Star Wars Outlaws Could Be The “Matinee Action” Adventure Fans Have Waited For [CNET]

Ubisoft creative director Julian Gerighty talks about exploring the seedy side of the famous franchise with an eye toward action and wonder.

At Gamescom 2024, I walked into the Ubisoft booth decorated like a Japanese tea house to celebrate the upcoming launch of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, but when I ducked into a nondescript meeting room to chat with Star Wars Outlaws creative director Julian Gerighty, our conversation immediately pulled us into a galaxy far, far away — and Ubisoft’s vision for a Star Wars game.

“We approached this as the first open world Star Wars experience, and that was particularly coherent because of the outlaw fantasy that we wanted at the heart of the game,” Gerighty said. “Have we had an outlaw game before in Star Wars?”

I jokingly mentioned the Nintendo 64 game Shadows of the Empire (to which Gerighty responded “Maybe, that was a long time ago. You’re dating me!”). But that game was a first-person shooter with linear level-based progression and not much to do beyond blasting everything you run across. 28 years later, Star Wars Outlaws takes the same time period — the turbulent, exciting year between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi — and focuses on the grimy underbelly of the Star Wars universe: the seedy smugglers and crime syndicates that rarely get the limelight, especially in games. 

Making a game set in that exciting moment in the Star Wars universe takes a lot of research, even for those 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 Lucasfilm has, you start understanding the design principles of Ralph McQuarrie,” Gerighty said, referring to the artist who established much of the original Star Wars trilogy’s visual language. “We were working with them very closely to make sure that everything felt familiar but new and bring in new things.”

That includes creating new ships, aliens and even adding a moon to Star Wars’ starscape. There’s plenty familiar in Outlaws, though Ubisoft picked locations that were only briefly visited before, like Canto Bight (from The Last Jedi) and Kijimi (from The Rise of Skywalker), to let players explore and discover the scummier parts of the Star Wars galaxy.

The game centers around Kay Vess, a scoundrel and thief, who is trying to survive between the Empire’s oppressive forces on one side and the criminal syndicates like Crimson Dawn and Ashiga Clan on the other. With her alien buddy Nix and various companions, she’ll try to pull off heists and stay one step ahead of the dangers of the outlaw life.

That sets Outlaws apart from other Star Wars games that have focused on the Jedi, like Respawn’s lauded Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor games, which have been more traditionally heroic. It’s an interesting tightrope to walk including more of the seedy side of Star Wars while not sinking the tone into grim darkness, Gerighty explained.

“Because we featured the underworld so heavily, we could have gone dark and mature, but that’s not at all what we wanted to do, [which was] connect with the four-year-old who saw A New Hope in the cinema whose mind was blown by things that were scary, funny, ridiculous, but brand new,” Gerighty said.

Outlaws’ “matinee action” tone, as Gerighty described it, seeks to embody the vibes of science fiction adventure serials 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 that Outlaws has in store for protagonist Kay — a hero and a scoundrel who isn’t perfect, a street thief who “barrels into this adventure falling into one bad decision and the next bad decision, and who ends up facing Jabba the Hutt and holding her own in front of Lady Qira and all these really fearsome criminal syndicates,” Gerighty said. Not too cool like Han Solo, but a more relatable protagonist.

That extends to Kay’s combat abilities — to put it lightly, she’s not the fastest gun in space. Outlaws heavily emphasizes stealth and using subterfuge, the environment and her alien pal Nix to knock out enemies one by one until the odds are in her favor…or things go screwy and she has to improvise. In my short time playing the Outlaws demo at Gamescom, Kay needs multiple shots to take down enemies; it’s clear she’s no soldier.

Massive Entertainment, the Ubisoft-owned studio that was the 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 sneaking, exploring and space battles 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 clambering around instead of pulling out a gun and sniping behind cover. When I found an enemy I could sneak up on, I didn’t creep up to do a stealth takedown with a tactical choke-out — Kay wound up her fist and clocked 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, which had hands-off presentations showcasing the brawling combat and that ever-satisfying ‘thunk’ sound when Indy lands a punch. There are similarities between the Outlaws fantasy for players and the many chaotic scoundrels in other media, Gerighty agreed.

“Indiana Jones is a scoundrel, 100%. Captain Jack Sparrow is a scoundrel. James Bond is a scoundrel,” Gerighty said. 

And part of being a scoundrel is balancing threats and opportunities. In Outlaws, whether sticking to the main story or doing more side quests and contracts, Ubisoft wanted players to feel the stakes of personal allegiances and betrayals that form when they do jobs for and cozy up to the criminal syndicates. “You’re really well rewarded if you have an excellent reputation, and if you have a terrible reputation, they’re going to send people out to kill you,” Gerighty said. That won’t change the ending — there’re no branching paths — but it will alter the flavor of the story and access to locations and exclusive gear.

That flavor extends to cameos from famous (or more specific to 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 period and setting for aforementioned criminal heavy hitters like Jabba and Qira, as well as the charming gambler and businessman Lando Calrissian. (Sadly, Ubisoft told me that the incredible Dr. Aphra is not in the game.)

Lando is the star of the first of Outlaws’ two planned DLC expansions, and his will focus on a high-stakes competition of the card game Sabaac (playing by different rules than what fans might know from the Disney Starcruiser and theme parks, Gerighty noted) that takes place on an illegal cruiser. The second DLC is about space piracy and stars fan favorite lovable pirate Hondo Ohnaka (of The Clone Wars and Rebels shows). 

It’s fun to see that interweaving with the greater Star Wars universe when it’s done well. 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 scoundrel fantasy belonged to us, and they made sure that we wove the story into the greater tapestry Star Wars.”

But despite that pressure and responsibility to tell a story in the universe of the legendary franchise through a AAA game with its own lengthy development process, Gerighty is adamant that his adoration for Star Wars hasn’t faded.

“After four years, I still really love Star Wars, and it’s such a challenging dream come true to be able to do something playing around with these stories,” Gerighty said.