Star Wars: Outlaws feels like the fulfillment of over a decade of promise made about Star Wars video games: a chance to rub shoulders with scum and villainy, embrace your rogue side, and live in the galaxy’s underworld.
While many Star Wars games cast players as the clear heroes of George Lucas’ universe, whether members of the Rebel Alliance, Jedi, or redeemed villains, the opportunity to play as characters with moral grittiness—smugglers like Han Solo or bounty hunters like Boba Fett—has become much rarer, especially in recent decades.
It wasn’t for lack of trying on the developers’ part; plenty of Star Wars games have tried and failed spectacularly to send players into the darker corners of Star Wars history. But Outlaws looks like it will finally let players play in the mud, figuratively speaking.
There was at least one game that nominally met these criteria: an average one, starring Jango Fett Star Wars: Bounty Huntera related game that was launched a few months later Episode II – Attack of the Clones hit cinemas. Bounty Hunter was a routine third-person action game from the GameCube and PS2 era that portrayed the Star Wars underworld through the prism of the prequel era — not the bleaker, run-down, Imperial-oppressed era of the most memorable and beloved Star Wars film trilogy.
Why was it so strenuous to explore this niche of the Star Wars universe? It turns out it wasn’t personal—it was all business.
About 10 years later Star Wars: Bounty HunterLucasArts has unveiled a promising modern action-adventure game in a similar vein. Star Wars: 1313 was presented at E3 2012 as a third-person shooter starring the mysterious bounty hunter Boba Fett.
Star Wars: 1313 dazzled those who saw early demos. The game was clearly inspired by the Uncharted series on PlayStation, with its mix of exploration, cover shooting, and movement. 1313 featured a sophisticated cinematic presentation, and given its impressive visuals, many assumed at the time that it was being developed for the next-generation consoles — PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
But after an impressive debut and a mandatory appearance at Gamescom 2012, LucasArts went out of business Star Wars: 1313The game was officially canceled in 2013 after Disney purchased Lucasfilm and the Star Wars franchise and the company decided to allow outside studios to make Star Wars games.
Star Wars: 1313 was at one point intended as a tie-in to another abandoned Star Wars project: Star Wars: Undergrounda live-action television series set in a world of galactic gangsters, bounty hunters, and space rogues. The film features shots of both Star Wars: 1313 AND Underworld there, offering some insight into what might have happened.
After LucasArts tried something similar by combining Uncharted with Star Wars, another developer tried something similar. In 2014, former Uncharted series director Amy Hennig started a project at EA’s Visceral Games studio that was meant to be a “story-driven, linear adventure” in the Star Wars universe. The project eventually stagnated and evolved into an open-world adventure in which players would switch between multiple “space baddies.”
Visceral’s Star Wars game, codenamed Project Ragtag, was briefly teased in 2016 with “early gameplay footage” that showed a man walking the streets of Tatooine while Imperial ships hovered overhead. Much like Star Wars: 1313The project met a terrible fate: EA closed down the studio that was making it and handed Project Ragtag over to another team. Hennig left EA shortly thereafter.
In 2019, EA ultimately canceled the project. Ragtag had been in development in various forms for six years, and the game’s cancellation indicated a worrying lack of faith in single-player, story-driven Star Wars games.
Hennig has since returned to the Star Wars video game business. Her studio, Skydance New Media, is working on a “rich, cinematic action-adventure game with an original story” set in the Star Wars universe. (Skydance must first complete a World War II video game for Marvel.)
In 2021, Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment announced they would be taking another stab at creating an open-world, story-driven Star Wars game. At the time, Ubisoft co-founder and CEO Yves Guillemot called the announcement “the beginning of a long-term partnership with Disney and Lucasfilm Games.”
This project will eventually be revealed as Star Wars: Outlaws in 2023. It promises that players will experience the more challenging side of Star Wars as smuggler Kay Vess. She will work with cartels, Imperial officers, bounty hunters, and other smugglers in an open-world game that will span multiple planets and space lanes in the Star Wars galaxy.
Star Wars: Outlaws seems to exist in spaces where no other Star Wars game has, borrowing ideas from Ubisoft’s open-world games and the Grand Theft Auto series. Your companions in Outlaws are thieves, spies, and members of crime syndicates. Not everything is dim and muddy, though; Vess has a droid companion programmed in comic-book style and an adorable, furry alien pet, which helps make her more compelling than the most sinister character we’ve met in the Star Wars underworld.
Let’s hope, Star Wars: Outlaws will deliver on its promises and continue the current trend of the best Star Wars stories focusing on bounty hunters and ruthless assassins rather than the incredibly lifeless Jedi.
