Star Wars Outlaws feels like the fulfillment of more than a decade of promises made by Star Wars video games: the ability to rub shoulders with scum and villains, embrace your villainous side, and live as part of the galaxy’s underworld.
In many Star Wars games, players take on the role of heroes from George Lucas’ universe, as members of the Rebel Alliance, as Jedi, or as reformed villains. Morally questionable characters such as smugglers like Han Solo or bounty hunters like Boba Fett, on the other hand, have become much rarer, especially in the last few decades.
It wasn’t that the developers didn’t try; several Star Wars games have tried and spectacularly failed to send players into the darker corners of Star Wars history. But Outlaws seems to finally allow players to play in the dirt, figuratively speaking.
There is at least one game that meets these requirements: the mediocre, starring Jango Fett Star Wars: Bounty Huntera companion game that months after Episode II – Attack of the Clones come to the cinemas. Bounty Hunter was a classic third-person action game from the GameCube and PS2 era that presented the underworld of Star Wars through the lens of the prequel era – rather than the dirtier, seedy, Empire-oppressed period of the most memorable and beloved Star Wars film trilogy.
Why was it so difficult to explore this niche of the Star Wars universe? As it turns out, it was nothing personal, but purely business.
About 10 years later Star Wars: Bounty HunterDeveloper LucasArts has presented a promising new action-adventure game in a similar style. Star Wars: 1313 was introduced at E3 2012 as a third-person shooter starring the mysterious bounty hunter Boba Fett.
Star Wars: 1313 dazzled those who saw early demos of it. It was clearly inspired by PlayStation’s Uncharted series, with its mix of exploration, cover shooting and traversal. 1313 had an elaborate cinematic presentation and due to its impressive visuals, many assumed at the time that it was built for the next generation of consoles – PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
But after an impressive debut and an obligatory follow-up appearance at Gamescom 2012, LucasArts disappeared Star Wars: 1313. The game was officially canceled in 2013 after Disney purchased Lucasfilm and the Star Wars franchise and the company decided to leave the development of Star Wars games to outside studios.
Star Wars: 1313 was conceived at one point as a tie-in to another abandoned Star Wars project: Star Wars: Underworlda live-action television series set in the world of galactic gangsters, bounty hunters and space villains. There is footage from both Star Wars: 1313 And Underworld out there and offers a glimpse into what could have been.
After LucasArts attempted to create a hybrid of Uncharted and Star Wars, another developer attempted something similar. In 2014, former Uncharted series game director Amy Hennig started a project at EA’s Visceral Games studio that was supposed to be a “story-driven, linear adventure” set in the Star Wars universe. The project stagnated and evolved over time, turning into an open-world style adventure where players could switch between multiple “space villains.”
Visceral’s Star Wars game, codenamed Project Ragtag, was briefly teased in 2016, with “early in-game footage” showing a man walking through the streets of Tatooine while Imperial ships hovered overhead. How Star Wars: 1313The project suffered a terrible fate: EA closed the studio where it was produced and handed Project Ragtag over to another team. Hennig left EA shortly after.
Image: Visceral Games/Electronic Arts via Making Star Wars
In 2019, EA finally canceled the project. Ragtag had been in development in various forms for six years, and the game’s cancellation indicated a disturbing lack of faith in story-based single-player Star Wars games.
Hennig has since gotten back into the Star Wars video game business. Her studio, Skydance New Media, is working on a “cinematic action-adventure game with an original story” set in the Star Wars universe. (Skydance just has to finish its World War II video game for Marvel first.)
In 2021, Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment announced that they would make another attempt at a story-driven, open-world Star Wars game. At the time, Ubisoft co-founder and CEO Yves Guillemot called the announcement “the beginning of a long-term collaboration with Disney and Lucasfilm Games.”
This project would ultimately prove to be Star Wars Outlaws in 2023. It promises to let players experience the rougher side of Star Wars as smuggler Kay Vess. She will interact with cartels, Imperial officers, bounty hunters, and other smugglers in the open-world game that spans multiple planets and space routes in the Star Wars galaxy.
Star Wars Outlaws seems to exist in spaces that other Star Wars games don’t have, and takes ideas from Ubisoft’s open-world games and the Grand Theft Auto series. Their compatriots in Outlaws are thieves, spies, and members of crime syndicates. It’s not all gritty and dirty, however; Vess has a droid sidekick programmed as comic relief and an adorably furry alien pet to make her more marketable than the dirtiest characters we’ve come to know in the Star Wars underworld.
Hopefully, Star Wars Outlaws will deliver on its promises and continue the current trend of the best Star Wars stories focusing on bounty hunters and cold-blooded killers rather than those incredibly boring Jedi.
