Star Wars Outlaws Locks Jabba Mission Behind Season Pass on Launch
In the midst of the gaming industry coming under fire for increasingly bad monetization practices, Ubisoft dropped a bombshell on the Star Wars Outlaws nascent player base: if you want to play the mission that features Jabba the Hutt on launch, you’ll have to get the season pass. Which means you need to get either the Gold or Ultimate version of the game, or be a Ubisoft+ Premium subscription. Needless to say, this hasn’t really made people happy.
Star Wars Outlaws already came under fire for featuring a season pass in the first place. It’s a full-priced, single-player game; why does it need a battle pass for? Unfortunately, this isn’t that new of a practice, so people would have probably let it slide. But then, we learned that the mission where you get to meet and work for Jabba (because ND-5 owes the infamous mafioso) will only be available for those that purchase the season pass. Granted, the wording (“Play the exclusive Jabba’s Gambit mission at launch”) implies that everyone will get to play the quest at some point.
Be that as it may, the fact that you have to shell put either $110 or $130 (for the Gold and Ultimate editions respectively) to play a mission that has been touted for a while now does not sit well with people, as well it shouldn’t. And making things worse, the description of the season pass reads as follows: “Unlock two additional narrative expansions coming after launch, a Day 1 exclusive mission with Jabba…” That kinda reads like those that purchase the base edition will get less content for their $70. And however you slice it, the practice to put content behind a paywall, especially in a full-priced single-player game, is inexcusable.
It remains to be seen how Ubisoft is going to handle this situation. Or, indeed, whether there will be mission content permanently locked behind the battle pass. What we do for sure is that, if you want to play the Jabba mission on launch, you’ll have to shell out more money. At least you’ll get some cosmetics along with it, I suppose.
