Aabout 10 minutes after the start of the latest preview version of Star Wars In Ubisoft’s upcoming open-world adventure Outlaws, main character Kay Vess enters Mirogana: a densely populated, rundown city on the desolate moon of Toshara. Around us is a mix of sandstone slums and sci-fi metal buildings, filled with blinking computer panels, neon signs, and holographic advertisements. Exotic aliens lurk in quiet corners, R2 droids slither and chirp between them. Nearby is a cantina, its shady clientele visible through the smoky door, and next door is a dimly lit arcade.
As you explore, robotic voices read Imperial propaganda over PA systems and stormtroopers patrol the streets, checking IDs. At least to this longtime Star Wars fan, these moments perfectly capture the aesthetic and atmosphere of the original trilogy. Like A New Hope itself, it’s a promising start.
“We did our homework,” says narrative director Navid Khavari. “We didn’t just look at the original films, we looked at George Lucas’ inspirations: Akira Kurosawa, World War II movies like The Dam Busters and spaghetti westerns. You can see the care that went into that original trilogy to give it a cohesive tone. We have to make this movie feel like it has high stakes, light humor, emotional tension, character development, the hero’s journey.”
Outlaws, which is set to release on 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 one point in the evening, then-CEO David Polfeldt stepped out for a quiet chat with a senior Disney executive. Over cocktails, the two began talking about a possible collaboration. “The first pitch was in February 2020, after Division 2 came out,” 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 pitch deck, based on three concepts: Star Wars, an open world, and a villain story.”
Set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Outlaws follows Kay, an ambitious street thief who tries to pay off a huge bounty on her head by assembling a team and pulling off the heist of a lifetime. “For me,[the appeal of Star Wars]wasn’t the Jedi farm boy or the grumpy old space wizard,” Gerighty says. “It was the cool guy, traveling the galaxy with his best friend and the most iconic ship. I really doubled down on those archetypal characters and their gameplay possibilities.”
In Outlaws, the player is free to explore and travel between at least five major worlds, ranging from Tatooine to stormy Akiva to flamboyant Cantonica, home to the casino city of Canto Bight featured in The Last Jedi. Wherever Kay ends up, she’ll encounter crime syndicates from across the Star Wars canon. There’s the brutal Pykes, the Hutts, the shadowy Crimson Dawn, the Samurai-inspired Ashiga. Completing tasks for a syndicate earns you credits and reputation points, which open up more lucrative jobs and new areas of the map. Joining one gang means alienating another, but there will be opportunities to turn crime bosses against each other, or betray them.
So, given the 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’s already the coolest guy in the galaxy. Kay is a street thief who ends up getting into a bad deal and getting 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 González’s personality was the final piece. Her voice, her performance, her approach to the character on the page brought a lot to the table.”
It was this focus on gangster intrigue that inspired the game’s placement in the Star Wars timeline, an idea that came from LucasFilm. “We were just looking for the right moment to set the gameplay and have you go to cool, interesting places and meet interesting characters,” says Steve Blank, Lucasfilm’s director of franchise content and strategy. “So we found a place that was ripe with opportunities for a mob story… the eyes of the Empire are very much on the Rebel Alliance, which has allowed organized crime to flourish. Jabba the Hutt is at the height of his power.”
At a press conference in Los Angeles earlier this month, I played a major quest set on Toshara, in which Kay must steal top-secret information from a computer in the sprawling home of Pyke crime lord Gorak. It’s a vast, multi-level environment, crawling with guards: you can run straight inside, blasting away, or stick to the network of vents, back rooms, and sneaky passageways, hacking at doors as you go. I also visited the icy planet of Kimiji, controlled by the Ashiga clan, an alien race of blind, hive-like swordsmen. The mission involves meeting a safecracker, but I’m being chased by an assassin. It's an atmospheric place to explore, with temple-like towers rising above frozen cobblestone streets, snow drifting through the air and small groups of shady thugs gathered around the warm orange glow of noodle stands.
This is a game from Massive Entertainment, but it undeniably looks Ubisoft. The stealth, the combat, the balance between story and side quests: it all has elements borrowed from Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Watch Dogs. You study enemy patrols, pick off targets one by one using a series of special abilities, and then escape. Other elements are borrowed from other action adventures, including Kay's ability to slow down time and target multiple enemies before unleashing a volley of multiple shots with 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, three factors set Outlaws apart from other Ubisoft adventures. First, there’s Nix, Kay’s constant companion, a cute little creature who follows you around, accessing parts of the environment you can’t. He can also be commanded to attack or distract guards, or to retrieve items and ammo, which is especially useful in 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 survived COVID. And I think that’s why it feels so natural: he acts like a dog.”
Outlaws also ditches Ubisoft's typical skill trees and points for a more naturalistic alternative. During expert missions, you complete quests for powerful specialists who then grant you new abilities or upgrade your weapons or speeder bike.
And then, of course, there's the space travel. You can launch off-world at any time (a transition that happens in one seamless sequence) and then fly freely around the current system, battling Tie fighters or scavenging from space wreckage, before hyperspace-jumping to new planets. Flying is straightforward, with dogfights relying heavily on a lock-on feature that lets you automatically track enemies (it's much more arcade-like than the old X-Wing or Tie-Fighter games). But still, there's a thrill to having an enemy ship in your sights and blowing it to pieces, accompanied by those legendary Ben Burtt sound effects.
I’ve only seen a few hours of the game so far – there’s still a lot to discover. The hope is that the missions and side quests will really delve into the Star Wars story and move further away from the Assassin’s Creed/Far Cry archetypes. I wonder how inhabited and detailed the planets will be away from the main hubs? I want to stumble upon Jawa transports, secret Imperial bases, and horrifying monsters intent on digesting me for a thousand years. That element of serendipitous discovery in the Star Wars universe is something the team has clearly thought about.
“We knew we had to let the player act, and that really impacts how Star Wars works,” Khavari says. “We tried to create a tonal model that took inspiration from both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and merge that into every character and story vendor that you meet, so that it always feels like it’s all part of the same journey. It took me a while to realize this, but Star Wars is uniquely suited to an open-world game. That’s why fans have been asking for this for so long, myself included.”
