A few things I learned about Star Wars Outlaws
The makers of The Division are trying something a little different.
Ubisoft’s first video game set in a galaxy far, far away, Star Wars Outlaws, was partially inspired by a Martin Scorsese comedy, defaults to widescreen and has another video game inside it.
That last detail threw me last month, when I played Outlaws and talked to the game’s creative director, Julian Gerighty.
At the start of the demo, I was playing as Outlaws’ protagonist, the scoundrel Kay Vess, as she approached some grimy buildings and the kind of unwashed city goers typical of a Star Wars adventure. I spotted a kiosk that I could interact with and, doing so, found it was an arcade game terminal. Through it, Vess could play a space combat game that is rendered with vector-style line graphics. It’s a hat-tip to the 1983 Star Wars arcade game.
I knew there was holographic monster chess in Star Wars—pardon me, I just learned it’s called Dejarik—but I did not realize there are video games in the world of Star Wars.
Later research revealed I’d missed six others, all pretty obscure.
The Outlaws space combat game is in there to help Vess’ surroundings feel more alive, part of an overall effort to make Outlaws’ world feel like the richest created in a Star Wars game. “The arcade games were a way for us to insert lots and lots of distractions within the world,” Gerighty said. He noted that they’ve been developed by Ubisoft’s Paris studio and boasted that the game also includes the Star Wars card game Sabacc in Outlaws. I’d heard of that one.
What Outlaws is, and who made it
Star Wars Outlaws was announced last year and is deep into the pre-launch hype cycle ahead of a late-August launch.
Here are some basics:
It’s the next big game from Ubisoft’s Massive Entertainment (The Division, The Division 2, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora) and is an open-world adventure set between the movies “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi.” In terms of gameplay, it’s a third-person game with the vibes of PlayStation treasure-hunting series Uncharted.
Outlaws features a game-long, planet-hopping effort by Vess to pull off a massive heist, and it is being pitched as an interactive dive into the Star Wars underworld, complete with appearances by Jabba the Hutt, Lando Calirissian and “Solo”’s Qi’ra.
The game has been built by 11 Ubisoft studios, across a team of about 600 people, comparable in scale to the crew behind The Division 2, Gerighty said.
It’s been in development for four years, with concept work beginning about a week before Covid triggered lockdowns, Gerighty said. Senior Division developers took a couple of weeks off at the time, then set about working remotely on Outlaws’ main ideas.
In LA, the demo I played offered a sampling of comfortable and slick, if mostly expected gameplay: cover-based shootouts against Stormtroopers in a hangar bay, lots of leaping and climbing within a wrecked spaceship, dogfights with Tie Fighters in space, a few seconds of racing across a planetary surface on Vess’ Star Wars equivalent of a motorcycle and—the surprise—a session with that vector-graphics arcade game.
One key gameplay element: Vess has a little space-cat called Nix that can fetch items and hop on enemies to distract them (actually, it’s so helpful that, despite its feline appearance, it’s probably more of a space-dog).
More interesting than advertised
Ubisoft hypes Outlaws as “the first-ever open world Star Wars™ game,” which is not true, but perhaps being third in the last two years doesn’t sound as cool.
I noted to Gerighty a year ago that Outlaws wasn’t the first; pointed it out last month, too, when he again used that talking point.
“I'm going to stick to my guns,” Gerighty said, acknowledging Ubisoft’s PR person sitting nearby. He was staying on script!
The actual bragging point for Outlaws’ open world potential is less marketable but no less enticing: it is a Star Wars game led by makers of Ubisoft/Massive’s The Division games, which, over the past decade, produced post-disaster versions of New York City and Washington, D.C. that are among the most richly detailed game worlds ever built.
The team’s mantra, Gerighty said, is to create “really compelling, infinitely explorable open worlds.” For this game, the world they’ve built, across multiple Star Wars planets, is meant to be more surprising.
“I think that the big difference here is that there's a lot that's hidden that you stumble across,” he said, contrasting Outlaws’ Star Wars planets with The Division’s cities.
“It's that feeling of discovering it and being the first player to ever discover it—following those breadcrumbs and finding something: a hidden cave right behind a waterfall and beautiful views, something that you feel okay, ‘I'm the first person in the history of Star Wars to this area.’”
Fewer numbers, more characters
For Outlaws, the Division braintrust is doing a mild genre shift.
The Division 2 was a loot game, a sort of paramilitary Diablo that you could play for the story and spectacle but that was rooted in a hunt for guns and gear with ever higher stats.
The new Star Wars game, by contrast, downplays the stats in favor of more of a light role-playing game format. “Nothing more complicated than a Ghost of Tsushima or a recent Assassin’s Creed,” Gerighty said.
Stat-based skill trees are out. Systems built around characters who can train Vess are in.
“Instead of having a traditional upgrade system with stat points and things like that, [there are] experts that we're hiding throughout the galaxy,” Gerighty said. “And these experts are—taking the master-padawan sort of relationship—they're going to be able to teach you things.
“You have to find them first. So, finding them involves an adventure. But even when you've found them, they're going to send you on adventures to be able to unlock those things.”
In other words, Gerighty said, the game’s approach to character improvement is “more ingrained within characters and world.”
A cinematic feel, if you want
The Outlaws demo running in LA played out in a letterboxed widescreen view, with black bars across the top and bottom of the screen.
Gerighty hopes Outlaws will feel like “one of the most cinematic games of all time,” with options for widescreen, distortion on the edges of the picture, chromatic aberration, vignetting, “a whole suite of things that you can turn on and off to your heart's content.” The cinematic widescreen will be turned on by default, but can be toggled off.
A Scorsese reference that I had to Google
“I've used this reference once today and I'm pretty sure that you're going to get it,” Gerighty said, when shifting to talk about his team’s approach to the game’s story.
“Starting off as a lowly street thief and then being catapulted into bad decision after bad decision and finding yourself facing off against Jabba, that's something that is very different for Star Wars. And one of the inspirations was After Hours, the Martin Scorsese movie.”
Imagine a confused reaction from me.
“You haven't seen it?” he said. “I would have bet that you had seen this movie.
“It's just a guy who falls from bad situation to bad situation over 24 hours,” Gerighty helpfully added. (Accurate.)
All that, and a chance to play a video game inside a Star Wars video game? I’m intrigued.
Item 2: In brief…
🎮 Brandon “SuperBlindman” Cole, a blind accessibility consultant who worked on numerous big-budget video games, has died.
For the last two days, Cole’s social media feed has been full of gamers and game industry workers paying their respects. The Game Awards host Geoff Keighley called Cole “a champion for accessibility… He left an indelible mark and helped games reach more people.”
A moving video from Xbox last year showed Cole testing a new mode in the racing game Forza Motorsport that let blind players like him race around a track.
👀 A UK Tribunal has sided with a developer who is diagnosed with autism and who said that their former employer, Cloud Imperium Games, discriminated against them when the studio denied their request to do their job remotely long-term, Game Developer reports.
🏴☠️ Nintendo is suing a person who sells modified Switch systems and another who allegedly operates multiple marketplaces for pirated games, claiming that both are violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and facilitating piracy, Torrent Freak reports.
💰 Gamer Nicholas “Lord Nazo” Minor, who impersonated game studio Bungie while sending 96 fraudulent YouTube copyright takedown notices, has agreed to be liable for $8.1 million in damages for his actions, according to a new court filing in the lawsuit Bungie brought against Minor in 2022.
🛒 Capcom has purchased two thirds of Taiwanese computer animation company Minimum Studios, which has contributed cinematics to some of its past titles.
🚕 Sega’s new Crazy Taxi game will be a massively multiplayer open world game, according to translations of a new Sega video, Automaton reports.
👍 Cards in new packs of Uno will include symbols to help color-blind players distinguish the cards, part of an effort by Mattel to make its products more accessible, Fast Company reports.
😲 The Rubik’s Cube is now 50, The New York Times reports, in a long feature about inventor Erno Rubik’s legacy.
“a sort of paramilitary Diablo” made me laugh (in a good way!)
I'd lose my mind and all my credits if we get to play pazaak in Outlaws.