But I admire the work of Massive Entertainment’s creative director Julian Gerighty, who shepherded the multiplayer shooter series “The Division” to great success. When I heard he was helming this project, I had to pay attention. After playing two hours of “Star Wars Outlaws,” I’m shocked to report that my Star Wars fire has been reignited.
It’s the simplicity of the concept. There’s never been a single-player digital Star Wars experience that lets you spend time in its seamless, open world. When I took our heroine Kay Vess to 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 have yet to find out if this game will explore new narrative themes, it is 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 first started things was reconnect with what Star Wars meant to us… that feeling when I had that VHS tape that I had used and played with the Kenner toys,” Gerighty tells 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 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 anything was possible.”
It’s a visceral thrill to ride Kay’s speeder bike across the sands of Tatooine. It’s important that I have the agency to go where I want at my own pace. Electronic Arts’ recent Star Wars Jedi games are excellent, but they remain linear narrative adventures. “Outlaws” wants us to feel like we’re living in the world.
This convincing illusion is helped by the spaceship ride that launches your customizable spaceship from the surface to blast through the atmosphere and into the stars. Xbox’s “Starfield,” while a great game with a thousand planets, failed to deliver an immersive space travel experience. Gerighty said “Outlaws” learned from another Ubisoft game, 2018’s “Starlink: Battle for Atlas.” In that game, spaceships would seamlessly travel between three planets.
“[‘Starlink’] “It was run by a friend of mine and we had meetings with the tech team there,” he said. “The problem they had was that the worlds felt a little small, the galaxy felt small, so the solution to that was we’re not going to build the entire planet. We’re going to focus on smaller areas, make it dense, make it rich and full of handcrafted things that connect to the world and have this kind of funnel into space, into orbit. And the orbit around the planet is also designed by level.” He adds that the spaceship sequence in “Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare” was another source of inspiration.
Much like the political sphere, the video game industry is plagued by rhetoric and misplaced anger around diversity and representation. Ubisoft has been a target recently with its upcoming “Assassin’s Creed Shadows” co-starring historical Black warrior Yasuke in feudal Japan. Kay, meanwhile, is being criticized for her appearance.
“Kay should be approachable, a petty thief who ends up moving forward in this story, making bad decisions and grounded with a lot of humor, humility and resilience, that’s what’s important to me. And she’s beautiful, come on,” Gerighty said. “She doesn’t make sense to me and she’s not worth getting involved with. If you’re engaging with people who are bad actors, there’s no nuance and no possibility of 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, 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 absent from the open-world formula for a few years, and it’s exciting to see them in a Star Wars setting.
After my preview, I went about my workday. When I got home, I was excited to play more Star Wars Outlaws and find out what happens when I betray that criminal lord I just helped, or maybe upgrade my speeder bike. Then I realized I didn’t have the game yet — I had caught the bug. It feels good to be excited, once again, for an open-world game from Ubisoft, and for Star Wars.
