Kay and Nix make their way through the streets of Mirogana in Star Wars: Outlaws. The game’s developers tried to develop an open-world formula where all things were possible for players. (Ubisoft)
The world of “Star Wars” was the first love of my life, but I can’t stand the brand anymore.
I’m one of the many turned off by the Disney movies and TV shows about the galaxy far, far away. I grew tired of Jedi psychobabble, the remixed Joseph Campbell archetypes and the inability to explore new narrative themes. Star Wars Outlaws, releasing Aug. 30 on PlayStation 5, Xbox and PC, looked to be more of the same, starring a scoundrel and taking place in the year after “The Empire Strikes Back.” On top of that, recent games by publisher Ubisoft have sometimes felt stale thanks to the influence its open-world formula had on the games industry. The “Ubisoft open world” has become a standard descriptor for a by-the-numbers video game.
But I admire the work of Massive Entertainment creative director Julian Gerighty, who steered the multiplayer shooting series The Division to great success. When I heard he helmed this project, I had to pay attention. After playing two hours of Star Wars Outlaws, I’m shocked to report that my fire for “Star Wars” is rekindled.
It’s the simplicity of the concept. There’s never been a single-player “Star Wars” digital experience that allows you to hang out in its seamless open world. When I walked our heroine Kay Vess into a cantina and started chatting with gang members, the high visual and audio fidelity made a real difference. After all, “Star Wars” is the franchise that used high-tech special effects to change popular entertainment forever. While I’ve yet to discover whether this game will explore new narrative themes, it’s at least tickling the right parts of nostalgia in ways that don’t feel pandering.
“What we did with the very small core team when we kicked things off was reconnect with what “Star Wars” meant to us … that feeling when I had that VHS tape that I wore out and playing with the Kenner toys,” Gerighty said. “Before the internet, before streaming services, before sequels and prequels and TV shows, before you could find “Star Wars” everywhere, what was my imagination in love with? It was the universe … sorry, I’m not allowed to say universe. It was the galaxy of substance, a galaxy where everything was possible.”
It’s a visceral thrill to ride Kay’s speeder bike across the Tatooine sands. It matters that I have the agency to go wherever I want at the pace I want. The recent Electronic Arts Star Wars Jedi games are excellent, but remain linear narrative adventures. Outlaws wants us to feel like we live in the world.
The Trailblazer makes an escape through the Akiva system in Star Wars: Outlaws. Players may go where they want, at whatever speed they want. (Ubisoft)
This convincing illusion is helped by spaceship travel that rockets your customizable spaceship from the surface to punch through the atmosphere and into the stars. Xbox’s Starfield, while a great game featuring a thousand planets, failed to provide an immersive spacefaring experience. Gerighty said Outlaws learned from a 2018 Ubisoft game, Starlink: Battle for Atlas. In that game, spaceships would seamlessly travel among three planets.
“[Starlink] was directed by a friend of mine, and we did meetings with the tech team there,” he said. “The issue they had is that the worlds felt a little small, the galaxy felt small, so the solution to that was that we’re not going to build the whole planet. We’re going to focus on smaller areas, make it dense, make it rich and full of handcrafted things that connected with the world and have that sort of funnel out into space, into orbit. And the orbit around the planet is also level-designed.” He adds that the spaceship sequence in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare was another source of inspiration.
Like the political sphere, the video games industry is racked with discourse and misplaced rage around diversity and representation. Ubisoft has been the target recently with its upcoming Assassin’s Creed Shadows co-starring the historical Black warrior Yasuke in feudal Japan. Kay, meanwhile, is being picked apart for her appearance.
Kay is a petty thief who barrels through the story in Star Wars Outlaws, making bad decisions and exhibiting a lot of humor, humility and toughness. (Ubisoft)
“Kay is meant to be approachable, a petty thief who ends up barreling through this story, making bad decisions and centered with a lot of humor, humility and toughness. That’s what’s important to me. And she’s beautiful, come on,” Gerighty said. “It makes no sense to me, and it’s not worth engaging with. If you engage with bad-faith people, there’s no nuance and no possibility of real dialogue. So all we can do is make the best game possible.”
It’s true that Kay feels like a great audience surrogate, stumbling her way through the open world. The player can make alliances and betray them. Faction dynamics like the gang relations of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas have been missing from the open-world formula for some years, and it’s exciting to see it in the “Star Wars” setting.
After my preview, I went along with my day at work. When I came home, I was excited to play more Star Wars Outlaws and find out what happens when I betray that criminal overlord I just helped, or maybe upgrade my speeder bike. Then I realized that I don’t actually have the game yet - I had caught the bug. It’s a nice feeling to be excited, once again, for a Ubisoft open-world game, and for “Star Wars.”
Platforms: PC, Xbox X/S, PlayStation 5
