Star Wars Outlaws puts you in the shoes of Kay Vess, a scoundrel on the run looking for a big score to change her life. It’s an all-new Star Wars adventure with shades of other Ubisoft games like Assassin’s Creed.
It also has a lot of settings options. Personally, I love when games let me fine-tune various details in the settings menu, and Outlaws doesn’t disappoint. It does, however, have some questionable default settings. Here’s what I recommend changing as soon as you jump into the game.
Star Wars Outlaws accessibility options
When you first launch the game Outlaws will bring you to its accessibility settings. There are five submenus and each one allows you to adjust a variety of options. You can also find most accessibility options in the full settings menu, and in some cases they can be further customized there.
These settings are more tuned to personal needs and preferences, so choose whatever feels right as you start. You can always change them later. The five accessibility submenus are:
- Gameplay, which allows you to set overall difficulty to Explorer, Adventurer, Outlaw or Scoundrel. It also contains options to simplify actions and timing in the game and to reduce camera effects.
- Cognitive, which allows you to set minigame difficulty, plus legibility and visibility options.
- Colors, where you can set colorblind presets (protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia).
- Vision, with options to make things easier to see and have menus read aloud.
- Hearing, which lets you set up subtitles and visual cues for lockpicking.
The menu shows you what elements change in each gameplay experience option.
Get rid of those cinematic black bars
Outlaws wants to give players a cinematic experience, going so far as to put the game in a 21:9 aspect ratio by default. To me, it feels like a waste of screen, and thankfully there’s a way to turn it off during gameplay. You can make the game full screen by going to: Settings > Video > Cinematic display mode > Fill screen.
Removing letterbox bars crops some of the area at the far right and left edges, but it’s worth it to fill the screen.
Look sensitivity
For the love of the Force, who sets these defaults? If you’re using a mouse, set this to 1 for high precision, or 2 for faster tracking. The default is 5, which will have you whipping around almost uncontrollably. You can find this under Settings > Controls > Mouse.
If you’re playing on a controller, or if you want to further customize your mouse settings, you can separately set aim sensitivity, hip-fire sensitivity and general look sensitivity under Settings > Controls > General > Advanced Controls. On PC, I recommend setting an overall mouse sensitivity that’s roughly what you’re looking for and fine-tuning everything else in advanced controls. I set my overall mouse sensitivity to 1, lowered aim sensitivity to 3 and left hip-fire and general look at 5.
Watch this: I Played the New Star Wars Outlaws Game at Gamescom
View angle (field of view)
This option determines how much of the environment you see by default. Higher is generally better, because you’ll be able to see enemies and objects in the environment that wouldn’t show up with a lower field of view. The caveat here is that a higher FOV is more taxing on your computer, so PC players on older devices might want to stay on the lower end. You can change this option by going to Settings > Gameplay > Visual > View angle.
I also kept the View angle while aiming option slightly lower to allow me to focus in on targets better, because when I’m scoped in I’m less worried about my surroundings and more worried about landing my shots.
Maximizing field of view lets you see more of the environment, like the character at the far right of the screen.
Minigames
Outlaws has a handful of minigames and quick-time events that you’ll perform as part of the game. For example, picking locks requires you to match the rhythm of intermittent beeps, and slicing into a computer terminal is basically playing Star Wars Wordle. If you have trouble with any of these minigames, you can make them easier to complete — including, in many cases, make them automatically complete. You can find these options by going to Settings > Gameplay > Minigames.
