In a pretty fundamental way, Star Wars Outlaws has a different feel from most every other Star Wars game I’ve ever played. More than any other Star Wars game, it puts its focus on what it might be like to live in that universe, struggling to eke out a living while constantly navigating around people who are more powerful, better connected, and more dangerous than you are.
I recently played around four hours of Star Wars Outlaws during a preview event that put a lot of focus on exploring its open world as a scoundrel type of character. You play as Kay Vess, a thief who sets about trying to establish herself in the criminal underworld of the Outer Rim. What was striking was how much Kay feels like a regular person who happens to be wandering around in Star Wars. She’s a capable thief and a bit of a gunslinger at times, but she also dies fast from blaster shots, she’s not particularly smooth in conversations with scary people, and she’s very much on the run from power brokers who want her dead. Kay gives Outlaws a vibe that’s pretty distinct from the Empire-fighting, lightsaber-wielding protagonists we’re used to in Respawn’s Jedi games, as well as the exceptionally talented soldiers and pilots of Battlefront and Rogue Squadron and well-equipped bounty hunters in The Old Republic.
Making Kay something of a regular person in the Star Wars universe, who starts from nothing and has to work her way up, is a choice that gives developer Massive Entertainment an opportunity to explore a different aspect of the Star Wars universe than players are used to seeing.
“The best creations, the best creativity, is coming from a place of writing what you know, designing what you know, creating what you know,” lead writer Nikki Foy told me in an interview. “So when you can look inside yourself–we’re all just regular people. So it’s really easy to empathize with Kay. And I think there’s a fantasy with Luke, Leia, and Han, where it’s like, ‘Oh, I want to be like that, that’s so cool. I wish I could use a lightsaber. I wish I could lift rocks with my mind. But I can’t. So how do I fit into this?’ I think that there’s such a fun opportunity to get to view things that way.”
Foy said the writers working on Outlaws were united by the common experiences that are part of Kay’s story and that they could relate to.
“I remember early on when we were writing Kay, being in the writing room with (narrative director Navid Khavari), and all of our writers, and Navid saying at the beginning of Kay’s journey, ‘I don’t know if you guys have experienced this,’ and many of us had. ‘Remember being hungry as a young kid and not knowing when you’re gonna get to eat–get to that place when we start writing Kay so that we can all really tap into that feeling of, how do we get out of this situation? What’s next for us? And then once you have this heart and this emotional core, put it into this fantastical galaxy, put it into this world that you love and know.’ And really, starting from that point was how we tried to center all of our relationships and stories.”
Kay Vess is a pretty good thief and a bit of a gunslinger, but she is also a regular person with no special powers.
Outlaws takes place at a very specific moment in the Star Wars timeline, which also informs some key elements of the story. It’s set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, when the Empire has just struck a crushing blow to the Rebellion at Hoth, scattering the rebels across the galaxy. With the Empire’s view squarely on finishing off the rebels, it’s a moment when the criminal underbelly of the galaxy is able to flourish.
At least in the preview, that made Kay feel like one small person trying to navigate between much bigger power brokers. On Toshara, the first planet we visited during the preview event, the local Imperial governor is being paid off by the Pykes, a criminal syndicate. The missions I completed largely had to do with either enhancing that relationship on behalf of the Pykes, or messing it up so other criminals could get a leg up.
“This is such an interesting time in the Star Wars galaxy,” Foy said. “There’s just been this devastating battle on Hoth, and the Empire and the rebels are so focused on what’s going on there that everyone else in the galaxy, all the regular people who are just trying to live their lives and carve out a space for themselves, how do they function with that? …And for Kay, just a regular person who has been dealt this hand that she doesn’t want to play, is trying to fight against an entire galaxy that doesn’t care about her. She’s not going to save the galaxy. She’s just trying to survive. And I think that timeline for that character is perfect for that story, of just a regular person who needs to be smart. And she fails forward a lot and just tries to figure it out. To me, in the whole timeline of Star Wars, that’s the moment where that character can shine the most.”
The Empire is a big presence in Star Wars Outlaws, but are more like cops to be avoided than a military to fight.
While Massive seems to be emphasizing a different kind of Star Wars experience than we might be used to, it still sounds like Kay’s story might intersect with some of the major characters we know to be around during this period. Massive developers mentioned Lando Calrissian a few times during the preview event–he wasn’t in the portion I played, but it sounds like he’ll show up sooner or later.
Foy wouldn’t give any details about the story that might amount to spoilers, but she confirmed that Outlaws has characters and moments that fans will recognize, and that Kay is “part of the galaxy puzzle.”
And as is usually the case with Star Wars games, we can expect to see a lot of familiar sights. The preview gameplay’s first portion took place on Toshara, which is a new planet created for the game, but a later chunk took place on Kijimi, a planet that appeared in The Rise of Skywalker. Foy mentioned Tatooine, and we know that the Hutt Cartel, Jabba the Hutt’s criminal enterprise, is one of the major factions in the game, as well.
But while Outlaws will venture to familiar places with familiar sights and reference elements of the larger universe players might expect, it seems as though Massive might give them a different spin than what we’re used to.
The first planet we visited, Toshara, was huge and full of people just living life in the galaxy.
“Our instinct is always to think about those things first, where it’s like, ‘Okay, we’re on Tatooine–what are we going to see that we, as fans, want to see?’ So when we are working with that, it’s a really fun challenge to be like, ‘What does Kay see?’ What is different about the galaxy is that we’re seeing it through Kay, how Kay experiences these things, how Kay sees them,” Foy said. “And I think a big part of making an open-world game is, for me, when I think about watching A New Hope for the first time, and seeing Luke walk into the Mos Eisley cantina and there’s just like 100 aliens doing their own thing, that’s so exciting. There’s so much curiosity. What are all these guys? What are all these beings? What are their lives? How did they get here? And to remember that feeling and write stories for this game where you will walk into the Mos Eisley cantina and see characters, and if you are interested in them, Kay can interact with them, and you can explore that curiosity. And to me, that’s the thing I’ve always tried to keep in my mind, as we’re talking about things as we’re pitching things is like, ‘What about the wonder of watching [The] Empire [Strikes Back], [Return of the] Jedi, A New Hope, can we integrate into this?'”
Though my time playing Star Wars Outlaws was only a few hours, it did feel absolutely enormous, and conveys a take on Star Wars that was more organic, alive, and lived-in than most of the games I’ve played in the universe. We’ll have to see how well it captures the sense of being a small part of a huge galaxy far, far away when it launches on August 30.
