TOTen minutes into the latest preview of Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft’s upcoming open-world adventure, protagonist Kay Vess enters Mirogana: a densely populated, weathered town on the desolate moon of Toshara. All around us is a mix of sandstone shacks and metallic sci-fi buildings, cluttered with flickering computer panels, neon signs, and holographic advertisements. Exotic aliens lurk in quiet corners, R2 droids flit past and chirp among themselves. Nearby is a cantina, its sombre clientele visible through the smoke-filled doorway, and right next door is a dimly lit gambling hall.
As you explore, robotic voices read Imperial propaganda over PA systems and stormtroopers patrol the streets, checking IDs. At least as far as this lifelong Star Wars fan is concerned, these moments perfectly capture the aesthetic and atmosphere of the original trilogy. Like A New Hope, it’s a promising start.
“We made sure we did our homework,” says narrative director Navid Khavari. “We didn’t just look at the original films, but we also looked at George Lucas’ inspirations: Akira Kurosawa, World War II films like The Dambusters and spaghetti westerns. You can see the care that went into that original trilogy to make it have a consistent tone. We need it to feel like there’s a lot at stake, light-hearted humor, emotional tension, growth between the characters, the hero’s journey.”
Outlaws, which launches August 30, has been in development at Massive Entertainment for nearly five years. In 2018, the studio held an event to announce The Division 2, and at some point in the evening, then-CEO David Polfeldt stepped outside for a quiet chat with a high-ranking Disney executive. Over cocktails, the two began talking about a potential collaboration. “The first presentation was in February 2020, after we had released The Division 2,” says creative director Julian Gerighty. “We had a small team of people—concept artists, game designers—and we went to San Francisco with a very short presentation, based around three concepts: Star Wars, open world, and a scoundrel story.”
Set in the year between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Outlaws follows Kay, an ambitious street thief, as she attempts to pay off a massive bounty on her head by assembling a crew and taking on the heist of a lifetime. “For me,[the appeal of Star Wars]wasn’t the Jedi farm boy, it wasn’t the grumpy old space wizard,” Gerighty says. “It was the cool guy, sailing through the galaxy with his best friend and the most iconic ship. I really went for those archetypal characters and their possibilities in terms of gameplay.”
In Outlaws, the player is free to explore and travel between at least five main worlds, ranging from Tatooine to stormy Akiva to striking Cantonica, home to the casino city of Canto Bight featured in The Last Jedi. Wherever Kay ends up, she’ll encounter criminal syndicates from across the Star Wars canon. There’s the brutal Pykes, the Hutts, the shadowy Crimson Dawn, and the samurai-inspired Ashiga. Carrying out tasks for a syndicate earns you credits and reputation points, opening up the possibility of more lucrative jobs as well as new areas of the map. Joining one gang will mean alienating another, but there will be opportunities to pit crime bosses against each other or betray them.
So, given this emphasis on space scoundrels, wasn’t the team tempted to make a Han Solo game? Gerighty shakes his head. “We always wanted a character who wasn’t Han Solo,” he says. “Han is already the coolest guy in the galaxy. Kay is a street thief who ends up falling into a bad deal and gets catapulted around like a pinball, and all of a sudden, she’s negotiating with Jabba the Hutt… We did a lot of casting, and Humberly Gonzalez’s personality was the final piece of the puzzle. His voice, his performance, his approach to the character in the role brought so much to the table.”
It was this focus on gang intrigue that inspired the game’s placement within the Star Wars timeline, an idea that came from LucasFilm. “We were looking for the right moment that defined the gameplay and allowed us to go to cool, interesting places to meet interesting characters,” says Steve Blank, director of franchise content and strategy at Lucasfilm. “So we found a place that was ripe with opportunity for an underworld narrative… the eyes of the empire are very focused on the Rebel Alliance, so organized crime has been able to thrive. Jabba the Hutt is at the height of his power.”
At a press event in Los Angeles earlier this month, I played a major story mission set in Toshara, in which Kay must steal secret information from a computer inside the sprawling home of Pyke crime lord Gorak. It’s a large, multi-level environment, littered with guards: you can either run in, blasters firing, or stick to the network of air ducts, backrooms, and sneaky passages, hacking doors as you go. I also visited the frigid planet of Kimiji, controlled by the Ashiga clan, a hive-like alien race of blind swordsmen. The mission is to meet up with a safecracker, but I’m being pursued by an assassin. It’s an atmospheric place to explore, with temple-like towers rising above frozen cobblestone streets, snow drifting in the air, and small groups of suspicious thugs gathered around the warm orange glow of noodle stands.
This is a Massive Entertainment game, but it has an unmistakably Ubisoft feel to it. The stealth, the combat, the balance between story and side missions – it all contains elements lifted from Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Watch Dogs. You study enemy patrols, pick off targets one by one using a variety of special abilities, then make your escape. Other elements are borrowed from other action-adventures, including Kay’s ability to slow down time and target multiple enemies before unleashing a multi-shot salvo from her blaster – a clear nod to Max Payne and Red Dead Redemption.
It’s fun to figure out exactly how to use all the toys available in these large, densely designed locations. But the big question is: what’s new? What’s different? Aside from the Star Wars license, there are three factors that set Outlaws apart from other Ubisoft adventures. First there’s Nix, Kay’s constant companion, an adorable little creature who follows you around and accesses parts of the environment you can’t. He can also be ordered to attack or distract guards, or pick up items and ammo, which comes in especially handy during a firefight. “Nix was inspired by our own pets,” says Navid Khavari. “Without our cats, I don’t know how my wife and I would have gotten through COVID. And I think that’s why he seems so natural – he acts like a dog would.”
Outlaws also ditches Ubisoft’s typical skill trees and points to offer a more naturalistic alternative. During Expert Missions, you take on quests for powerful specialists who then grant you new abilities or upgrade your weapons or speeder bike.
Then, of course, there’s space travel. You can take off from the world at any time (a transition that occurs in a seamless sequence) and then fly freely within the current system, fighting TIE fighters or searching for space wrecks, before jumping into hyperspace to new planets. Flying is straightforward, and dogfights rely heavily on a lock-on feature that lets you automatically track enemies – it’s much more arcade-like than the masterful X-Wing or Tie-Fighter of yesteryear. But even so, getting an enemy ship in your sights and blowing it up, accompanied by those legendary Ben Burtt-esque sound effects, remains a singular thrill.
I’ve only seen a couple of hours of the game so far – there’s still plenty left to discover. The hope is that the missions and side quests will really delve deeper into the Star Wars story and move further away from Assassin’s Creed/Far Cry archetypes. I wonder how inhabited and detailed the planets away from the main hubs will be. I want to encounter Jawa transports, secret Imperial bases, and hideous monsters hell-bent on digesting me for a thousand years. This element of serendipitous discovery in the Star Wars universe is something the team has clearly thought about.
“We knew we had to allow for player autonomy, and that really influences how Star Wars works,” Khavari says. “We tried to create a tonal model that was both Empire and Return of the Jedi, and fuse that with every story character and vendor you encounter so that it still feels like it’s part of the same journey. It took me a while to figure this out, but Star Wars is uniquely suited to an open-world game. That’s why fans have been clamoring for it for so long, myself included.”