However, I admire the work of Julian Gerighty, the creative director at Massive Entertainment who has led the wildly successful multiplayer shooter series The Division, so when I heard he was heading up this project, I had to take note. To my surprise, after playing two hours of Star Wars Outlaws, my passion for Star Wars was rekindled.
It’s the simplicity of the concept. There’s never been a single-player Star Wars digital experience that let you spend time in a seamless open world. The high visual and audio fidelity really made a difference when I took heroine Kay Beth to a bar and started chatting with gang members. After all, Star Wars is the series that changed mass entertainment forever with its high-tech special effects. It remains to be seen whether the game will explore new narrative themes, but it at least tickles the right parts of nostalgia in a way that doesn’t feel pandering.
“What we did when we started the project, with our very small core team, was to rediscover what Star Wars meant to us… that feeling we had when we had our old VHS tapes and played with our Kenner toys,” Gerrity told The Washington Post. “Before the internet, before streaming services, before sequels and prequels and TV shows, before you could find Star Wars everywhere, what was the imagination that captured my imagination? It was space… sorry, I can’t say space. It was a galaxy of matter, a galaxy where everything is possible.”
Riding through the Tatooine desert on Kay’s speeder bike is a visceral thrill. Having the freedom to go wherever you want, at your own pace, is key. Electronic Arts’ recent Star Wars Jedi games are great, but they remain linear narrative adventures. Outlaws makes us feel like we’re living in that world.
This compelling illusion is achieved through a spaceship journey that sees players rocket their customizable spaceship from the Earth’s surface, penetrate the atmosphere and head out to the stars. Xbox’s “Starfield” is a great game featuring 1,000 planets, but it failed to deliver an immersive space travel experience. Gerighty said “Outlaws” learned from another Ubisoft game, 2018’s “Starlink: Battle for Atlas,” in which spaceships traveled seamlessly between three planets.
“A friend of mine directed Starlink, and we had a meeting with the tech team there,” he said. “The problem they had was that the world felt a little small, the galaxy felt small. So the solution was, we’re not going to make an entire planet. We’re going to focus on a small area, and we’re going to make it denser, and full of handcrafted things that connect with the world, and kind of flow into space and into orbit. There’s even level design for the orbits around the planet.” He added that the spaceship scenes in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare were also a source of inspiration.
Like the political world, the video game industry has been rocked by debate and uncontrollable anger over diversity and representation. Ubisoft has been a target recently for its upcoming Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, which stars Yasuke, a historical black warrior set in feudal Japan, while Kay has been criticized for her appearance.
“Kay is a relatable character, a small-time thief who finds her way through this story, making bad decisions, and has a lot of humour and humility and strength, which is what’s important to me. And she’s beautiful,” Gerrity said. “It doesn’t make sense to me, and it’s not worth engaging with. If you engage with people who are malicious, there’s no nuance, there’s no real dialogue, so all we can do is make the best game we can.”
It’s true that Kay feels like a great audience surrogate as he stumbles through the open world. Players can ally with or betray others. Factional relationships, like the gang relationships in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, have been missing from open-world formats for the past few years, and it’s exciting to see them in a Star Wars setting.
After the preview, I went to work for the day. When I got home, I was excited to play more Star Wars Outlaws and see what would happen if I betrayed the crime boss I’d just helped, or upgraded my speeder bike. But I realized I didn’t have the game yet. I’d gotten caught up in the heat. It felt good to be excited about Ubisoft’s open-world games, and Star Wars, again.
