Open-world action game Star Wars Outlaws is coming next month, and developer Massive Entertainment has already shown off some of the speeder biking and laser trading in multiple trailers . But recently they’ve been talking a bit more about the player’s dirty travels across the galaxy, including how big some of the explorable planets will be, and what happens if you piss off the Hutts. Basically, there’s a price on your head. Makes sense.
“Your reputation moving in a positive direction unlocks a lot of things for you,” says Mathias Karlson, game director at Masssive, who tells IGN all about the game’s various factions. For example, cozying up to the Hutts, Pykes, Ashiga Clan, and Crimson Dawn can let you enter certain zones without being treated as hostile, or it can unlock landing sites in new locations. It can also earn you discounts with the more rogue merchants, leading to some “exotic rewards.”
“But if you really get on their bad side, that’s another thing you’ll feel dynamically in the game, because they’ll actually send assassins out into the open world to take you out.”
Sounds like part of that emergent gameplay I’ve heard so much about. But it also works the other way around, with good reputation sometimes yielding temporary allies during a fight, Karlson says.
“If for whatever reason you’re wanted and you’re being pursued by the Empire, and you come across a syndicate that you have a really good reputation with at the moment, they might join up and help you,” he says.
That sounds familiar. In the Division series (Massive’s previous work), various factions often get into small-scale firefights with each other, and Far Cry’s warring freedom fighters often get into trouble with the enemy when you’re nearby. But neither of these are tied entirely to a reputation system. The hit squads sound interesting too, but they might remind some of the mercenaries that hunted you down in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, for example. Don’t get me wrong, open-world Star Wars sounds cool. But this is a Ubisoft game, after all, and they’re not the type to deviate from a formula.
Elsewhere in the IGN video, the developers talk about the sheer size of the planets you’ll be tearing across. They compare the size of some of the planets to two or three zones in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and say that you can traverse the playable surface of one of these planets, Toshara, on a speeder bike in about five minutes.
“[It] “That might not sound like a lot,” says Julian Gerighty, creative director at Massive, “but once you start doing it, it’s quite a lot and you’re always getting distracted.”
Some of that distraction may include geographical “easter eggs,” landscapes and locations that fans would love to visit.
“We can focus on the virtual tourism aspect of, ‘Hey, how far is the moisture farms from Mos Eisley to the cantina?’” Gerighty says. “There’s a linear rollercoaster story, a golden path, if you will. And then around that, of course, there’s the open world.
“There’s a very structured intro that leads you to a crash landing on Toshara, a moon that we created with LucasFilm Games,” he says. “And once you’re done with the linear story on Toshara, the other planets open up and it becomes completely nonlinear and you can choose to tackle those [worlds] in the order you want.”
Everything I see about Star Wars Outlaws reminds me how much I enjoy the visual design of Lucas’s madcap interstellar opera. But I’m also under no illusions about the iconography safari that Ubisoft’s open worlds tend to offer, so consider my eyes satisfied, but expectations unchanged. The IGN video, on the other hand, is pretty exhaustive and contains an impressive amount of tidbits, so it’s worth a watch if you’re rubbing your Mon Calamari mitts with anticipatory glee.