupted by three things - distress calls, flying near to ships/stations and flying near to hostiles. Whilst you can toggle the option to have autopilot disrupted by distress calls, you must do this each and every time you load the game from the main menu as the game does not remember your preference. It's quite annoying. I'd love to also have the option to toggle breaking autopilot for friendly/neutral ships/stations as well as, if you're playing a good character, you will not need to fight these or persuade freighters to drop their cargo for you.
I completely understand about not having a toggle to have autopilot disrupted by enemies but later in the game when these encounters provide nothing but a time sink for the player trying to get from A to B it's quite annoying and I'd love to have autopilot be able to skip these meaningless interactions in order to advance plot points more quickly.
Further to these in-system travel options, there is also the jump system which allows you to travel between star systems. This is fine in it's current implementation (you have good gates and bad gates - the bad gate can cause you damage or shift you off to a place you didn't expect to go unless you buy a very expensive upgrade) but the problem lies in the mission system - you have to travel a lot to far-off star systems which means that a) you have to use autopilot a lot (which gets interrupted by the above-mentioned events) and b) you cannot use a jump gate or dock when there are hostiles present.
This last one is actually a step back from Privateer - where you could rush the station or warp point and dock/jump whilst being attacked (or not). Sometimes this would result in your being destroyed or damaged as you attempted to do that but it was a trade-off you gambled on. Changing this to being a forbidden activity means that the player can become frustrated by enemies that are not even near to their position: if you arrive at a jump gate and there's an enemy 11 k away, you can't jump.
Also, there are relatively few "bad" jump gates (seven by my count) which provide short cuts for the player to take.
Lastly, for some unknown reason, Double Damage included the jump gate fuel system from Privateer. I understand that this was a legacy feature but I don't really understand its inclusion here, in a game in 2019. Having a limit on the number of times you can jump between star systems makes no sense when the cost to getting more fuel is time, rather than money/resources. It adds an extra enforced stop-off to a station (where upon docking your fuel is automatically refilled for the 50 credits docking fee) which incurs two autopilot travels and one docking engagement, all of which can be interrupted by the above-mentioned events. Or it involves stopping off at a refuelling station which takes less time but still requires two autopilot transitions. For comparison, Freelancer did away with this requirement and was not poorer for it...
What this all adds up to is a feedback loop in the travel system which can frustrate the player with unimportant busywork in order to get to an objective which can be 7 or more star systems away, not to mention that to activate a mission, you must first travel there and then travel to where the mission will take place - so each mission has two sets of travelling and sometimes three (where you travel back to the starting point to have a conversation in the bar).
There really isn't much point to the sub-light engines being in the game since they provide no reason for their existence - autopilot is faster and sub-light cannot be used as a getaway tactic during combat because you need a waypoint to target and you cannot activate them until you are "free" from combat and at that point you can activate autopilot anyway...
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| The world and combat of Outlaw is almost hypersaturated. I find it really cool and a nice departure of the dull colour palettes of other games... |
Speaking of missions, the mission types have some variation to them, ranging between simple combat bouts, scanning an objective to find another location where an enemy to be defeated/stashed cargo/a freighter to defend is... to shaking down freighters for their cargo. There are also dynamic objectives in the game - such as distress beacons, freighters trapped in minefields (sometimes in the midst of an attack and sometimes not) and battles between police and pirates.
The combat itself is fun and vibrantly coloured with various laser and other effects bringing the empty inkyness of space to life. I can see how this could be a little confusing or disorientating for some people but it doesn't bother me. There is a small amount of strategy for players to manage in combat - you have to manage your shields, hull health, armaments and energy levels.
You manage each of these resources through several ways: first there is the energy management system which diverts energy to one of three systems (shields, engines, weapons). It's not an all-or-nothing situation and slight increases to one or two systems can be performed. This can be done through accessing the "ring" menu and pressing d-pad left, up and right, respectively with d-pad down resetting the power levels. Increasing power to the engines actually provides quite a significant improvement to the velocity of the craft and also to the relative effect of the afterburner as well! This is something which is not explained in the game but is vitally important if the player wishes to run away from a battle without dropping cargo or if the enemies refuse to stop hostilities.
For example, with a level 4 shield and power plant the lowest setting for engine power on in the Coyote achieves 215 m/s, the highest - 602. At that highest level of output, the basic afterburner achieves >999 m/s which allows you to be able to effectively run from an encounter.
Similarly, for the lowest and highest weapons energy settings for a full laser complement of 2x gauss, 3x combat and 1x ion blaster with the same power plant and shield generator gives 17.5 seconds and 3.5 seconds of fire for the highest and lowest levels respectively.
Shielding is another matter entirely though. The lowest level of output does not appear to charge the shields at all; the highest level fully charges the shields in approximately 21 seconds.
Obviously, each level of power plant, shield generator and various weapons will affect the durations listed above and it is up to the player to discover what sort of playstyle they prefer. One aspect which is vitally important is the "dump energy to shields" function which can be bound to a button on the controller or accessed via the wheel menu. This instantly charges the shields from the available weapons energy pool. Survival in the more difficult encounters is dependent on this function.
One aspect of this management is a bit finicky though - Privateer had graded "bars" for your ship's shielding which allowed easy comprehension of the status of the space ship's defensive status at any point in time from a quick glance. Outlaw has a confusing melding of various types of display for armour and shields.
Enemies have graded shields - which makes it easy to see their status - but colour coded sections of their hull to indicate how damaged they are. This is exactly the same as Privateer's system worked for enemies. For the player's ship, armour and shields are a single bar which is sequentially illuminated. I find this system very difficult to understand in the middle of combat because when the shields and armour are hit, they flash - meaning you can't see what status they are currently at. Even then, you can tell when the shields are empty or full and when the armour is empty or full but anything inbetween is a bit of a crapshoot in terms of readability.
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| Sub-light travel is cool-looking but doesn't really provide any gameplay benefit. |
Finally, we come to the difficulty in this game. I'm unsure as to what governs the difficulty of encounters in Outlaw. I have a feeling that the stronger, more agressive ships tend to appear at certain levels of player net worth. At least, it seemed that way to me. As my net worth increased, random encounters became more difficult (not including the main story missions). What I found was that, early on, encounters were very manageable but that as I saved for bigger and better ships and components, random encounters became much more difficult. Then, once I had purchased the upgrades I'd been eyeing the difficulty of those encounters decreased because of my increased defensive or offensive capabilities, generally speaking.
I will fully admit that I probably would have played the game differently if I were to go back and do it again. I did some story missions and then did a lot of random missions from the missions boards to get money and upgrade my ships and items. This meant that by the time I was using end-game equipment, I was still quite early on in the main story and hadn't met most of the companions. In hindsight, this was a mistake as main story missions generally lacked appropriate difficulty and disproportionately rewarded me with huge amounts of credits that were clearly designed to help the player purchase new equipment and ships. This just made it so that my wallet often sat above 500,000 credits with nothing to spend it on.
In fact, I guess that is the final aspect of the primary gameplay I should mention - the economy in this game is completely broken. It's very easy to make a tonne of money very quickly. Moreso than in Privateer or Freelancer. This is a problem because I don't see any reason for trade, or for doing missions... items cost very little to purchase and you can just pick up random bits and pieces of loot dropped during firefights and you'll make money each time you leave the station - even if you're not doing a mission.
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| 31,000 credits for low risk? The economy is really crazy in Outlaw... (Though, the description does say "RISKY" so I don't know which is correct but normally, green is low risk, orange is high risk) |
Double Damage did a good job of including new content onto the base of Privateer. Aside from the variations in mission structure and combat controls, they also included new minigames in the form of poker dice and 8-ball.
Again, my primary complaint with these is the lack of tutorials or explanations. I've played a lot of pool (I guess it is the same as 8-ball since it has many, many similar aspects) and I know there are quite a few variants of the game with custom rules, especially depending on which competition you are playing in. The problem isn't that you can't learn the rules - after all, they're not complicated - the problem is that when you're learning the rules, you're likely to be low-level, new to the game and with a very limited amount of cash in your wallet. I've no issue losing 6,000 credits when I've got 500,000 in the wallet but losing 500 when you only have 4000 in your wallet is a crazy amount! The risk setup is huge for both 8-ball and dice right when these explanations need to be happening.
While dice is much easier to parse (maybe because I've played several variants of poker before?), I feel that if there was a "free" game of each in the starting station where you can play without betting money in order to learn the rules then I would have had no problem with this.
As it stands, both games are fun diversions from the main gameplay.
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| This game is incredibly efficient in terms of system requirements - this is the utilisation running bandicam, Outlaw, PS CS5 and Chrome. |
I played this on PC and encountered only a small issue/bug within the game until the 1.14 update. For some reason, I was getting a crash about 1 minute into the game from the video card drivers. It's not a problem, reload is very fast and in 1 minute, I've not accomplished anything significant. Then the game is rock-solid and I can alt-tab and have multiple processes running simultaneously without issue. Given the provenance of the issue, I don't know if it's Nvidia at fault or the game. It's not clear and not that big of an issue anyway given my semi-anachronistic setup. Plus, since a hard-boot, the game is no longer experiencing this issue.
The actual game-specific issue was that I was testing changing button binds on my controller and found that throttle up and down on the up and down buttons (respectively) of the d-pad only worked for increasing engine power but not decreasing. This was also replicable for the "secondary" binds as well. It's not a huge issue as the default buttons for these aspects work well enough.
Overall, considering how tightly controlled the design is, the game doesn't leave a lot of space for errors like that anyway. However, I will say this - the game is extremely light on the technical requirements. I'm running a Phenom II X4 955 with a modernish graphics card and a good amount of RAM. This game only really stutters very slightly during very intense scenes with a lot of explosions and weapons fire and even then it's not very noticeable.
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| The Caballeros refuelling depots exist only to make it so that you don't have to dock to refuel for jump gates... |
I really like Rebel Galaxy Outlaw. I can fully recommend it to anyone who enjoys these sorts of games. Still, although this is a good update to the Privateer formula, I feel that the modernisation efforts did not go far enough. In theory, this game has support for modding, so maybe some functionalities will be added through the mod community. Outlaw is a vibrant, fun game which may become even better over time. The one huge flaw (in my opinion) is the quality writing for the story and characters. Unfortunately, that can't readily be rectified by the modding community.
It's interesting to see the way Double Damage is expanding their home-grown universe and building on the technology designed for use in the first Rebel Galaxy (not a flight sim) and I'll be interested to see where they go next!
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| One of the four minigames a player can partake in at a bar.... The pool game is actually quite good! |
If I'm honest, despite really liking this game, it's been a long time since 1993 and many iterations on the space sim combat trader game have existed in one form or another. Primarily, the biggest are Privateer, Freelancer, Evochron, the "X" series and Elite Dangerous. While I've only played the first three, I have developed my own ideas as to what the evolution of the genre should entail and so I realise I'm quite nit-picky on this game. Saying that, these gripes are pretty simple things - they may be addressed in a patch or DLC.... or a mod (this game has some mod-friendly aspect).
However, as it stands at release I have many suggestions on how I'd do it differently:
1) There's no toggle for pursuit mode!! I mean, okay, it's not that much of a hassle to hold down a trigger but at the same time you can make the argument that targeting could also be a trigger-holding aspect as well... in fact that leads me to improvement no. 2:
2) The pursuit mode button also targets!!! You know what that means? In the confusion of battle, you can accidentally target something and then select it as your target. It's happened to me enough times that it's annoying. I'd prefer that this function did not auto-target anything and this was left entirely to the targetting button.
3) Scale back the level scaling (or whatever you want to call it). Early in the game, in the starting system, I'd be doing runs in my starting ship whilst saving money for the Sandhawk fighter. This meant my net worth was quite large in comparison with my actual loadout and combat effectiveness and, presumably, as a result random encounters were super difficult - this was in a star system that had a moderate police presence! Then, I'd go and do a story mission and the difficulty would be appropriate for my ship once more.
Obviously, I don't have a great deal of insight into how this is managed right now until I see the modding tools but I think the way I would do it would be to separate difficulty of missions and encounters into the three categories of star system - moderately patrolled, lightly patrolled and lawless. On top of that I'd have a modifier for each type of ship that is being run by the player - but only for the police patrolled systems; the lawless systems would be unaffected by player ship.
This wouldn't just extend to the number and type of craft in an encounter but to the types of tactics employed by the enemies. For example, the player is has expensive cargo/is running a freighter class - the enemies will contact them and tell them to drop the cargo instead of fighting or, perhaps, after a short time fighting.
4) The only caveat to the above point is that being able to dock, repair and reload at any point without losing access to the missions you are currently performing makes the game easier in comparison with Privateer/Freelancer. I actually think this feature is good but maybe there could be a penalty to this mechanic. The point above is about the difficulty scaling of individual encounters but this point is about the overall difficulty of the game.
Maybe a reduction in mission reward could be applied for the "time" you took to repair/reload the ship - maybe the time-sensitive missions would be failed upon docking (speaking of which, I've no idea whether "urgent" missions are actually time-sensitive or not as it's not explained...).
5) Tool tips or tutorials... or BOTH!! I know there's no manual for games these days, I know that Double Damage wanted players to discover the game for themselves over time but, please... players shouldn't have to guess at the functionality of the HUD/menus/displays.
Having the rules for 8-ball and dice explained does not ruin it for the player, it takes away frustration because when the player is learning the game, the stakes are at their highest because the percentage of the win to the player's total wallet size is huge!
Also, what is with the "notes" section of the mini-comp? I couldn't work out what the colour-coding meant, I couldn't tell if I'd visited a given note before or not... do they disappear once visited? Did I miss something when I went to that place?
6) This extends to combat as well - How do you flee? How do you bargain? I guess these could be handled within the description of the afterburner at the point of sale but it wasn't immediately obvious to me that an afterburner's output is a percentage of the *current* velocity of the space ship. This is a bit counter-intuitive because the functionality of this item has been treated differently in various games in the past. Normally, an afterburner means "max speed", especially in space sims where you're really not burning "fuel" as you do with an atmospheric craft. There's literally nothing to re-ignite in space-faring craft.
7) Targeting functionality needs to be expanded. The player needs to be able to select between types of targets and then be able to cycle through them. This actually would work pretty well because the functionality of the "select nearest enemy" feature could be amended to target the nearest element of the currently selected target family. As I said in the main text, in large encounters there is so much going on, it's horrible to have to sit there and cycle through every available target and loot in order to find the one you want...
i.e. The player holds the left bumper, presses down on the d-pad to select enemy fighters and then presses d-pad up to select the nearest fighter. At the end of the battle, they press d-pad down to select loot and can then target the nearest piece of loot or cycle through them with the d-pad left/right buttons as is currently implemented.
As targeting families, I'd have:
- Enemy fighter
- Enemy capital ship
- Friendlies
- Loot
- All
8) The economy really needs fixing - rewards for both story and mission computer missions needs reducing drastically, particularly in the mid-to-late game. Trading can be left as it stands.
9) The game currently does something totally unconscionable - it changes the selected mission automatically and without informing the player it has done so! This is crazy for me. Sure, I have someone pop in over the radio and give me a new mission. Great! I'll get around to it once I'm done with the current one I'm travelling to, I-.... Hey, wasn't I just in this star system a minute ago? CRAP! I got all turned around because I was just following waypoints!
Don't do this! Let the player choose to drop their current heading by themselves.
10) This is also tied into the excessive travelling required for story and side missions. At I noted above in the main part of the review, travelling is a chore and the mechanics of the game make it moreso. How would I fix this?
a) Remove the jump gate fuel limitation - it serves no purpose in gameplay. Players are likely to dock to unload cargo/fix damage on long hauls more often than they are required to refill the fuel. I used a Caballeros refuelling station twice in the entire game.
b) Use the in-ship comms more. Sure, you made these nice 3D bar settings and character models but don't make the player travel 5 or more jumps to have a conversation in a bar, travel 2 jumps to the mission and then travel back 2 jumps to the bar for the last bit of meaningless chat. This can be done almost entirely in the cockpit.
This can be streamlined quite easily to meet the character somewhere near the mission or even at the mission location itself. Then, instead of going back to the bar, the character can speak over the ship-to-ship comms. Sure, for missions where you have a physical dodad to offload, let's make the trip. However, where there isn't one of those, don't make the player travel unnecessarily.
c) Have the option for the player to "autopilot" to the mission. I know it's immersion-breaking but then, so is the autopilot within-system anyway. The point of the autopilot is to reduce frustration and decrease the amount of dead time for the player. This concept can safely be extended to the inter-system missions as well. Have it as an option in the mission select screen and the player can automatically travel to the starting point of the mission. Simple.... you can even have interrupts from random encounters like you currently do - just one or two for the journey, not as if you're literally simulating travelling all that distance.
d) Make it so that enemies don't affect your ability to use jump gates when they're greater than 8 K away. Most weapons in the game don't even reach that far anyway so it shouldn't be an impediment.
11) There are way too many "wait around a bit until I contact you" points in the mission structure of the game. I've literally sat in space waiting for the next mission to happen because I don't need money - I just want to advance the plot. I understand that these exist to give a player breathing room but since following missions is entirely at the player's discretion and nothing to do with the equipment or money the player has at their disposal (unlike in Freelancer's story) then there's no reason to have these enforced breaks. Trust the player to know when they can or want to move on. Also, since there's no penalty for failing a mission (I only failed one mission so it's difficult to gauge if there are penalties in other instances) then there's even less reason for this artificial gating.... just re-write the story beat so that instead of "hey I have to go find this person now, I'll call you later", say "I've actually already got a lead on this person, meet up with me when you get a chance".
12) Clarify the waypoint system. Currently, for some unknown reason, each star-system can have an individual player-set waypoint but not more. Clearly there is the ability of the game to store more than one waypoint, maybe this could be explored.... or, remove the ability of multiple waypoints and just have one.
13) In the original Rebel Galaxy, (at least on PS4) I'm pretty sure you could manually activate the sub-light engines without a waypoint. It would be nice to be able to do this in Outlaw as well, this way it could be a viable means of escape from encounters. Enemy ships are able to do this (I presume they don't actually target a position before activating the drive) so it'd be cool if the player could too!
14) Remove all the extraneous screens and button presses to get to the mission computers in the mercenaries' and merchants' guilds. This is just good UX streamlining...
15) Switch out the display of in-ship comms chatter from the MFD to a holo display in one of the corners of the HUD so that important information is still accessible during those periods.
16) Have the game remember your preferences - if I toggle that "don't disrupt autopilot for distress signals" function then please don't re-enable it every time I load up the game from the main screen
17) Have a toggle for not breaking autopilot for non-hostile encounters.
18) Improve the display of the shielding and armour plating through graded bars. We can keep the "flashing red when being damaged" display though.
Although it one might think I hate the game or something from reading through the above, I really liked it... I just would love it even more if it was updated and tweaked a little bit.
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