While plenty of people will be excited to see that Star Wars Outlaws finally has a release date, there is a little bit of eyebrow-raising news accompanying it. Even though it is a single-player game, you must have an internet connection to install the physical version.
Star Wars Outlaws debuted a new story trailer that accompanied its August 30 release date announcement. However, if you go to any pre-order site that includes a physical version of the game, you can see a new message on the cover that says, “Internet required to install the game.” This message is on both the PS5 and Xbox Series X versions of the game.
Obviously, it’s not surprising that you need the internet to install a game when you buy it digitally, but what is interesting about this situation is Star Wars Outlaws is a single-player game with no other internet functionality, at least that we know of.
In today’s gaming landscape, there is an ever-increasing reliance on internet usage. For some games, that makes sense. If a game is solely focused on multiplayer, that is understandable. This news tells us two things:
- Outlaws is going to have a very large installation size. It’s an open world game, so that’s not entirely surprising.
- Ubisoft is looking to save costs as much as possible by not including a second disk for installation.
As of this writing, we do not know the expected file size at launch for Star Wars Outlaws. Knowing how bloated Ubisoft makes many of their games like Assassin’s Creed, though, we would expect something pushing 150 GBs at launch. Of course, after updates and post-launch content, that number will only go up. Of course, that is speculation.
It’s disappointing to see another example of people not being able to just buy the game, put it in their console, and install the game. If you don’t have internet, you will be forced to skip this game.