After issuing a pathetic non-apology for their disgraceful revisionism of Japan’s history revolving around the fictionalized “samurai” background of the supposed historical figure Yasuke in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and blatantly misleading investors about the reception and sales projections for the upcoming Assassin’s Creed title and Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft has given consumers another reason to despise them with the PC requirements for Star Wars Outlaws.
The full recommended system requirements for the PC build of Star Wars Outlaws have been released, and they are an embarrassment for a game that visually looks no different than older Far Cry titles released over five years ago.
The game, due out on August 30th, has been openly mocked and ridiculed by gamers due to its hideously designed female protagonist, who appears to have been initially designed as a male before being “Sweet Babied” into a gender swap at the last minute, resulting in a frumpy monstrosity that looks nothing like the actress hired by Ubisoft to scan her likeness.
The last time we discussed Star Wars Outlaws was during Ubisoft’s recent financial report and investor call, where the company announced that they had spent more on marketing for Star Wars Outlaws than any other game they had previously released.
Ubisoft also claimed that Star Wars Outlaws and Assassin’s Creed Shadows were among the most anticipated games of the year. Assassin’s Creed Shadows, in particular, has become the most controversial game of the year due to its falsified Samurai narrative for its protagonist Yasuke, a fabrication by author Thomas Lockley.
Lockley, who has written two books about Yasuke, altered various Wikipedia entries by citing himself and his unpublished works as credible sources. Following this discovery, Lockley abandoned social media as the game sparked a massive boycott campaign.
Over 100,000 gamers have signed a petition to have the game effectively banned in Japan, citing obscene cultural appropriation and the distortion of Japan’s heritage and history to push a culture war agenda, which video game journalists have defended on the grounds of “fiction” since day one.
Star Wars Outlaws, on the other hand, was previously showcased by IGN, which had the privilege of publishing and promoting a ten-minute preview of the game.
This preview has since received 72,000 dislikes compared to 13,000 likes, with the comment section flooded with criticism regarding the poor quality particle effects, such as explosions, and a generic, bland open-world atmosphere.
Additionally, the video was mocked by consumers for its woeful “stealth” mechanics, which appear to be blatantly copy-pasted from older Far Cry titles, a likely scenario given that this is a modern Ubisoft game. The NPCs themselves exhibit noticeable issues with pathfinding and an inability to effectively shoot the player.
As is typical for large companies like Ubisoft, who have claimed to have spent the most money on marketing for this game, they’ve recruited various social media influencers and content creators to generate positive buzz and reviews.
For instance, GmanLives, a YouTuber with over 730,000 subscribers who reviews both new and old games, was among those tapped for promotion.
He, along with other influential figures such as JoeRaptor, who boasts 960,000 subscribers, was given early access to Star Wars Outlaws. They were likely flown out by Ubisoft to attend events centered around the game, which may or may not have included complimentary passes to Disneyland, interviews with game developers and more.
Call it a preview build or a review build, it doesn’t really matter. The game releases on August 30th, yet these individuals were given full access well in advance. GmanLives, for example, published his thoughts on the game on July 31st in a video titled “Star Wars Outlaws Might Actually Be Pretty Good.”
Given the generally poor reception of the game, when a content creator who makes a living producing game reviews has a starkly positive opinion, it naturally raises suspicions. People accused GmanLives of being a paid shill for the game judging from his near 50/50 like to dislike ratio on his video with a large portion of the comments mocking him.
A shill is someone paid to promote or endorse a product, while a fanboy is someone who blindly supports a product or corporation out of their own free will. Shills often can’t handle criticism when called out, and GmanLives was no different.
Simple observational facts indicate that GmanLives is an influential figure, given his YouTube channel boasts over 700,000 subscribers. He claims to make videos for fun and entertainment rather than for profit, even though he has made a successful living from producing such content.
The Act Man, another content creator, faced similar criticism for a biased review of Payday 3. He was flown out by its developers to play a preview build, much like content creators for Star Wars Outlaws. Large-scale journalist publications and GmanLives himself had early access to the game, playing it more than a month before its release to consumers.
A genuine person who creates videos for fun would consider their audience’s trust as well as their own credibility. Those who speak the truth about poor products rarely get early access, as developers of bad games often push back review NDAs until the day of release or just before.
GmanLives believes that Star Wars Outlaws is a good game, despite widespread consumer criticism over its lackluster open-world gameplay, poor particle effects, NPC behavior, and an unattractive protagonist who can shrug off blaster shots like they were Super Soakers.
Given his early access to the game, it appears he is either repaying Ubisoft’s handouts with positive coverage or his “genuine” opinions are as garbage as his takes. GmanLives was previously mocked for suggesting that players of Grand Theft Auto, a crime simulator, deserve to be put on a watch list if they mercilessly kill NPC pedestrians.
Aside from all that, Ubisoft has given gamers yet another reason to avoid their upcoming Star Wars experience, with absurd PC requirements that essentially mandate the use of upscaling technologies like Intel XeSS, AMD’s FSR, and NVIDIA DLSS for a playable experience.
We’ve seen harsh PC requirements for games recently, such as Capcom’s Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Remedy’s Alan Wake 2. Despite being a interactive movie with race-swapped characters, Alan Wake 2 did push technical boundaries by leveraging DirectX 12’s Mesh Shaders and offering detailed visuals.
However, its PC requirements were not reflective of how the game actually looked or played, which resulted in a commercial flop with Remedy failing to recoup the costs of their progressive walking simulator, despite it winning many awards at last year’s ESG ceremony.
Alan Wake 2, for instance, practically forces players to use upscaling technologies to maintain a playable experience at any resolution. Its minimum requirements for 1080p 30 fps include an RTX 2060 or Radeon RX 6600, with DLSS and FSR2 set to their “quality” presets, effectively rendering the game at a native resolution of 720p.
On the official Ubisoft website for Star Wars Outlaws, they revealed that the minimum specifications to achieve 30 FPS at 1080p require an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 or an AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT.
While this is less demanding than the requirements for Alan Wake 2 at release, it targets the lowest graphical preset for Star Wars Outlaws with upscalers set to “quality.” Therefore, you’ll need a fairly modern yet entry-level graphics card from within the past five years to play this visually bland game at 720p 30fps on its lowest graphical settings.
For gamers aiming to use the high preset, Ubisoft recommends a more modern Ryzen 5000 series CPU or Intel Core i5-10400 with at least 6 cores and 12 threads, along with an RTX 3060 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT.
These are solid performance options in the $300 price bracket even by today’s standards, eclipsing even more modern GPUs below and even above their price point.
The fact that Ubisoft recommends such powerful GPUs for 1080p 60fps with the high graphical preset is a travesty. Even more concerning is their admission that this includes graphical upscalers set to “quality,” indicating a true native resolution of 720p.
To highlight how unoptimized Star Wars Outlaws appears on the PC platform, Ubisoft recommends an RTX 3080, RTX 4070, or Radeon RX 6800 XT for “1440p” high settings at 60 FPS, with upscalers set to “quality,” which actually results in a native resolution of just 1706×960 which you may have guessed is lower than 1080p. This is exactly the graphics card I have.
Despite roughly being on par with a stock Radeon RX 7800 XT in terms of performance, it’s disheartening to see that Ubisoft’s progressive Quebec developers have created such a poorly optimized PC port that even relatively high-end GPUs costing around $500 USD seemingly struggle to deliver a solid 1080p experience with high settings.
For the ultimate experience, you’ll need to invest in a Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU with V-Cache, along with either a GeForce RTX 4080 or an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX to play the game at “4K resolution” at 60 frames per second. However, this recommendation also includes DLSS or FSR upscaling set to “quality,” which results in a native resolution of 2560×1440.
These requirements are an embarrassment, especially given that the fundamentals and graphical detailing of Star Wars Outlaws have barely evolved from previous Ubisoft titles built on the Snowdrop engine, such as Assassin’s Creed Mirage and Valhalla, and the recently released Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, which played similarly to Far Cry but with ugly blue people.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, released last year, appears more detailed than Star Wars Outlaws from my perspective. It’s even more embarrassing to see that its system recommendations suggest an RX 5700 (non-XT) and NVIDIA GTX 1070 for 1080p low settings at 30 FPS and 1080p 60 FPS recommendations for AMD’s RX 6700 XT and NVIDIA’s RTX 3060 Ti with upscaling set to “quality.”
These recommendations are roughly on par with, if not lower than, those for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, which makes no sense whatsoever.
Arguably, the specifications for a visually superior product from a year ago are either inferior or the same as those for Star Wars Outlaws, highlighting the tragic reality of modern game design. This situation is exacerbated by diversity hires, political activism, and incompetent workers contributing to some of the worst-written and performing games in history.
The introduction of upscaling technologies, initially presented as a gimmick with NVIDIA’s RTX 2000 series, has had a detrimental impact on the industry. Paid propagandists like Digital Foundry, in sponsored videos, often claim that upscaling from a lower native resolution somehow looks “better” than a true native experience.
In reality, any perceived improvement from technologies like DLSS or FSR often comes from the compromised integration of temporal anti-aliasing, which is used as a performance-saving alternative to MSAA. Modern games, built on deferred rendering with temporal-based anti-aliasing, frequently suffer from washed-out and blurry textures.
NVIDIA’s DLSS, for instance, requires T(x)AA be implemented in the games beforehand, which effectively smears a vaseline-like effect across your screen. Once replaced with sharpened upsampling implementations, the result can appear “better than native,” but this is more about compensating for the inherent shortcomings of these technologies.
But ultimately as competitors in AMD and Intel released their own open source renditions, upscaling technologies have become ingrained in modern game design which are now used as a crutch by game developers to excuse poor optimization given that upscaling games from lower resolutions increase performance, who knew?
Ultimately, this technology has evolved into frame interpolation. Not only are we upscaling games from lower native resolutions with added sharpening filters to mask visual artifacts and shimmering during motion, but now NVIDIA and AMD are pushing the narrative that you can generate more frames for added performance.
The trend of artificial resolution and now artificial frames has drained much of my remaining enthusiasm for the DIY PC hardware industry. NVIDIA’s latest RTX 4000 series is arguably the worst they’ve ever produced in terms of profiteering, segmentation, and the disappointing number of CUDA cores compared to the top-tier models.
You’re essentially paying more for less as NVIDIA shifts its focus from gamers and consumers to becoming an industrial corporation. Meanwhile, AMD’s Radeon RX 7000 series offers competitive products but has followed NVIDIA’s lead in pricing, maintaining the illusion of value.
The reality is that an RX 6700 XT should not be the recommended hardware for a gaming experience that essentially equates to 720p at 60fps, not for a game of such magnitude as Star Wars Outlaws.
The overreliance on upscaling technologies like FSR and DLSS just to achieve a playable experience, even at the lowest settings, is indicative of DEI issues in the workspace. Given that Ubisoft has made minimal changes since the release of Avatar, its performance is likely to reflect what we can expect from Star Wars Outlaws.
According to TechPowerUP’s findings, at 1080p with no upscaling, a Radeon RX 6700 XT, a popular mid-range card around $300 struggles to average 45 frames per second at the highest settings. Lower-end models will drop into the thirties.
For even older or less powerful cards like the Radeon RX 5600 XT and NVIDIA GTX 1660, framerates could easily fall below 30 FPS on average, making upscaling technologies essential.
This situation highlights the broader trend in modern game design, where developers focus on pushing progressive content and inclusivity while charging $70 for games. In the case of Star Wars Outlaws, it requires Ubisoft Connect and won’t be available on Steam.
Additionally, Ubisoft’s games include restrictive DRM like DENUVO Anti-Tamper and VMProtect, which are known to degrade performance and impact frame rate consistency.
Moreover, Star Wars Outlaws will feature a season pass, similar to recent Assassin’s Creed titles, despite being a single-player game.
Ubisoft is trying to attract Star Wars fans with a lackluster and unattractive open-world game that demands a modern, mid-range PC to run. On top of this, intrusive DRM affects performance, and players are hit with an additional season pass fee after already spending $70 on the game.
The need for even expensive graphics cards to rely on upscaling technologies to run the game decently highlights the detrimental impact of the feminist movement and affirmative action hires on Ubisoft and many other game development studios.
Companies like Ubisoft are increasingly staffed by unskilled diversity hires who prioritize pushing culture war agendas and antagonizing entire countries to align with BlackRock and their ESG mandates, all in an effort to promote tokenized minority representation in their games.
