Star Wars Outlaws offers a "deeply immersive" experience, all thanks to its design as an open world game.
In an interview with Kotaku, narrative director Navid Khavari explained how Ubisoft is utilising its open world experience to build its galaxy. "Focusing on the open world game aspect allowed us to build out a deeply immersive Star Wars journey," says Khavari, explaining that offering protagonist Kay an entire galaxy to explore helped create a main character who's deliberately out of their depth: "we wanted to create a scoundrel who has never experienced anything like this before. She hasn't figured it all out yet, and doesn't have all the right answers all the time."
That means putting Kay in difficult situations, and that means taking her to a wide variety of locations. Khavari explains that you'll travel to "dense cities bustling with activity," as well as "cast, mysterious, and stunning open environments." Ubisoft showed some of those off last year, when it debuted Star Wars Outlaws, documenting Kay's journey from foot, to speeder, to spaceship.
The ability to move between multiple different modes of transport with ease will be a core part of Outlaws - Khavari suggests that "one of the core parts of the scoundrel fantasy is having your own ship and that essentially being your home." And that ship remains a key part of Outlaws' biggest form of exploration: Space.
"Space represents a super lucrative yet very risky experience for any outlaw," Khavari explains. "If you go off the beaten path, your willingness to explore will bring surprises as well. So you can go from taking on a contract to steal an Imperial shipment, but then get distracted on your speeder and head off into the Toshara savannah in search of an artifact, and the game will reward your curiosity.”
We've already learned a decent amount about Star Wars Outlaws since its reveal this summer. Debuted as part of Ubisoft's summer conference offerings, the game is set between the events of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, a time when the Empire is simply too busy to properly police the actions of lowly scoundrels. Ubisoft has already explained how its open world is designed to offer "full freedom of approach," but that won't apply to the game's finale - Star Wars canon means there's no room for multiple endings, so you'll have to make the most of that freedom during the main story.
Prepare for a life on the run with our list of the best Star Wars games.
My next Metroidvania kick is an ingenious mix of Zelda-like exploration, twin-stick combat, and pitch-perfect controls – with 97% positive Steam user reviews
Stellar Blade keeps fixing things that bothered me when I reviewed it – now including "input time for basic attacks, as well as the timing of blocking and parrying"
