Star Wars: Outlaws’ dev talks creative control, accessibility, and the fluffy force

In just over a week, Star Wars: Outlaws is set for release. In this open-world adventure game, you play as Kay Vess, a lovable criminal working on the outskirts of space with her furry companion Nix, trying to complete that one last big job that ensures her ability to leave this life behind.

At Gamescom, we sat down with Julian Gerighty, the game's creative director, to discuss some behind-the-scenes details as the release fast approaches.

Given that Outlaws is one of several Star Wars games either recently released or on the horizon from different publishers, I asked how the game was pitched to Lusasfilms and what Gerighty thinks sets Ubisoft’s entry apart from the competition.

“Working with Lucasfilm Games, one of their principal roles is to make sure that every game that exists embraces a different fantasy of Star Wars, and for us, since we pitched them, ‘open world,’ and ‘The Scoundrel Fantasy,’ the outlaw fantasy, that was our lane. And they were super supportive of that from the beginning. So, the only open-world scoundrel experience is going to be this open-world scoundrel experience. That makes things super, super easy for us to embrace and to really lean into.”
Gerighty clarified that gameplay genre and narrative fantasy role were indeed where the pitch began.

“One hundred percent that pitch was the approach. We started off with a very small team around four years ago. We sat down and started talking about what Star Wars meant to us because I think I'm a huge fan of Star Wars. So, this was a treat to be able to work on this. We started talking about the characters, the people that really connected with us when we were kids. The inner 7-year-old, you know, 15-year-old, and we all agreed that the scoundrel character, the Han Solo character, you know, surfing the galaxy in a foolish ship with his best friend Chewie, a dog on two legs, was exactly, you know, the character that he connected with.

“So it comes from that player fantasy of, okay, scoundrels, and then we're good at open worlds. We know how to make open worlds. Open-world scoundrel fantasy, and what does that mean going forward? And it was Lucasfilm Games who came up with the era, the choice of being set right in the middle of the original trilogy."
Beyond that, I was curious about the mechanical role of Nix, Kay’s lovable furry friend, in helping to extend the Star Wars fantasy to a non-Jedi protagonist.

“So, we really came up with Nixx as a solution for a gameplay problem. Kay, your character, is not a Jedi. She doesn't have these supernatural powers. What she does have is this abstract; it's … it's a long arm. It's Mr. Fantastic. That takes the form of this creature. So you're always in control of Nyx, and you use them to sneak, distract. to turn off cameras, to attack, back grenades, all of those things.” 
Something that stood out in Star Wars: Outlaws is the impressive strides that the developer made around accessibility options for disabled players when compared to its last title: The Division. Ubisoft as a publisher has a history over the past several years of making a notable effort to make their games accessible to as wide a range of disabled gamers as possible, but Outlaws seems set to go a step further by incorporating things like customizable accessibility presets for common disability categories, and an impressive range of customization options.

“We went into it with a philosophy of ‘this is very different from The Division,’ which course we worked on at Massive Entertainment, and very different from The Division 2, so we wanted anyone to be able to pick up this game and be able to enjoy it and finish it, no matter their skill level or if they have disabilities. So we sketched out what we wanted to do in terms of gameplay, pieces of gameplay like pathfinding clues, the difficulty of certain puzzles, and removing the difficulty of certain puzzles.

“So that's on the just skill and challenge level. Of course, colorblindness. Of course, hard of hearing. So we have subtitles and audio descriptions of each of the cinematics, and we have a lot of different things that help people really get into whatever we're doing up on screen.”
When asked if they had further accessibility plans for Outlaws or any future games from the studio, Gerighty seemed very positive about the future.

“We'll keep on adding to the game, basically. Of course, you're constrained by what you can do for the launch, but we're, we're really passionate about making it an extremely accessible experience," he said. "In terms of the future, the ease of creating audio descriptions for cinematics is really, really cool. I mean, it's something that we'll never not do in the future. I think it's such a great way to be super inclusive to everybody that it's just worth doing.”

You can pre-order Star Wars: Outlaws on the Epic Games Store now. It releases on Aug. 30. In the meantime, make sure you check out our hands-on with the game as well.