Star Wars Outlaws is aiming to let us step into the first-ever truly open-world action adventure in the Star Wars universe. Full to the brim with different planets, diverse environments, various cultures, and iconic locations, it's a playground that begs to be explored. During my time at developer Massive’s studio in Malmo, Sweden, I got the chance to hear all about the approach the team took to make this open-world a reality, and it certainly sounds ambitious. But it's also what makes the chance to experience the galaxy far, far away in the shoes of up-and-coming scoundrel Kay Vess so enticing.
Early on, the team immediately recognized that in order to truly deliver an open-world, they would have to let us navigate through one of the key ingredients that makes Star Wars, well, Star Wars. Space.
"Being the first truly open world Star Wars game, we of course imagined the different places we can go to, the different locations," game director Mathias Karlson says of the early stages of development. "But we instantly realized that the true Star Wars open-world experience needs to go beyond planet surfaces. They [the planets] are completely central to the variety, but so is space. Space is an equally important part of the Star Wars world and experience. So surrounding these planets are orbital regions, space regions. And we can therefore, as part of this space experience, put one of the most iconic moments literally at your fingertips: hyper driving, hyper jumping between these different regions at will. When you arrive, this is not an authored, roller coaster ride where we tell you when to go to space and how to go through it. It's real time space flight."
Familiar and new
"We wanted to have a mix of familiar planets, but also brand new creations."
Cloé Hammoud, associate world director
I've only gotten a small taste of space flight from my hands-on time with Star Wars Outlaws, but it certainly left me eager to see just how much freedom we'll be afforded in these "space regions". But being able to fly through space at will is just one side of the open-world scoundrel fantasy Star Wars Outlaws is promising - on the other side is planetary exploration.
As associate world director Cloé Hammoud highlights, the Star Wars universe is home to "more than a million worlds", so the first task for the team was deciding what planets Outlaws would bring us to. Using the concept art of Ralph McQuarrie who worked with George Lucas on the original trilogy, art and world director Benedikt Podlesnigg outlines the rules of the design the team followed. These rules draw from movies - such as strong silhouettes, the "3 second rule" (which is how long it should take you to understand what you see), and the underworld feel they wanted to capture. In what Podlesnigg describes as the "cookbook recipe for worldbuilding", the team considered both the familiar and the unfamiliar when it came to determining which worlds in the Outer Rim would make a good fit for Kay's adventures.
"When we started working on Star Wars Outlaws, it became really clear to us that we wanted to have a mix of familiar planets, but also brand new creations to provide not only diverse environments for players, but also a sense of visual progression", Hammoud says. "To leverage the underworld feeling we needed to have a right balance between human spaces, but also natural spaces.
"We needed planets to have at least one city to support this underworld feeling and opportunities," Hammoud adds. "These spaces needed to be large enough to encourage exploration, to [be able to] take your speeder, but also [for] traversal and on-foot exploration to support a wide range of open world activities. We also wanted to capture the scoundrel fantasy because this is core to our game, and each planet needed to accommodate the presence of criminal syndicates, but also the Imperials because the Empire at this time is at its peak."
Working closely with the narrative team, Hammoud explains that they also put a lot of consideration into what would support the kind of journey Outlaws is trying to tell, which also informed the number of planets needed to explore Kay's scoundrel story. In Star Wars Outlaws, the open-world will be made of "five very distinct hand-crafted worlds to offer new experiences", which we'll be able to navigate to and from as we jump from cities to landscapes and space in our Trailblazer ship.
Inspirations
"It was critical for us to not be too self-referential, and not only look at the movies and the original trilogy"
Cloé Hammoud, associate world director
The five planets in Star Wars Outlaws are a mixture of the familiar and unfamiliar. Tatooine, for example, will be familiar to Star Wars fans far and wide for its famous appearance in the original trilogy, while the moon world of Toshara is a new creation to the Star Wars canon made in collaboration with LucasFilm. We'll also be going to planets that have made appearances in other media, such as the frozen world of Kijimi that appeared in Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker, along with the opening location of Cantonica which is featured in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The team have also brought to life the jungle planet of Akiva, which has so far only appeared in the novel Aftermath.
While Outlaws is set between the events of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Kay's journey presented Massive with an opportunity to explore Lucas' inspirations and go deeper than the movies to bring to life both established and fresh locations.
"We asked ourselves, how do you create worlds that feel authentic to Star Wars, that resonate with fans, because it has a strong community and we wanted to acknowledge that, but also bring something new and fresh to this franchise?", says Hammoud. "So it was critical for us to not be too self-referential, and not only look at the movies and the original trilogy, but also we wanted to do the exercise of going deeper and really ask ourselves what inspired George Lucas when he created all of these worlds, these characters, and these locations?"
Hammoud speaks at length about how George Lucas was greatly inspired by the Wild West and Spaghetti Westerns, which informed the frontier-style design of Tatooine. With this in mind, Massive decided to bring to life some new locations on the desert planet, such as the Wayfar station, which has a lot of frontier iconography and acts as a rendezvous point for traders and farmers. The Sheriff's office is also another spot we'll venture to as Kay, which we first saw in the latest showing of Outlaws during Ubisoft Forward this year.
The planet of Kijimi, which was originally inspired by samurai movies such as The Hidden Fortress, sets the scene for the introduction of the new crime syndicate: The Ashiga clan. The clan was brought to life in collaboration with LucasFilm, whose design is heavily influenced by feudal Japan and the creative impact samurai movies had on Lucas.
With a wealth of different inspirations ultimately leading to the make up of the open-world setting, I'm curious to see how Massive brings it all together. I've still yet to experience how varied the Outer Rim will actually be in Star Wars Outlaws, or get a true sense of the amount of freedom we'll have as we go from place to place directly, but I hope the adventure can pull it off. After all, the prospect of getting lost in the Star Wars universe, delving into the dangerous side of the galaxy, and trying to make it through unscathed? Well, that's a more than exciting one.
Star Wars Outlaws is coming to PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5 on August 30, 2024.
