At Gamescom 2024, I walked into Ubisoft’s booth, which was decorated like a Japanese teahouse to celebrate the upcoming launch of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. But when I stepped into a nondescript meeting room to chat with Star Wars Outlaws creative director Julian Gerighty, our conversation immediately transported us to a galaxy far, far away—and to Ubisoft’s vision for a Star Wars game.
“We approached this as the first open world Star Wars experience, and that was especially cohesive because of the outlaw fantasy that we wanted to have at the heart of the game,” Gerighty said. “Have we had an outlaw game in Star Wars before?”
I jokingly mentioned the Nintendo 64 game Shadows of the Empire (to which Gerighty replied, “Maybe, it’s been a long time. You’re dating me!”). But that game was a first-person shooter with linear, level-based progression and not much to do other than blast everything in sight. Set 28 years later, Star Wars Outlaws is set in the same time period — the turbulent, exciting year between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi — and focuses on the dark underbelly of the Star Wars universe: the seedy smugglers and crime syndicates who rarely get the spotlight, especially not in games.
Making a game set in that exciting period in the Star Wars universe takes a lot of research, even for people who know the franchise well.
“We had to learn what Star Wars was, because you think you’re a fan until you open up the archive of information from Lucasfilm, and you start to understand the design principles of Ralph McQuarrie,” Gerighty said, referring to the artist who created much of the visual language of the original Star Wars trilogy. “We worked very closely with them to make sure everything felt familiar but still new, and to introduce new things.”
That includes creating new ships, aliens, and even adding a moon to the Star Wars starscape. There’s plenty that’s familiar in Outlaws, though Ubisoft has chosen locations that have only been briefly visited before, like Canto Bight (from The Last Jedi) and Kijimi (from The Rise of Skywalker), to give players some of the seedier parts of the Star Wars galaxy to explore and discover.
The game revolves around Kay Vess, a rogue and thief, who tries to survive between the oppressive forces of the Empire on one side and the criminal syndicates such as Crimson Dawn and Ashiga Clan on the other. With her alien buddy Nix and various companions, she tries to pull off heists and stay one step ahead of the dangers of the outlaw life.
That’s what sets Outlaws apart from other Star Wars games that have focused on the Jedi, like Respawn’s acclaimed Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor games, which have traditionally been heroic. It’s an interesting line to walk, bringing in more of the seedier side of Star Wars without sinking the tone into grim darkness, Gerighty explained.
“Because we made the underworld so heavy, we could have been dark and mature, but we didn’t want to do that at all, [which was] “I want to connect with the four-year-old who saw A New Hope in the theater and was amazed by the scary, funny, ridiculous, yet brand new stuff,” Gerighty said.
The “matinee action” tone of Outlaws, as Gerighty described it, attempts to embody the vibes of sci-fi adventure series like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, the touchstones that inspired George Lucas when he created the original trilogy. That’s the kind of space-swashbuckling action Outlaws has in store for protagonist Kay — a hero and a villain who’s not perfect, a street thief who “goes into this adventure and makes bad decisions over and over again, and who eventually runs into Jabba the Hutt and holds her own against Lady Qira and all these really scary criminal syndicates,” Gerighty said. Not as cool as Han Solo, but a more relatable protagonist.
The same goes for Kay’s combat skills — to say the least, she’s not the fastest gun in space. Outlaws places a heavy emphasis on stealth, using guile, the environment, and her alien buddy Nix to pick off enemies one by one until the odds are stacked in her favor… or things get out of hand and she’s forced to improvise. In the brief time I played the Outlaws demo at Gamescom, Kay needed multiple shots to take out enemies; it’s clear she’s no soldier.
Massive Entertainment, the Ubisoft studio that served as lead developer on Outlaws, had experience making third-person shooters like The Division series. But those were cover-based, military shooters, and the studio focused on simplifying the player experience in Outlaws to make the gameplay loop of stealth, exploration, and space combat engaging and active. To wit: In my demo of a heist mission, I was discovered and had to improvise, which meant using the environment and scrambling around instead of pulling out a gun and sneaking behind cover. When I found an enemy to sneak up on, I didn’t sneak up on them and perform a stealth takedown with a tactical choke-out — Kay wound up her fist and knocked the enemy unconscious with a haymaker. “Matinee action,” indeed.
I told Gerighty that it reminded me of another game down the hall — Machine Games’ Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, with hands-off presentations that showed off the brawls and that always satisfying “thunk” sound when Indy throws a punch. There are similarities between the Outlaws fantasy for players and the many chaotic villains in other media, Gerighty agreed.
“Indiana Jones is a villain, 100%. Captain Jack Sparrow is a villain. James Bond is a villain,” Gerighty said.
And part of being a villain is balancing threats and opportunities. In Outlaws, whether sticking to the main story or adding more side missions and contracts, Ubisoft wanted players to feel the stakes of personal loyalty and betrayal that come with doing odd jobs and dressing up for criminal syndicates. “You get really well-rewarded if you have a great reputation, and if you have a terrible reputation, they’ll send people out to kill you,” Gerighty said. That won’t change the ending—there are no branching paths—but it will change the flavor of the story and the access to locations and exclusive gear.
That flavor extends to cameos from famous (or, more specifically, in Kay’s circles, infamous) characters in the Star Wars universe. It wouldn’t make sense for Luke Skywalker to show up, Gerighty said, but it’s the right time period and setting for aforementioned criminal heavyweights like Jabba and Qira, as well as the charming gambler and businessman Lando Calrissian. (Sadly, Ubisoft tells me that the incredible Dr. Aphra is not in the game.)
Kay Vess talks to ND-5, a friend who commits robberies.
Lando is the star of the first of two planned Outlaws DLC expansions, and he’ll focus on a high-stakes competition of the card game Sabaac (with different rules than fans might be familiar with from Disney’s Starcruiser and theme parks, Gerighty noted) set on an illegal cruiser. The second DLC will focus on space piracy and will star beloved pirate Hondo Ohnaka (from the Clone Wars and Rebels shows).
It’s fun to see how that intertwines with the larger Star Wars universe when it’s done right. Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment worked directly with Lucasfilm Games, who “taught us what Star Wars was,” as Gerighty put it. “They made sure that the villain fantasy was ours, and they made sure that we were weaving that story into the larger Star Wars tapestry.”
But despite the pressure and responsibility of telling a story set in the legendary franchise’s universe through a AAA game with its own lengthy development process, Gerighty is adamant that his admiration for Star Wars has not waned.
“After four years, I still love Star Wars. It’s a huge challenge to be able to do something that plays with those stories,” Gerighty said.
Check this out: I played the new Star Wars Outlaws game at Gamescom
