Column | ‘Star Wars Outlaws’ somehow made me fall in love with Star Wars again

But I admire the work of Massive Entertainment creative director Julian Gerighty, who steered the multiplayer shooting series “The Division” to great success. When I heard he helmed this project, I had to pay attention. After playing two hours of “Star Wars Outlaws,” I’m shocked to report that my fire for Star Wars is rekindled.

It’s the simplicity of the concept. There’s never been a single-player Star Wars digital experience that allows you to hang out in its seamless open world. When I walked our heroine Kay Vess into a cantina and started chatting with gang members, the high visual and audio fidelity made a real difference. After all, Star Wars is the franchise that used high-tech special effects to change popular entertainment forever. While I’ve yet to discover whether this game will explore new narrative themes, it’s at least tickling the right parts of nostalgia in ways that don’t feel pandering.

“What we did with the very small core team when we kicked things off was reconnect with what Star Wars meant to us … that feeling when I had that VHS tape that I wore out and playing with the Kenner toys,” Gerighty tells The Washington Post. “Before the internet, before streaming services, before sequels and prequels and TV shows, before you could find Star Wars everywhere, what was my imagination in love with? It was the universe … sorry, I’m not allowed to say universe. It was the galaxy of substance, a galaxy where everything was possible.”

It’s a visceral thrill to ride Kay’s speeder bike across the Tatooine sands. It matters that I have the agency to go wherever I want at the pace I want. The recent Electronic Arts Star Wars Jedi games are excellent but remain linear narrative adventures. “Outlaws” wants us to feel like we live in the world.

This convincing illusion is helped by spaceship travel that rockets your customizable spaceship from the surface to punch through the atmosphere and into the stars. Xbox’s “Starfield,” while a great game featuring a thousand planets, failed to provide an immersive space-faring experience. Gerighty said “Outlaws” learned from another Ubisoft game, “Starlink: Battle for Atlas” in 2018. In that game, spaceships would seamlessly travel between three planets.

“[‘Starlink’] was directed by a friend of mine and we did meetings with the tech team there,” he said. “The issue they had is that the worlds felt a little small, the galaxy felt small, so the solution to that was that we’re not going to build the whole planet. We’re going to focus on smaller areas, make it dense, make it rich and full of handcrafted things that connected with the world and have that sort of funnel out into space, into orbit. And the orbit around the planet is also level-designed.” He adds that the spaceship sequence in “Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare” was another source of inspiration.

Like the political sphere, the video games industry is racked with discourse and misplaced rage around diversity and representation. Ubisoft has been the target recently with its upcoming “Assassin’s Creed Shadows” co-starring the historical Black warrior Yasuke in feudal Japan. Kay, meanwhile, is being picked apart for her appearance.

“Kay is meant to be approachable, a petty thief who ends up barreling through this story, making bad decisions and centered with a lot of humor, humility and toughness, that’s what’s important to me. And she’s beautiful, come on,” Gerighty said. “It makes no sense to me and it’s not worth engaging with. If you engage with bad faith people, there’s no nuance and no possibility of real dialogue. So all we can do is make the best game possible.”

It’s true that Kay feels like a great audience surrogate, stumbling her way through the open world. The player can make alliances and betray them. Faction dynamics like the gang relations of “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” have been missing from the open-world formula for some years, and it’s exciting to see it in the Star Wars setting.

After my preview, I went along with my day at work. When I came home, I was excited to play more “Star Wars Outlaws” and find out what happens when I betray that criminal overlord I just helped, or maybe upgrade my speeder bike. Then I realized that I don’t actually have the game yet — I had caught the bug. It’s a nice feeling to be excited, once again, for a Ubisoft open world game, and for Star Wars.