Star Wars Outlaws Can Take Several Key Lessons from Starfield

Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment are making big promises with Star Wars Outlaws. Of course, as the next big flagship release from a major AAA studio with a proven track record, it was going to have plenty of eyes on it anyway, but add to that the weight of the Star Wars license and the game’s billing as the first proper open world Star Wars game, and the level of excitement and anticipation surrounding the game ratchets up drastically. 

Star Wars Outlaws’ development team at Massive Entertainment would, of course, have taken inspiration from a variety of sources, and they might not necessarily be the ones that you would expect. For instance, you’d think that in terms of aesthetic, tone, and narrative, Outlaws is going to have little in common with Ghost of Tsushima, but as the upcoming sci-fi game director Julian Gerighty revealed in a recent interview with GamesRadar, Sucker Punch’s samurai epic was one of the biggest inspirations for Star Wars Outlaws in terms of its open world.

Then again, there are closer analogs to the kind of experience that Massive Entertainment is looking to deliver that it could have easily looked at as reference. Take, for instance, Starfield, which, given the fact that it launched less than a year before Outlaws’ own release date, is unlikely to have impacted Massive’s development process in any way meaningful way. But as players, we can, at the very least, look at Bethesda’s space faring game, the things that it did right, the things that it did wrong, and how that could impact Star Wars Outlaws depending on if it were doing things similarly or its own way.

Obviously, before we proceed, we’d be foolish not to acknowledge that Star Wars Outlaws is likely to go for a very different kind of gameplay experience than Starfield. Where the latter was the sort of emergent mechanics-driven sandbox that Bethesda has always been known for, Outlaws is going to be a much more cinematic and narrative-driven experience. And of course, with Starfield being a full-fledged RPG that places extreme emphasis on player agency, and Star Wars Outlaws looking to put players in a very specific kind of experience – the classic Star Wars scoundrel fantasy, to be precise – it’s clear that both games have very different design philosophies.

That doesn’t mean their venn diagram has no overlap whatsoever, however. The most obvious similarity between the two is their interstellar setting, which allows players to freely fly around space in their own ship, hopping from planet to planet to moon to space station to what have you, with plenty of dogfighting thrown in for good measure. Arguably, that’s a pretty superficial similarity between the two games – a space game having space flight and combat? Shock and horror! – but Starfield does still serve as a lessor for games looking to land in the same genre.

One thing that Bethesda’s RPG was widely criticized for (one among several, actually) was the fact that it did not allow seamless planet to space traversal, nor vice versa, with space and surface gameplay being separated by loading screens every single time. With Star Wars Outlaws, seamlessness has been promised from the day that the game was unveiled, and though you could argue that the thing happening on screen while Kay Vess’ ship lands on the surface of a planet or moon is effectively a fancier loading screen, not having that break in gameplay can make a big difference, especially in an open world game.

Star Wars Outlaws is also promising a far greater amount of handcrafted play space, based on what we’ve seen of it so far. Starfield did, of course, have handcrafted locations of its own, but there were many who did say that they collectively still did not feel like they were enough, especially since so much of the game’s open world setting was procedurally generated. Star Wars Outlaws, on the other hand, is promising has officially confirmed at least five handcrafted planets and moons that players will be able to explore and visit, with each being described as being as large as 2-3 zones in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey put together- which, for those who haven’t played the 2018 title, is large.

What we’ve seen has looked impressive in terms of environmental diversity as well. From the oppressive interiors of Imperial space stations to the windswept savannas of Toshara, from the bright lights of Canto Bight to the frozen environs of Kijimi, from the deserts and dunes of Tatooine and more, Star Wars Outlaws is touting an impressive level of environmental variety, which should further help sell the vastness of its space setting. That, again, was something that many found Starfield lacking in, so hopefully Outlaws can fare better.

Lifting off from the planets and moons and coming to space itself, this is another area where Star Wars Outlaws needs to walk a different path than the one that Starfield did, because another point that the latter received criticism from many for was how empty its space felt. Yes, there were some random encounters and a few space stations scattered here and there, but by and large, not only was there little actual incentive to be in space, while you were actually there, the moment to moment gameplay felt a little too sparse. If space in Star Wars Outlaws feels sufficiently populated, unpredictable, and most importantly, fun to exist and move around in, it’s going to have a big leg up over Starfield in this particular department.

And then we come to the factions- because we can’t really talk about a Bethesda game without bringing up factions, and as it turns out, we can’t talk about Star Wars Outlaws without doing so either. Granted, the latter is going about implementing them in a much different way. Each faction in the game is going to be a criminal syndicate (other than the Empire, which will instead serve as the law behind the game’s Wanted system), and the focus is going to be on spinning plates and navigating the tricky underworld without making any faction too mad at you- which may be difficult, since the work you’ll be doing with other factions will often very much not be in their peers’ favour.

That’s a decidedly different approach to factions that what we’ve seen in Starfield (or other Bethesda RPGs), where each faction tends to exist independently of all the others (with some exceptions in past titles). That means the decisions you make in a quest focused on one faction is unlikely to impact your standing with any of the other groups, something that decidedly is not going to be true in Star Wars Outlaws. Many have hoped for something more akin to Outlaws’ focus on consequences to player actions in BGS titles and how they handle factions, so there’s reason to be optimistic here as well.

Admittedly, with Star Wars Outlaws, there’s also not necessarily a shortage of reasons to be skeptical, which is something that we’ve brought up a few times in recent features. We’re desperately hoping that all of that skepticism will be a distant memory when the game launches, because the prospect of a great open world AAA Star Wars game where you get to live out your space scoundrel fantasies sounds like exactly the sort of experience that needs to exist in its proper form.

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