Ubisoft gave us a proper look at Star Wars: Outlaws at its big Ubisoft Forward conference today, showing its latest wise-cracking scoundrel Kay Vess in action. But we’ve also had a bit of extra time with it behind closed doors out in Los Angeles this week, where we saw the new extended walkthrough of a mission ahead of time and spoke with Navid Khavari, Outlaws’ narrative director, and game director Mathias Karlson, who talked us through it in a bit more detail.
As you’ve likely already seen, Outlaws is an “open-world, single-player action adventure game” set in the year between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi – specifically in the aftermath of the battle for Hoth. The basic setup, we’re told, is Kay comes out on the bad side of a job gone wrong, and has to worm her way out of trouble through grinding credits for the gangs of the underworld and attempting to pull off “one of the greatest heists the galaxy has ever seen.”
Star Wars: Outlaws previewDeveloper: Ubisoft MassivePublisher: UbisoftAvailability: Out 2024 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
That setup is a little familiar. Between Rogue One, Solo, and now Andor there have been a few stories about heists and scoundrels and criminal underworlds in Disney’s world of Star Wars, but most of all it’s a remarkably similar setup to that of Project Ragtag, the game Amy Hennig was working on for EA’s Visceral, before it was infamously cancelled in 2017.
According to Khavari, that’s pure coincidence. When asked if that was something Lucasfilm Games or Disney were specifically after, he said quite simply, “No – definitely not.”
“It was really, when we landed on that scoundrel fantasy, and then when we talked to them about that era, it was really just about seeing that – especially Massive, as ‘experts of open world’, this is the bread and butter. This is building world stories, having a hero’s journey, and a protagonist navigating through that open world. Lucasfilm was so excited to jump in and talk about it from that angle.”