Star Wars Outlaws looks like the best thing Ubisoft has made in years

pcgamer.com:

If you ask everyone in the room to describe their perfect vision for a Star Wars game, you're gonna get a lot of answers. Many would, I wager, basically describe Star Wars Jedi: Survivor with its lightsaber power fantasy, memorable characters, cool force powers, and satisfying stormtrooper amputation.

My pitch would sound a lot closer to the game that Ubisoft announced yesterday at the Xbox Games Showcase, Star Wars Outlaws—a sandbox action game starring a Solo-like scoundrel-for-hire on the lawless planets of the Outer Rim. No, it's not the Mandalorian game that I was quietly crossing my fingers for, but a completely new character instead: Kay Vess, a young outlaw getting her start in the criminal underworld.

Outlaws takes place in the gap between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. For those who haven't kept up perfectly with the barrage of Star Wars stories lately, that places Outlaws something like a decade after Jedi: Survivor and a few years before The Mandalorian. It's developed by Massive, the Ubisoft Sweden branch that's also making Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, previously made The Division 1 and 2, and in more ancient times, the 2007 RTS World in Conflict.

I got an early look at the demo that (I suspect) was just shown during the Ubisoft Forward stream and jotted down some key observations:

The ship flying sure was a surprise for me. It looked like the process of taking off and entering space was automatic, so you probably can't fly close to the ground like in No Man's Sky, but Ubi says space exploration is a big part of Outlaws (something of a theme at not-E3 this year)—there are secrets to find in the void, and space combat varies from «intimate dogfights» to larger scale battles.

The brief