“Commitment and experience.”
Star Wars Outlaws Lead Systems Designer Matthieu Delisle muses as we sit in the MASSIVE Entertainment offices and unpack Star Wars’ next big video game step. While the galaxy far, far away has gifted us with cinematic multiplayer shooters, Jedi-power-fantasy adventures, and even a stray dogfighting sim, Outlaws is set to become the first truly open-world game set in the stars. It’s been a long time coming and, in a sense, it’s not surprising that a Ubisoft studio is the one to step up to the plate.
Outlaws is taking a little bit of inspiration from all corners of Star Wars gaming. A swashbuckling action adventure that takes MASSIVE’s shooter heritage and transplants it into an original tale of a scoundrel, her dog, and her ship, Outlaws is finally gearing up for release. With two days spent with the team in their hometown of Malmo, Sweden, we’ve already unpacked our complicated feelings on the narrative of Outlaws but unsurprisingly, a production of this scale requires many certain points of view.
A New Lens, An Old Hope
So much of what makes Star Wars work, whether you realise it or not, is the feel of it. One of the largest franchises in cinematic history, an empire all its own, built around a very specific vibe that delicately balances nostalgia and contemporary visual language. It’s a hard enough tone to achieve in traditional mediums, as Lucasfilm’s pivot to StageCraft technology The Volume has turned some audiences off due to its lack of tactility. Others still scrunch their nose at the Sequel Trilogy’s sharper contrasts and cooler colour palette. New is hard, old is gold, and MASSIVE is keenly aware of this.
The Lens Project is, on its face, a remarkable bit of game development magic. Taking the team’s familiarity with the Snowdrop Engine and blasting the hinges off, The Lens Project is an extensive and all-encompassing push to ensure everything you see in Star Wars Outlaws looks and feels like Star Wars. A painstaking replication of the Ultra Pan Vision 70 Lenses used to film the original trilogy, The Lens Project uses a combination of lens flares, vignetting, lens breathing and about a dozen smaller touches to give the image the same textured warmth of the original films.
And honestly, it looks tremendous, a true achievement in aesthetic composition and emulation that gives Outlaws a tangible cinematic vibe absent from many AAAA gaming experiences. There are few better places to experience the impact of this effort than the cosy sound editing room tucked away on the upper floors of the MASSIVE office, and in here we glimpsed one of the game’s many cutscenes. In it, Kay and Nix are fleeing enemy fighters in their ship and between the lens effects, extensive mo-cap, and Wilbert Roget II’s bombastic score, Outlaws becomes nearly indistinguishable from a modern Star Wars film.
The thing about feel though is that it’s guttural and there’s a deep irony in the directors being eyed for inspiration including J.J. Abrams. A somewhat underrated journeyman, Abrams helmed arguably the biggest return to form Star Wars had seen with 2015’s The Force Awakens, an ostensibly new tale in the galaxy that sought to recapture the feeling of Star Wars through a series of expensive emulation techniques. It also looked tremendous, hailed as an authentically Lucas experience due in large part to its aesthetic touchstones.
But time has been…interesting to The Force Awakens. As we pushed deeper into the new wave of Star Wars stories, many began to consider the film’s dedication to nostalgic comfort a detriment to the new trilogy’s vision and somewhat indicative of broader creative stagnation within the franchise. Rogue One, another of Outlaws’ major influence points, skirts these same criticisms due to its gestures toward violent maturity but still exhibits many of the same retreating comforts of Abrams’s work and Outlaws now follows suit.
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And it does begin to hit you just how funny it is that the night changes, that we’re now a decade out from The Force Awakens’ nostalgic glow, two from the Prequels experimental digital efforts, and nearly fifty years since A New Hope began this cycle. Here we still are, warping digital light and matter in admittedly wonderful ways to make sure this Star War, developed by a diverse and vibrant team, feels the way the franchise is remembered rather than how it could be envisioned for the future. Maybe it’s not fair to ask this of a game of this scale, perhaps the stakes are too high even for a scoundrel, but The Lens Project is as much an immaculate monument to comfort as it is to inertia.
Lucas Strikes Back
Outlaws is of course making its own mark on the Star Wars visual vernacular, a combined effort of aesthetic layering and original art direction. Sitting down with Associate Art Director Marthe Jonkers and Lead Concept Artist Samuel De Vos, we began to unpack the myriad influences, pressures, and joys of getting to truly create something new within the galaxy.
“There was a lot of inspiration from pets! I think it’s a very emotional connection that we would like the player to feel and that goes back to that relatability…not only with Nyx, but also other wildlife that we see on Kijimi, for example, but also the vehicles,” De Vos excitedly explains, “I look at the Trailblazer, and the only pet that I had was a turtle and it was fun to see that that also came back as a main inspiration for the Trailblazer. But the goal is really to go with the original trilogy methodology of designing because we really want to be respectful to the time period within the Star Wars timeline.”
Picking up where De Vos left off, Jonkers continued, “A lot of the sixties and seventies design was definitely inspiration for this, as well as it was for the Original Trilogy. And (things like) Samurai movies and Spaghetti Westerns, we really try to dig into the same sources of inspiration that George Lucas would have had when he was creating the universe for the Original Trilogy.”
Pursuing the same influences as Lucas is always a double-edged lightsaber though and has landed some of the original ideas in Outlaws in a strange place. On the one hand, the game is overflowing with fun and creative designs; Kay Vess is head to toe a gorgeous addition to the galaxy, with massive hair and a popped collar, the art department poured themselves into her design and it has paid off dividends. Likewise, the love of pets is evident in Nyx’s every feather and move, and more broadly, the wildlife we’ve seen glimpses of on planets like Kijimi is captivating and cool as shit. A giant creature that appeared to be one part owl, one part bat eyed me off with its singular eye in the streets and I got a little kick out of seeing a new animal in this far-off place.
Elsewhere on Kijimi though, the newly crafted Ashiga Clan returns to the original sin of Star Wars. Lucas was not particularly shy about his influences, the films were effectively a hodgepodge of other properties and, crucially, real-world cultures. Science fiction broadly has an issue with this, with Western creators lifting elements of Asian and MENA art and customs to craft “alien” aesthetics. Star Wars has been guilty of it since inception (still plucking away for shows as recent as The Mandalorian), and Outlaws, in its Lucas reverence, does the same. The Ashiga are shamelessly Samurai coded, right down to the brazenly promoted “honour code” and broader race traits.
Poke your head into Star Wars fan spaces and you’ll find no shortage of praise for the Ashiga already, their striking insectoid designs and gold-plated armour do make for a compelling identity after all, but much like The Lens Project, it’s a strangely retro-minded bit of design impulse. Outlaws seems full of other incredible work of course, the touted war between syndicates is pulling in many different factions from Solo’s Crimson Dawn to The Clone Wars’ Pykes. And they all look so well realised, which makes for a strange contrast with the game’s other less-considered aesthetic choices.
A MASSIVE Open World
MASSIVE is, unsurprisingly, keenly aware of its heritage and place in the wider gaming industry. With roots in tactical games sprawling all the way back to the late 90s, MASSIVE was pulled into the Ubisoft gravity well in the twilight years of the aughts and quickly put to work on what would go on to become Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. Forging ahead under new leadership, the studio would go on to helm the wildly successful Tom Clancy’s The Division titles and last year’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, titles they say have uniquely prepared them for handling Outlaws.
“What we mean by open world is this full spectrum experience of activities and ways to interact with the world, including climbing and driving and flying and talking to people in cities,” Lead Systems Designer Matthieu Delisle explains as we discuss why it’s taken the industry this long to produce a truly open-world Star Wars game, “And to that degree, I think that it’s partially tech, like being able to go from ground to space to hyperspace and down again, but it also takes commitment and experience to be able to do that. We have, and Ubisoft have, a lot of experience in how to build open-worlds, and the engine was ready for it as well.”
The first Star Wars game made outside of the infamous agreement between Disney and EA, Outlaws shares some DNA with the incredible Star Wars Jedi: Survivor but is angling for a distinctly Ubisoft flavour of open-world. When I flagged that invoking such an idea is to gesture toward many years of discourse around the genre and its proliferation and somewhat untenable expansion under Ubisoft, Delisle (understandably) opts for diplomacy that would make a Republic senator blush.
“We really started with, what does this game need to make you feel like you’re living in Star Wars and being a scoundrel?…and it’s evolved from there. And of course, we’re going to use some mechanics and inspirations from other games. Sometimes they’re from outside of Ubisoft, sometimes they’re from inside Ubisoft. I think it’s really an inverse of how we really think about it. We really don’t think about a template or a way of making games in a pattern. We think about, what’s this fantasy and how do you do it? We had decided it is an open world and so obviously, with open-world comes some expectations of what you’re supposed to be able to do in it.”
Outlaws will likely meet many of the expectations your mind conjures when you hear “Ubisoft open-world Star Wars game.” Streamlined RPG systems and player-driven exploration combine to make for a familiar, but approachably comfortable, loop as Kay scours the galaxy for lessons on how to be a better scoundrel, parts to upgrade her modular blaster and ship, homesteads to defend from raiders, and of course, syndicate missions and quests. We’ll have extensive thoughts on these systems soon enough, but the action verbs being used to describe the Outlaws experience are expected but not wholly unwelcome.
Kay Shot First
And while these systems have become somewhat standardised in the genre, MASSIVE’s shift from tightly tuned shooter to narrative-driven action has given the team a chance to stretch its legs. “It was certainly a challenge, and we went through some different ways of approaching it, but we needed to stay true to what a scoundrel is, and a scoundrel has their sidearm and a bunch of other tools to get through trouble,” Delisle explains, “But for the gunplay, we knew we still wanted variety so we worked with Lucasfilm to invent a new type of blaster that can switch out modules on the fly and turn into different types of firing experiences…so built into that gun, and accessible through the workbench on the Trailblazer, is pretty broad-spectrum shooting experiences. Then you add on top of that, that we really want you to grab weapons from enemies as well, we really took the opportunity with a Sci-Fi title to go a little bit further than we’ve ever done on The Division and give you shooting experiences that you could really only do in Star Wars.”
And it is a blast to mow down a Stormtrooper before dodge rolling to nab his heavy repeater and turn it loose on his fascistic little buddies. With Nyx roaming to blow up barrels and Kay’s slight frame struggling to control the beastly weapon (a deliberate friction to reflect her relative lack of experience with weapons beyond her own), there’s a clarity of vision between system and idea. This is Outlaws at its best, a synergistic design ethos born from allowing developers of all disciplines to interact during the creative process, building play spaces and interactive means fitting the narrative and vice versa.
Lead Gameplay Designer Fredrick Thylander and Senior Systems Designer Alice Rendell are riffing on this effort with me toward the end of my visit. “Once the project landed on that scoundrel fantasy, there was so much to play with in terms of what you can do, like playing Sabacc (Star Wars poker) or playing arcade games (Outlaws features possibly the first depiction of a video game inside a Star Wars video game)” Rendell enthuses as Thylander concludes, “We have a game that’s lucky in the sense that it is very rich in terms of the different verbs. You can talk to people, you can sneak in, you can slice, you can pick locks, punch people…it was more about finding what we think is the most fun rather than working around constraints.”
Constraints is an interesting note to linger on, as Outlaws feels simultaneously supported by Lucasfilm Games and free to have charted its own path through the galaxy and reverentially cloying and shy. The enormous compound of a building that houses the MASSIVE team (a converted textile factory that towers on an unassuming corner of Malmo) is a maze of small rooms, desks and shelves crowded with Original Trilogy memorabilia and Ralph McQuarrie prints. A shrine built around Han Solo in carbonite adorns a corner and you get the impression that Outlaws is exactly the kind of Star Wars experience this team intended to make.
Between the adaptable systems, mostly charming character and world design, and raw nostalgic energy of The Lens Project, Outlaws has a holistic sense of very specific comfort to it. Loaded though it may be, so far Outlaws is undeniably a Star War through and through.
Star Wars Outlaws launches on August 30th for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. Amazon has pre-orders available for $89 with free release day delivery for Prime members.
James was a guest of Ubisoft with travel and accommodation covered for the purpose of this preview.
