Ubisoft's Next Big Game Isn't About an Elite Order assassins or the intrigues of Persian Princes.
Instead, “Star Wars Outlaws,” which premieres Aug. 30, takes a more down-to-earth approach to the galaxy far, far away.
“We've seen in the movies the story of the Rebellion versus the Empire, we've seen the Jedi versus the Sith,” explains the narrative director. Navid Khavari“We were really looking forward to telling something new.”
“Star Wars Outlaws” heroine Kay Vess begins the game armed with nothing but a blaster and a dream to succeed. She must rely on her wits, lockpicking prowess, and a little luck to navigate a criminal underworld set somewhere between “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi.”
“She’s someone who didn’t grow up as a Chosen One,” Khavari says. “She sees the galaxy as rigged, and I think what people are looking for is that closeness.”
This kind of Force-less game about a plucky upstart has few predecessors, as franchise titles generally focused on noble Jedi Or rebel fighters as. Indeed, his mixture of “Unexplored“- stylish acrobatics, pistol shooting and stealth echo”Star Wars 1313”, a highly anticipated project which Disney Abandoned when it bought Lucasfilm.
But more than a decade after that acquisition, and after a recent boom in movies and spinoffs, audiences may be growing tired of “Star Wars.” Disney just canceled the streaming series “The Acolyte” after strong audience decreased by the end of his first seasonThe wild detective story of “Outlaws” might instead offer exhausted fans a new outlet.
“When you play the game, you feel like you’re entering this galaxy for the first time, even though it’s been around for 30 or 40 years,” Khavari says. “We’ve lifted the barriers a little bit to experiment.”
3 questions for Navid Khavari
One thing people will remember about Han Solo in the original 1977 Star Wars film is that he's not afraid to shoot first and ask questions later. Is this the world the main character of your game lives in?
“I’m sure Kay would shoot first! I’m convinced of that. But that’s exactly it. And what’s really fun, I think, for players who don’t know Star Wars, is that they’re on this journey with her from the beginning. She’s new to the underworld. She’s new to this kind of underworld life with all these syndicates and organizations that she has to play off against each other. It’s a great gateway into that kind of story.”
You've been working in games for a long time and I wonder if it's a challenge for a writer because the story has to react to the player's choices, right?
“It’s one of the hardest things to do in storytelling. There’s always a learning curve if you’ve never written for games and maybe you’ve worked in TV or film, because the player is in control and the characters have to be able to react to what you’re doing. But what’s interesting is that on this project, I really tried to introduce the concept of writers’ rooms, where we would work hand-in-hand with people from the gameplay teams, the art teams, the character artists. And we would talk about the content and bring it into the room, frame our story around it, bounce ideas off it. That allowed us to keep this activity going.”
“I think the big difference with other media is that I've been working on this for over three years, right? So there's a longer cycle in which you're producing some of this content, but it's also very rewarding to be able to deliver something that I always wanted to play as a kid, which is being able to enter the Star Wars universe as if the reward outweighs all of that.”
Have you ever sat down at the design table with your team and said, “A lot of people are familiar with the Star Wars games and stories. They might be a little tired of it. How do we make it less predictable?”
“That was a concern of mine from the beginning, because I’m a Star Wars fan. I gave myself a week to freak out and think, ‘How are we going to approach this?’ And then, honestly, after that, I put that aside and thought, to do this justice, we can’t really be beholden or too reverent to what’s come before. And so, as we were building the team and starting these sort of story rooms and development rooms, we were always conscious of the fact that Kay had lived here. And the gift that that gave us was that she wasn’t part of this Jedi fight. She wasn’t part of this rebellion. And so the whole underworld itself was such a new space.” And, you know, when we were maybe caught in the trap of being respectful of a Jabba or a Lando or something like that, or trying to steer the story in a certain way, we always came back to who Kay was.
“It opened the floodgates for us every time we found ourselves in these difficult situations. And no matter who you are, every writer, every creative space finds itself in a difficult situation. You just have to step back and look at the bigger picture, the themes that you’re trying to address.”
James Perkins Mastromarino and I produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Mark Navin. Perkins-Mastromarino adapted it for the web.
