Star Wars Outlaws: Ubisoft’s Quest to Make the First Star Wars Open-World Game
Exclusive: The Ubisoft team behind Star Wars Outlaws walks us through how it turned the galaxy far, far away into a true open-world experience.
This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.
Fans of a certain age may still look back to the ‘90s and early ‘00s as “the golden age” of Star Wars games, but the truth is that we’re currently at another high point for the game franchise. After a long drought following the 2013 closure of LucasArts, the movie studio’s famed game publisher that gave us hits such as Knights of the Old Republic and Battlefront, there are finally plenty of new Star Wars games to choose from—across multiple genres, platforms, and studios—with more on the way, including the franchise’s most ambitious title to date.
Star Wars Outlaws, from developer Massive Entertainment and publisher Ubisoft, is the first open-world game set in the galaxy far, far away. While the ability to jump into a massive game world and explore it freely might seem like old hat to those who have played any number of modern Xbox and PlayStation games—including Ubisoft’s own Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry games—this is still a major milestone for Star Wars specifically, one a decade in the making, dating back to when Electronic Arts tried to do it with its infamously troubled (and eventually canceled) Project Ragtag.
Now, the long-coveted open-world Star Wars game is finally here. After playing a short hands-on demo of Star Wars Outlaws at this year’s Summer Game Fest, Den of Geek sat down with the Massive team to talk about the challenges of making a new kind of Star Wars game, crafting the world and story of Outlaws, and the fun easter eggs fans can expect this August.
A Larger World
Best known for The Division series and last year’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Massive brought plenty of open-world design experience to its newest title, which was on a different scale entirely.
Outlaws allows players to travel freely between four planets from the franchise’s past, as well as a brand-new moon called Toshara, all of which feature their own unique biomes, sights and sounds, and scum and villainy. Oh, and you can even explore outer space on your trusty ship, the Trailblazer, which you’ll fly between the game’s many locations and pilot into battle against Imperial TIE fighters. There are a few space stations to find as well, such as Achra Station, which is located in the middle of an asteroid field near the planet Akiva.
“That was a challenge because we’ve never done that before,” world director Cloé Hammoud says of designing the game’s space regions. Fleshing out the game world with plenty of things to do and see was at the forefront of Massive’s mission to “realize [the Star Wars galaxy] as a real place where you’re not on a guided tour,” according to game director Mathias Karlson, who promises that in Outlaws, “you live in it, and you get to go where you want and do what you want when you want.”
The demo that we played covered just about an hour of the game, broken up into three sections meant to highlight different aspects of the experience. The first slice of gameplay, which followed thief and scoundrel protagonist Kay Vess and her trusty pet companion, Nix, as they escaped an Imperial Star Destroyer, was the best showcase of the game’s scale. What began as a sneaking mission quickly broke out into a firefight on the ship’s docking bay, which progressed into a tense battle in space once our heroes took off on the Trailblazer, all before landing on the moon of Toshara, hopping on Kay’s speeder bike, and venturing into the city of Mirogana to complete the section. It was a virtually seamless experience from point A to B that felt immersive and exciting.
Karlson says seeing the ambitious scale of the game come together for the first time was a “magical moment” for the studio. Creating a vast and populated sandbox was key to providing many more moments like the one in our demo, and that meant picking the right planets for the sandbox, which Hammoud says was “a bit overwhelming” at first.
In Outlaws, players can visit the deserts of Tatooine, snowy Kijimi from The Rise of Skywalker, the lavish casinos of Canto Bight from The Last Jedi, the jungles of Akiva first mentioned in the books, and Toshara, which Hammoud says is inspired by the African savannah but with “more alien ingredients.” You’ll find many places to visit within these larger worlds, such as Mirogana, a dense, multi-level city on Toshara that looks like it’s been carved out of a cliff face. The demo also took us to another point of interest on Mirogana: a crashed High Republic-era ship with its own stories to tell.
Each planet also has unique environments, cultures, architecture, and—most importantly—its own seedy underbelly led by one of the game’s five main criminal factions, which you’ll interact with quite a lot throughout the game. (It’s called Outlaws, after all.) Our brief trips to Mirogana and Kijimi City showcased locales brimming with life and danger, as well as lots of nods to established lore. In fact, all but one of the criminal organizations in the game are from past Star Wars stories. How did the team at Massive keep track of all of the details?
“The approach when we do things like this is really breaking it down into slices: demographics, syndicates, population, fauna, flora, the biome,” says Navid Khavari, the game’s narrative director. “When you start laying out those layers, all those details organically start to form, and the process is extremely fascinating. Hopefully the proof is in the spotchka.”
While the game’s central story follows Kay as she makes a name for herself in the criminal underworld, Outlaws offers plenty of opportunities to go off the main path and explore.
“Even though this is a story largely about maneuvering the underworld under the watchful eye of the Empire, there are many other aspects of life of Star Wars as a whole that don’t necessarily directly tie to only that,” Karlson says. “That’s the beauty of an open world. The presence of these syndicates and the Empire is padded with a lot of other fun things for you to find if you’re curious.”
The Outlaw and the Merqaal
Fantastical worlds are key to a successful Star Wars story, but the saga is nothing without its emotional core: the relatable underdogs who must face insurmountable odds to complete a quest. Enter Kay Vess (Humberly González), who crosses a powerful crime lord named Sliro (Caolan Byrne) and ends up with a huge price on her head at the start of the game. Now, she is on the run from bounty hunters, and the only way to buy her freedom is to pull off a history-making heist. Along the way, Kay also has to complete jobs for the galaxy’s competing crime gangs—even if it means risking a run-in with the Empire.
The game is set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, which means the franchise’s greatest villains are still at the height of their power. Kay will face the Empire throughout the game. But unlike Han Solo, this scoundrel is no freedom fighter.
“What was exciting to us is that this is a character that isn’t part of the Rebellion, isn’t part of the wider galactic war, but is really on the ground,” Khavari says of creating Kay. “Kay’s like, ‘[The war is] deciding our destinies. What I have control over is trying to make a living for myself and my pet Nix, and land a score so that we’re actually free.’ That’s something all of us are drawn to, that idea of freedom. That feeling was a primary motivator for her journey.”
Kay had a rough upbringing as a thief on the streets of Canto Bight, and that background is reflected in her appearance.
“She has a broken nose and scars to show she has had quite a rough life,” associate art director Marthe Jonkers says. “Kay has a hairpin that she can lockpick doors with. She also has sneakers, which are not normally in Star Wars, but we created these sneaker-style boots, which are very helpful for a thief to sneak around. There are even small things like her jacket, [which] has scratches on the back because Nix hangs on the back part.”
Kay’s main weapon is a slick blaster that’s a whole lot of fun to unload on stormtroopers, but her most effective (and adorable) tool is the little merqaal, Nix (Dee Bradley Baker). An original creation for the game, Nix can attack or distract enemies, fetch treasure and weapons for Kay, and even activate traps on command. Siccing Nix on people was the very best part of our demo.
“Nix is the heart and soul of Kay,” Khavari says. “Kay is a pretty untrusting person, and the crack in her armor is Nix. She loves and adores this creature.”
Nix hails from a stormy jungle planet and so his design had to reflect the harsh conditions. Jonkers quickly points to a tattoo on her arm of her cat when revealing that the team’s own pets were a major inspiration for Nix, as well as the axolotl for Nix’s tentacles and the pangolin for his scales.
We still don’t know how Kay and Nix first met, but there’s plenty more to learn about these partners in crime. Khavari teases: “There’s a file on Nix where we’ve gone to great lengths to explain where he’s from and all of that, but it is a mystery.”
Kay will also eventually team up with an imposing Clone Wars-era battle droid named ND-5 (Jay Rincon), but Khavari says “they don’t necessarily get along super well.” They can’t all be Nix.
Stranger in a Familiar Land
Although the goal was to give players a new way to experience this galaxy, there are still plenty of classic Star Wars influences in the game: Spaghetti Westerns, samurai movies, and the art of Ralph McQuarrie—particularly “the simplicity, the color palettes, the scale of the architecture that he designed,” according to Jonkers.
Massive also brought back two of the most dangerous criminals in the movies: Kay will cross paths with both Jabba the Hutt and Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke’s character from Solo) during her adventure. But Kay doesn’t know their history, which allowed Massive to explore these characters through a fresh perspective.
“One of the most exciting things we were able to roleplay in our story room was, what if you never met Jabba? Or what happens if you have no idea who Qi’ra is? What’s that conversation like?” Khavari says, teasing that “there’s a really interesting dynamic between Qi’ra and Kay.”
The final part of the demo transported us to Kijimi City to steal an artifact from the samurai-inspired Ashiga Clan, imposing masked foes who don’t take kindly to intruders. The city, with its icy streets, hidden passageways, and ancient temples is a serious expansion of The Rise of Skywalker version (before it was blown up by The Final Order), while the look of the Ashiga were inspired by the art team looking back at “the very early sketches for the snow troopers” in the original trilogy, according to Hammoud.
Then there’s the return of Tatooine, Star Wars’ original hive of scum and villainy, which was a no-brainer for a game about space outlaws, but Khavari says your time on the desert planet won’t just be a retread of the movies. One new activity to find on the desert planet involves a side quest that offers a hilariously specific bit of wish fulfillment—if your ultimate Star Wars fantasy is moisture farming.
“As Kay, you will stumble onto someone who is desperate,” Jonkers says, giggling before she can get the words out. “He has gambled too much and lost his moisture farm. You can help him get his farm back, and, as a reward, you become co-owner of the farm.”
Outlaws isn’t the first Star Wars game set between Empire and Jedi. In the ’90s, Shadows of the Empire was the first story to explore this specific era. It also took a deep dive into the galaxy’s criminal underworld and featured another scoundrel, the mercenary Dash Rendar, stepping in for Han, who is still frozen in carbonite at this point in the timeline. Shadows isn’t canon anymore, but the similarities between the classic game and Outlaws are obvious. Was that on purpose?
“We looked at absolutely everything,” Khavari says coyly. “Shadows of the Empire is one of my all-time favorite Nintendo 64 games, and it has some super fun characters, but you’ll have to wait until August to get the full answer.”
Star Wars Outlaws is out on Aug. 30 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
Written by
John Saavedra is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Den of Geek. He lives in New York City with his two cats.