As a lifelong Star Wars fan, and someone old enough to (just!) remember seeing the original movie at the Studio Cinema, Bletchley, in 1978, there have been moments in Star Wars Outlaws that have filled me with overwhelming nostalgia. Strolling through Mos Eisley, passing Stormtroopers carrying their heavy stock assault rifles and Jawas selling gently used Astromech droids, has been a hell of an experience – but it's only part of what makes Ubisoft's game such a faithful Star Wars experience. Like the acclaimed sequel movie Rogue One, it captures so much of the style and meaning of the first three films.
There are a few things Massive Entertainment has done to achieve this. One vital factor is that the designers drew inspiration not just from Star Wars, but from the films and filmmakers that influenced Lucas himself while he was writing the screenplay – they watched John Ford and spaghetti westerns, as well as Kurosawa movies. “We had the best first few weeks,” says creative director Julian Gerighty of that research process. “It was a celebration, and it was also about making sure that everyone on the core team was on the same track. This is what we were trying to nail in terms of tonality. The other inspiration was Rogue One – the aesthetics of it are so informed by the original trilogy, but with today's technology. That was super inspiring for the visuals of this game.”
There's a lot of John Ford in both Star Wars and Outlaws. Kay Vess is the reluctant hero drawn against her will into a wider conflict, a regular Ford theme, which Lucas adapted into Luke Skywalker. Ford, too, was interested in life at the edges of the American Frontier: small remote towns, dodgy cantinas, corrupt lawmakers, the thriving underworld – this is reflected in the setting of Outlaws with its outer rim planets and criminal gangs. The whole Gunslinger quest, where Kay sets out to help a Tatooine sheriff defend her town from outlaws, is a classic Western narrative. Meanwhile, the samurai-inspired Ashiga clan with its complex codes of honor and duty are a nod toward Kurosawa. The game's whole narrative, of a rootless warrior attempting to navigate their own route through a vast and devastating war, is the essence of Hidden Fortress – the Kurosawa picture to which Star Wars is most indebted.
(Don't) let the past die
Star Wars Outlaws review: "An exceedingly fun Star Wars game that's hindered by poor stealth systems"
The tone and energy of the game also draw from the classic Saturday morning adventure serials of the 1930s-'50s, the likes of Flash Gordon, Zorro and Dick Tracey that Lucas loved when he was a child, and that directly influenced the feel of Star Wars. These adventures were filled with gangsters, smugglers and alien warriors, but they were suitable for all. Gerighty says that in the early stages of development his team spent weeks watching these shows. “It's super easy to make the Dark Star Wars game,” he says. “That was not at all our intention. We went back to George Lucas and Ralph McQuarrie's original breakdown: this is matinee action. It's fun. It's inspired by the serials of the 40s which could be scary and full of action, but they were for families, and they were about bringing people together.”
Interestingly Rogue One also went back to these same sources. “I certainly started out by going back to the early origins of Star Wars, in particular since Rogue One is so immediately adjacent to it,” says the film's co-writer, Gary Whitta. “It was a great opportunity to go back and watch The Hidden Fortress, Flash Gordon, and George's other well-known influences. I even pulled all of George's student films from the Lucasfilm archives. The general idea was to try to get a true understanding of why the original film works so well so we could infuse Rogue One with some of that same DNA and make sure the two films felt like they belonged together not just chronologically and narratively but also thematically and emotionally.”
But Outlaws also relates closely to the original Star Wars trilogy – in a very obvious sense, as with its setting between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, it takes us right back to the themes, worlds and visual language of those films. Star Wars began in a post-Clone War era of battered technology and corrupt star systems surviving on the outskirts of Imperial rule. Outlaws is there too. It returns to Tatooine, the heartland of the Star Wars myth, weaving in iconic characters such as Jabba and Lando, and like Rogue One, it makes brief yet scintillating use of Darth Vader and the Death Star. Just as important is how Outlaws uses the aesthetics, iconography and milieu of the original movies: the cantinas with their shadowy corners filled with diverse aliens, imperial bases with their monochrome interiors and walls of blinking computer panels; spaceship cockpits with their analogue switches and levers. A New Hope, Rogue One and Outlaws are all about physical technology – hard drives and memory banks, computer hacking tools and stolen plans. And while Kay is breaking into vaults for loot and data, there are Rebel Alliance operatives doing the same thing, drawing us back to the spies alluded to in the original film.
And while the Outlaws universe feels practical and weathered – a stark contrast to the digital precision and opulence of the prequel trilogy – the narrative also feels grounded. It's about thugs and gangsters, and set in dodgy bars and the streets of crowded towns. There's none of the meandering Jedi, Sith and Mandalorian mythologies that weighed down the Disney TV spin-offs or the closing film trilogy of the Skywalker saga. This leads to a world that feels immediately understandable. “We have a fantastic world building team that really would dissect these planets, from demographics, to fauna, flora and aesthetics,” says narrative director Navid Khavari. “We followed the three second rule, which was very crucial to Star Wars: 'do I understand what I'm seeing within three seconds? Do I get the story?' Whether that's an environment, or a character, it was important.”
Indeed the very building blocks of the Outlaws narrative – its structure and underlying themes – take us back to the opening trilogy and its reliance on Joseph Campbell's concept of the Hero's Journey, which was a huge inspiration for Lucas. Just like a New Hope, Outlaws is a story about building a crew and setting off on a quest: in the former, Luke gathers C3PO, R2D2 and Ben Kenobi, then Han and Leia; in the latter, Kay has Nix, but she bring in other experts, starting with battle droid ND-5. It was the same with Rogue One – a classic crew-building story with Jyn gathering a team of disparate warriors. But on a deeper level, both Rogue One and Outlaws return to the absolutely fundamental theme of Star Wars – parental abandonment and rediscovery. Just as Luke must contend with Vader, Kay's relationship with her errant mother underpins the story and drives her forward. As Whitta says of Rogue One, “One of the things that's very clear from the original trilogy is that it's about a fallen man being redeemed through the love of, and for, his son. So that's where the idea of Jyn's father being one of the architects of the Death Star came from, a similar theme of the daughter redeeming the sins of the father.”
Outlaws is not a perfect game, nor is it a perfect Star Wars sequel. The stealth-based action is a little too simplistic, and the story never quite lets Kay use the sort of evasive charm and ingenuity of fellow scoundrels Han and Lando. But it does brilliantly continue the visual style, the energy and the atmosphere of the original trilogy as it was first envisaged by Lucas and experienced by a generation of young cinema goers. To me, playing Outlaws is like watching Star Wars on a VHS tape – it's the closest I can get to being back in Bletchley cinema watching the opening text crawl and hearing that theme tune for the very first time.
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