At their most recent Forward event, Ubisoft revealed some gameplay for their upcoming Star Wars game, Star Wars: Outlaws. Unlike other games, you won’t be a lightsaber-wielding Jedi, however. Instead, you’ll be playing a smuggler, and according to creative director Julian Gerighty in an interview with EDGE magazine, that will mean courting criminal factions.
If you’re in their good books, you’ll unlock exclusive quests, special prices at their vendors, access to locked-off areas. But if you’re in their bad books, they’re going to send people to chase you down, and there’ll be consequences in terms of credits, or some sort of monetary punishment, there.
Star Wars: Outlaws takes place in the Outer Rim of the Star Wars galaxy, where the Galactic Empire’s grip is weaker. As smuggler Kay Vess, players will be interacting with them in a wide variety of ways, and every action the player takes with them, according to Gerighty, can influence your relationship with each faction in Outlaws.
You can take contracts, small missions, from a faction to get in their good graces. If you are caught in their territory without their permission, that’s gonna affect it adversely. If you’re seen getting rid of faction members, that’s going to cost you as well. So there’s lots of little levers that you can pull over the course of your adventure, and even the main quest-the golden path, if you will-has decisions you’re going to have to make, about who you’re actually siding with in these quests.
Vess is also not the kind of smuggler that might be able to compete with someone like Han Solo, either. She’s on her own in a big galaxy torn apart by the war between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance, and that leaves her in a vulnerable position, according to Gerighty.
[Vess is] more of a rookie, a petty thief, who ends up in a situation that’s much bigger than they ever expected. This little fish in a colossal pond, dealing with sharks and barracudas.
Considering that the game takes place between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, there’s at least one notable crime lord that Vess will most likely be encountering. However, there are other planets that she can go to as well, that can offer different experiences.
We’re trying to adapt the player experience between each planet or moon that you go to.
Players will travel to a variety of planets, ranging from the snow-covered mountains of Kijimi (from Rise of Skywalker), planets with dense urban metropolises, forested savannas, deserts, or even Imperial bases. However, unlike previous Ubisoft games, Outlaws won’t be completely open-world.
In our past games, we didn’t have vehicles, so in wrapping our heads around the different gameplay possibilities of speeders and spaceships, we’ve had to embrace the limits and constraints of each one. Flying freely above the planet was something that we chose not to do, because it was going to take us a huge amount of effort for very little payoff.
With everything that Massive is putting into Star Wars Outlaws, hopefully the game will live up to the hype when it releases sometime next year on Xbox Series X, Playstation 5, and PC.
