About 10 minutes into the latest preview build of Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft’s forthcoming open-world adventure, lead character Kay Vess enters Mirogana: a densely populated, worn-down city on the desolate moon of Toshara. Around us is a mix of sandstone hovels and metallic sci-fi buildings, crammed with flickering computer panels, neon signs and holographic adverts. Exotic aliens lurk in quiet corners, R2 droids glide past twittering to themselves. Nearby is a cantina, its shady clientele visible through the smoky doorway, and just to the side is a dimly lit gambling parlour.
As you explore, robotic voices read out imperial propaganda over public address 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 aesthetics and atmosphere of the original trilogy. Like A New Hope itself, it’s a promising beginning.
“We made sure to do our homework,” says narrative director, Navid Khavari. “We didn’t just look at the original films, we looked at George Lucas’s own inspirations: Akira Kurosawa, world war two movies like The Dambusters and spaghetti westerns. You see the care that was taken in that original trilogy to make it tonally consistent. We need to make this feel like it has high stakes, lighthearted humour, emotional tension, growth between characters, the hero’s journey.”
Due out on 30 August, Outlaws has been in development at Massive Entertainment for almost 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 exec. Over cocktails, the two got talking about a potential collaboration. “The first pitch was in February 2020, after we’d shipped Division 2,” says creative director Julian Gerighty. “We had a small crew of people – concept artists, game designers – and we went to San Francisco with a really short pitch deck, based around three concepts: Star Wars, open world and a scoundrel story.”
Set in the year between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Outlaws follows Kay, an ambitious street thief, as she attempts to pay off a huge bounty on her head by assembling a crew and taking on the heist of a lifetime. “To me, [the appeal of Star Wars] wasn’t the Jedi farm boy, it wasn’t the cantankerous old space wizard,” says Gerighty. “It was the cool guy, surfing the galaxy with his best friend and the most iconic ship. I really doubled down on those archetypal characters and what their possibilities were in terms of gameplay.”
In Outlaws, the player is free to explore and travel between at least five major worlds, ranging from Tatooine to stormy Akiva and showy Cantonica, home to the casino city Canto Bight, featured in The Last Jedi. Wherever Kay ends up, she’ll encounter criminal syndicates from throughout Star Wars’ canon. There are the brutish Pykes, the Hutts, the shadowy Crimson Dawn, the Samurai-inspired Ashiga. Carrying out tasks for a syndicate earns you credits and reputation points, opening up more lucrative jobs as well as new areas of the map. Getting in with one gang will mean alienating another, but there will be opportunities to play the crime bosses off against each other, or double cross them.
So given this emphasis on space scoundrels, weren’t the team tempted to just make a Han Solo game? Gerighty shakes his head. “We always wanted a character that was not Han Solo,” he says. “Han is already the coolest guy in the galaxy. Kay is a street thief who ends up falling into one bad deal and gets catapulted here and there like a pinball, and all of a sudden, she’s negotiating with Jabba the Hutt … we did a lot of casting and Humberly González’s personality was the last piece of the puzzle. Her voice, her performance, her approach to the character on the page brought so much.”
It was this concentration on gangland intrigue that inspired the game’s positioning within the Star Wars timeline – an idea that came from LucasFilm. “We were just looking for the right moment that would define the gameplay and allow you 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 rife with opportunity for an underworld narrative … the eyes of the empire are focused very much on the rebel alliance, so organised crime has been able to thrive. Jabba the Hutt is at the height of his power.”
At a press event in LA earlier this month, I played a major story quest set on Toshara, in which Kay must steal some top secret information from a computer within the sprawling home of Pyke crimelord, Gorak. It’s a large multi-level environment, crawling with guards: you can run straight in, blaster firing, or stick to the network of air ducts, backrooms and sneaky passages, hacking doors as you go. I also visited the icy 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 the frozen cobbled streets, snow drifting in the air, and little groups of shady thugs gathered around the warm orange glow of noodle stalls.
This is a game by Massive Entertainment, but it feels unmistakably Ubisoft. The stealth, the combat, the balance between story and side quests: all contain parts salvaged from Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Watch Dogs. You study enemy patrols, take targets out one by one using a range of special abilities, then escape. Further elements are borrowed from other action adventures, including Kay’s ability to slow time and target several enemies before unleashing a multi-shot salvo with her blaster – a clear nod to Max Payne and Red Dead Redemption.
It’s fun working out exactly how to use all the available toys in these large, densely designed locations. But the big questions is – what’s new? What’s different? Apart from the Star Wars licence, there are three factors that set Outlaws apart from other Ubisoft adventures. First there’s Nix, Kay’s constant companion, a cute little critter who follows you everywhere, accessing parts of the environment that you can’t. It can also be commanded to attack or distract guards, or fetch items and dropped ammo, which is particularly useful 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 it feels so natural – it acts like a dog would act.”
Outlaws also scraps typically Ubisoft skill trees and points for a more naturalistic alternative. During expert missions, you carry out quests for powerful specialists who then give you new abilities or give your weapons or speeder bike an upgrade.
Then of course, there’s space travel. You can launch off-world at any point – a transition that takes place in one seamless sequence – and then fly freely within the current system, battling tie-fighters or scavenging from space wrecks, before hyperspace-jumping to new planets. Flying is simple, with dogfights relying heavily on a lock-on function which lets you automatically follow enemies – it’s much more arcade-like than the masterful X-Wing or Tie-Fighter games of old. But still, getting an enemy ship in your sights and blasting it to pieces, accompanied by those legendary Ben Burtt-style sound effects, remains a singular thrill.
I’ve only seen a couple of hours of the game so far – there is still much to be discovered. The hope is that the missions and side-quests really delve into Star Wars lore and move further away from the Assassin’s Creed/Far Cry archetypes. I’m wondering how inhabited and detailed will planets be away from the major hubs? I want to run into Jawa transports, secret imperial bases and horrible monsters hellbent on digesting me over a thousand years. This element of chance discovery in the Star Wars universe is something the team has clearly thought about.
“We knew we had to allow player agency and that really factors into how Star Wars works,” says Khavari. “We tried to create a tonal blueprint that was both from Empire and Return of the Jedi, and fuse that into every story character and vendor that you run into, so that it still feels like it’s part of the same journey. It took me a little while to realise this, but Star Wars is uniquely suited to an open world game. That’s why fans have been clamouring for that for so long, myself included.”