Star Wars Outlaws' Wild Bug Turned Nix Into a Ground-Dwelling Phantom

Way back in the halcyon days of 2024, when the galaxy far, far away finally opened its doors to scoundrels and smugglers in the first open-world Star Wars game, one bold outlaw discovered that even the Force couldn't protect Kay Vess from the perils of mountain climbing. A Redditor going by the handle WRSA eagerly fired up Ubisoft’s brand-new epic, ready to race across the dusty plains of Toshara on a sleek speeder bike. What followed was a glitch so gloriously absurd that it turned the young scoundrel’s loyal companion, Nix, into a tunneling phantom and left the player sliding downhill faster than a podracer on an Tatooine salt flat.

The scene was straight out of a slapstick holodrama. WRSA’s clip showed Kay Vess gunning her repulsorlift engine up a jagged cliffside, ambition written all over her determined face. As she crested the peak—just when any player would expect a triumphant vista to unfold—the code threw a thermal detonator into the works. Instead of gliding smoothly over the top, Kay began an uncontrolled descent. Her speeder bike bucked, her limbs flailed, and the camera twitched as if the game itself was having a conniption. But the real tragedy, the moment that elevated this bug from annoying to hilarious, was what happened to Nix. The adorable axolotl-like critter—a constant sidekick who normally clings to Kay’s shoulder with soulful eyes—suddenly clipped into the mountain’s mesh as if he were being swallowed by the very planet. For a few heart-stopping seconds, he was gone. Then, with all the dramatic timing of a holochess monster popping out of the board, Nix re-materialized at the bottom of the slope, perfectly fine, probably wondering why his human was flailing like a gundark with a bellyache.

This incident became an instant legend among early adopters. It perfectly encapsulated the chaotic charm of Star Wars Outlaws, a title set in the criminal underworld between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Players were meant to dive headfirst into a gritty, Hutt-controlled landscape where Kay Vess, a scrappy rising thief, tangles with the likes of the ruthless bounty hunter Vail and the enigmatic Crimson Dawn leader Lady Qi’ra. Kay’s trust in her companion Nix was supposed to be the emotional bedrock of the journey—he can distract stormtroopers, fetch loot, and press unreachable switches. But no one anticipated that his skill set would include impromptu subterranean navigation.

The bug was, of course, part of a bumpier-than-usual release week. While the game wowed audiences with its sprawling hubs—the neon-drenched casinos of Cantonica, the windswept plains of Toshara, the jungle-drenched Akiva—some early access players on PlayStation 5 found themselves staring down a far direr screen. Ubisoft pushed out an emergency patch that carried a grim directive: delete your old save file and start over. A game-breaking bug in the earlier build meant that anyone who had already sunk hours into exploring Kyber-infused mysteries would have to trigger a fresh beginning. The Nix-mountain-slide may well have been a harmless manifestation of that deeper, save-crunching gremlin, a mere crack in the hyperdrive core that threatened to blow the whole ship.

PC and Xbox outlaws, meanwhile, were spared the reset catastrophe. They journeyed unburdened toward the official launch on August 30, 2024, looting credits on Kijimi’s ice-bound streets and chasing leads through the dusty domes of Tatooine’s Anchorhead. But the memory of the vanishing Nix spread through the community faster than a Bothan rumor. Memes erupted. Players dubbed him “the burrowing merqaal” and joked that he must have secretly learned Force phase-walking from a Jedi holocron. Some even started to seek out the same ridge, eager to recreate the glitch before it was inevitably patched out.

By 2026, of course, the landscape looks very different. Ubisoft has since rolled out multiple title updates, a speeder customization pack, and the sprawling Jabba’s Gambit expansion, which added a whole new moon to explore. The mountain-sliding glitch was swatted from existence in one of the earliest hotfixes, leaving behind only grainy video clips and fond snickers. Nix is now firmly anchored to Kay’s shoulder, his pathfinding algorithms as robust as a Mon Calamari cruiser. Yet the legend endures. When veteran outlaws gather in the cantinas of Reddit or the message boards of the Holonet, they still trade tales of the day their trusty companion became one with the mountain. It’s a testament to the endearing unpredictability of open-world games: sometimes the most unforgettable moments aren’t scripted heroics, but the bizarre, physics-defying accidents that make you choke on your blue milk.

Today, anyone picking up the game on modern hardware will find it polished to a gleaming sheen. Kay’s speeder maneuvers like a dream, Nix squeaks adorably on command, and the syndicate missions unfold without any unexpected geological entombments. But spare a thought for the trailblazers of 2024, who braved the buggy frontier and gave the community its very own myth—a small, scaly phantom that still inspires the question: what else is lurking just beneath the surface of that open galaxy?