If you want to play the Jabba the Hutt mission in Ubisoft’s upcoming Star Wars: Outlaws, it’ll cost you dearly. In order to play the single-player game’s Day 1 exclusive Jabba mission, you’ll need the single-player game’s Season Pass. And the only way you can get that right now (via pre-order) is with the Gold or Ultimate editions of the game, or with Ubisoft+ Premium.
The base game costs $70, but the Gold Edition will set you back $110 and the Ultimate rings in at $130. The mission—Jabba’s Gambit—sounds like an introductory mission for the crime boss. “Just as Kay is putting together a crew for the Canto Bight heist, she receives a job from Jabba the Hutt himself,” the mission’s official description reads. “Turns out that ND-5 owes Jabba a debt from years ago, and he has come to collect…”
The Gold and Premium editions also come with two DLC expansions and various other perks like cosmetics for Kay Vess and her pet, Nix. That’s pretty standard for a premium edition. It’s the whole concept of a Season Pass for a single-player game that has me (and plenty of others) wagging our fingers at Ubisoft. It’s unclear if other Jabba content is included with the base game, or if you need the Season Pass, but at the very least the Jabba’s Gambit mission is locked unless you fork over at least $40 extra.
What on earth does a single-player game like this need a Season Pass for? We have too many Season Passes and Battle Passes already for games that are actually live-service. From Fortnite to Call Of Duty to countless other games, the Season Pass is ubiquitous these days, but it has no business in a single-player, AAA title that already costs $70. Locking an exclusive day-one mission with one of Star Wars’ most beloved villains behind it is absurd and outrageous. I often find the internet gets worked up about things too much and there’s too much faux outrage out there, but this is genuinely outrageous and Ubisoft deserves to come under scrutiny and face pushback for this.
There’s a lot of silly controversy around the game’s protagonist, Kay Vess (I just think her hair looked better in the first trailer) but the real controversy is a game publisher milking its customers for all they’re worth, and doing it with the Star Wars IP. Star Wars has become an incredibly divisive property at this point and this will only make matters worse. I’m a little surprised that Disney and Lucasfilm have let this kind of thing happen to begin with. Then again, outside of rare gems like Respawn’s Jedi games, we haven’t had much in the way of worthwhile Star Wars video game content in a long, long time.
This was an easy win for Ubisoft. The game was a huge hit when it was revealed. Gamers were hyped for a big, single-player Star Wars game about the seedier underbelly of a galaxy far, far away. Ubisoft has stumbled all over itself with a series of unforced errors all coming from the business side. Add to this the latest trailer—which looks shockingly bad—and you get a great big swing and a miss. It’s a real shame.
