That’s right! We’re going to review a video game using a four box business model and I promise you two things:

1. You will understand the purpose alignment model better (which every IT manager should)
2. It will be the best video game review you’ve ever read which features the purpose alignment model

What’s the model?

The Purpose Alignment Model (or “Purpose Based Alignment Model” which is an unwieldy way to say it so I leave out the “based) is a four box model that helps you know which systems you should create, partner on something with, use something off the shelf, or just ignore. There are online articles which explain the model pretty well, though I first encountered it in Stand Back and Deliver, on the advice of my boss. The model looks like this (taken from the article linked above):

The example my boss always uses is eMail. No one is going to do business with you because of how well you do email, but it’s an important tool that the business relies on. That means it’s high on the “mission critical” scale and low on the “market differentiation” scale, which puts it in the “parity” section. And in the parity section you just find out what other people are doing and, you know, copy them.

Most “back office” type stuff falls into parity, so if someone is trying to convince you that they need to make their own custom accounting software well, unless they’re an accounting firm, it’s probably a waste of money.

But imagine that your company helps place reservations for restaurants. There are off-the-shelf services that do that, but if you just use something off-the-shelf there’s nothing differentiating — why would someone go to you when they could go literally anywhere else?

That’s a mission critical and differentiating piece of software, so you might build it yourself. If you’re smart you’ll talk about how you use AI to call people, use AI to recommend which restaurant they should go to, and then use AI to call restaurants and reserve tables and then you can just sit back and watch that sweet, sweet VC money rain down on you.

Anyway, that’s the purpose alignment model, so how does it relate to a Star Wars video game??

Open World Games are a whole thing

A lot of games are “open world games” now — you can travel freely, tackle some missions in any order, spend time on side quests, upgrading your tools, or just get addicted to Sabacc. I think these are appealing to game makers for three main reasons:

• Particularly immersive
• You can stretch out play time by having people travel from place to place
• Appeals to a wide audience by having multiple ways to play

Open world games can also have a dizzying variety of gameplay mechanics and attributes in them. These typically include:

• Story stuff
  • Setting
  • Plot
  • Plot interactivity
  • Characters
  • Etc.
• Graphics
• A traversal method (how you get from place to place)
• Combat (how you fight others)
• Non-Combat interactions (how you interact with others that doesn’t involve fighting)
• Upgrade or progression systems
• Home base upgrades (real estate?)
• Puzzle mechanics which could include
  • Lock mini games
  • Hacking mini games
  • Etc.
• Stealth

You get the idea.

Think of an open world game you really like. What is the main thing you like about it?

One series that springs to mind is the recent spiderman games. And what’s crazy is that the thing that stands out is … if you’ve played them I’m letting you guess … the traversal mechanic!

That’s right, just getting from place to place is fun because they really nailed what you imagine swinging on webs to be like. So even if the surrounding mechanics are a little painful (nobody likes going and collecting 50 backpacks stuck to the sides of building) the mere act of getting around is enjoyable.

It makes up for a lot, like the aforementioned backpacks, or the fact that the combat and stealth mechanics are both just straight ripoffs of the Arkham Asylum games. If you plotted every mechanic in Spiderman on the Purpose Alignment model up there what you’d find is a TON of stuff in the lower right quadrant, and up there in the upper right, all by itself, is “Web slinging.” Maybe “An authentic feeling Spiderman story” goes up there too, but really, not much else.

And that’s fine! Basically every open world game is gong to have almost everything in the “parity” section and one or two things up in the “differentiating” section. It’s those one or two things that make or break a game.

Finally! Star Wars Outlaws

In Star Wars Outlaws you play as Kay Vess, basically, young female Han Solo. She has a tiny scaly buddy instead of a big harry one. She’s quick on the draw with a blaster. She’s almost always in over her head.

For the most part I like Kay, and I think her voice actress killed it. I think the “story stuff” is one of the main things this game has going for it — it’s in Star Wars, which is a wonderful setting, and they made the bold choice of (basically) not having anyone with a lightsaber in the game. Instead, Kay is a criminal and spends the whole time bouncing between criminal factions, trying desperately to stay one step ahead of the “death mark” that wound up on her due to some dumb mistakes in the beginning of the game.

Instead of reviewing the game like a normal critic, I’m going to do something weird (but in keeping with the theme of this blog post) and just list out the gameplay mechanics. For each gameplay mechanic I’m going to do one of three things:

1. Point out a game that did it better
2. Say “Parity” if Outlaws does it about as well as everyone else (though obviously if another game focused on that mechanic it’s an outlier, so this should be read as “average”)
3. Point out if Outlaws does it better than everyone else

I’m just going to copy my list above and go through that. Let’s hit it!

• Story stuff
  • Setting — This is a strong point for Outlaws, thanks to Star Wars
  • Plot — Parity
  • Plot interactivity — Basically any bioware or bethesday game does this much better
  • Characters — Parity
• Graphics — Parity
• A traversal method (how you get from place to place)
  • Climbing — Uncharted and Tomb Raider games do this way better
  • Driving — Parity
  • Ship Flying — Every game where you fly a spaceship is better than this, but I’ll call out “Starfield” to keep it brief — we’ll talk about this later
• Combat (how you fight others) — It is terrible, Uncharted (again) does it better, but any other third person game with a cover system does it better than this.
• Non-Combat interactions (how you interact with others that doesn’t involve fighting) — You can pickpocket from people with Nix, which is neat, and you can talk to people, though there’s very few dialog choices
• Upgrade or progression systems — This is an interesting take on the system, instead of building experience points you do specific stuff. I didn’t love it, though. We’ll be generous and say “Parity” but in my head it’s “Parity-“
• Home base upgrades (real estate?) — You can change your ship’s color. Starfield, with completely customizable ships, probably has the best version of this, but even the super old Skyrim did it better
• Puzzle mechanics which could include
  • Lock mini games — Parity
  • Hacking mini games — Parity
• Stealth — The stealth is terrible (and, so, so unfortunately, MANDATORY). Splinter Cell did it better 20 years ago. Cyberpunk did it much better more recently. More on that later, too

The only really unique mechanic is the “syndicate” system, where doing something for one syndicate (of four) improves your reputation and allows you to access different merchants, get some rewards, and take care of some missions easier.

It’s a cool idea that ultimately is kind of frustrating because almost every mission will make one syndicate happy and another upset. If your goal is to get on everyone’s good side (my goal in the beginning but I quickly gave up) you’re going to end up super frustrated. Instead, you’ll probably choose one or two to always make happy and just accept that everyone else will hate you.

That might’ve been cool for replay-ability, but it doesn’t make a huge difference. Some people shoot your more or less, you get or miss some outfits, but in the end there’s one small change depending on who you went with (remember the different colored lights of the end of Mass Effect 3? It’s along the same lines). And if we’re talking about mechanics having to do with making friends and influencing people, Shadows of Mordor also did that better.

I don’t know if you noticed a theme, but that’s basically how I felt about Outlaws — everything was OK, but almost all of it reminded me of some other game that did it better. Except for two things that made me want to quit the game.

First: unless your game is specifically a stealth game, mandatory stealth is the WORST! Especially of the variety where “If you get spotted you automatically fail.” By the end of the game I absolutely hated the stealth sections and, unfortunately, the entire end is basically a string of stealth sections. They usually went “Sneak for ten minutes, get caught, do that ten minutes again, get five minutes further, get caught. Fifteen minutes later …” blah blah blah. In the end I would spend an hour trying to get through a fifteen minute section where much of it was spent just sitting there, watching people go back and forth until their patrols all line up.

As mentioned above, games like Cyberpunk do it better because it’s an optional mechanic — it’s rewarding if you do it because you typically find additional secrets or get more rewards, but if you fail you just have to blast your way through, instead of just wasting your time. It’s less frustrating, and feels a little more immersive since there’s not a big “YOU GOT CAUGHT” sign pulling you out of the game every five minutes.

Second: Ship flying. Whoever created the controls for this game was really trying to reinvent the wheel (why is pushing down on the right stick the default for interacting?) and the spaceship controls are unlike anything I’ve ever used. Even worse, if you fixed the ship controls in the settings, it changed the regular on foot settings. You couldn’t change one without changing the other. What? Why??? Because of this, flying always felt awful and I avoided space missions. Controls are always a “parity” thing — don’t try and reinvent how a controller works unless you have a really, really compelling reason. You lose more than you gain.

Do I recommend Star Wars Outlaws?

What’s the one thing in the list above that star wars outlaws has going for it?

The setting.

And I kind of stand by that. If you love Star Wars and would like to spend some time in that universe then this is honestly one of the better star wars games — especially if you’re tired of lightsabers. No lightsabers here!

But if you want a stealth game, there’s better. If you want a third person shooter, there’s better. If you want an interactive plot where your choices matter or a space ship sim, well, there’s MUCH better.

So how much do you want to spend time in the Star Wars universe? That’s really the only question you have to ask yourself if you want to know if you should play the game.