Ghost of Tsushima was Star Wars Outlaws director's "biggest reference" when it came to making his own open-world game

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"This is the story, the world, the character, everything fits together with the gameplay guiding everything"

Star Wars Outlaws
(Image credit: Ubisoft)

PlayStation's gorgeous open-world game Ghost of Tsushima was a definite reference point for Star Wars Outlaws, according to creative director Julian Gerighty.

After my recent hands-on preview of Star Wars Outlaws, I found the game reminding me quite a bit of Red Dead Redemption - pretty appropriate given the influences the Western films that inspired Rockstar's classic also inspired Star Wars itself. When I brought up that comparison to Gerighty, he said his own open-world reference point had its own parallels to the films that inspired Star Wars.

"It's super interesting because my biggest reference was Ghost of Tsushima, which is more on the Kurosawa side of inspiration than the Western, the John Ford side of the inspiration for George Lucas," Gerighty explained.

"Red Dead Redemption is phenomenal, [because it treats] the world as a world - not as a checklist of activities that are repeated often. But I think that Ghost of Tsushima, what I loved about it was this purity of having a player fantasy and really leaning into it. This is the story, the world, the character, everything fits together with the gameplay guiding everything. That's the fantasy of 'you are a samurai ninja in Japan.' That was one of the guiding lights for this."

The "player fantasy" in this case is that of being an outlaw in the Star Wars universe, an idea that the devs have spoken about numerous times in previous looks at Star Wars Outlaws. Massive aims to turn Outlaws into "the ultimate scoundrel fantasy," and if my hands-on time is any indication, the studio is well on the way to success.

From Kay's wrist tattoo of Nix to ND-5's jacket, Star Wars Outlaws' characters have been designed to be "very authentic" but also "very new."

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.