Star Wars Outlaws Wants to Be Your Dream 'Open Galaxy' First
“I think, in general, making games is really tough. Making open-world games is really, really tough. And making Star Wars open-world games is the next level of difficulty.”
Julian Gerighty, creative director at Massive Entertainment, is up for a challenge. For the first time ever, we’re getting a fully open-world Star Wars video game. It’s been a long time coming, but after back-to-back successes with both The Division and The Division 2, Gerighty was in the mood to take a risk.
“I think this is maybe just my approach, but even if it's scary, you've got to do it,” he says. “You've got to lean into it. What's the downside to pitching a Star Wars game in San Francisco at LucasFilm Games in George Lucas' old office? [...] If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, but you still have that experience.”
Fast forward several years after that meeting and Massive Entertainment is less than two months away from releasing Star Wars Outlaws, a fully realised version of the original pitch described in that office: an open world of dual ambitions – maintain the cinematic legacy of the films, and create immersive scoundrel gameplay that grants you the freedom of the galaxy.
“I think it's taken this long to get an open-world Star Wars game because of how, excuse the pun, massive it is to build a game like this. There are only so many studios in the world who build games of this scale,” says Steve Blank, director of franchise content and strategy at Lucasfilm. “The door is then open for Massive to come to us and say, this is what we're interested in doing, this is the type of game design and gameplay we want. This is what we're thinking about in terms of an archetype.”
“It's the outlaw player fantasy and it's open world, those were the two main pillars that we pitched,” explains Gerighty. “Why open world? Because the outlaw fantasy really needs that to live and breathe.”
“It's a combination of our DNA as a studio, our background, when we think, ‘Okay, what do we have a lot of experience doing?
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