Jedi and Sith are a dime a dozen in Star Wars, but when it comes to charming outlaws with a heart of gold, there’s Han Solo and then there’s everyone else. So creating a memorable new scoundrel was perhaps the biggest challenge facing the team at Ubisoft Massive when they came up with Kay Vess, a young starry-eyed thief and the protagonist of the upcoming open world video game Star Wars Outlaws.
“Kay is dealing with seedy characters and seedy organizations, and has to get by in a world that has never really been on her side,” Star Wars Outlaws director Mathias Karlson tells Inverse, “but Kay is not an evil person.”
To drive home that point, and help distinguish Kay from her scoundrel peers, Outlaws gives her a furry sidekick — admittedly not the most original idea when Han Solo basically comes with Chewbacca attached at the hip — but the game finds a unique spin on that classic dynamic with Nix, a whimsical alien pet and an entirely new species invented for Outlaws.
“Lucasfilm has always been incredibly open to us creating new things.”
“Nix is the kink in her armor that shows there’s a person with a heart beneath that guarded facade,” Karlson says. “But with everything you do in the story, you’ll find that Kay is never punching down, she’s only punching up.”
The dynamic duo at the heart of Star Wars Outlaws is a perfect example of Ubisoft Massive’s overall approach to the game: a light-hearted romp all focused on adventure and discovery. Ahead of the launch of Outlaws, Inverse spoke to Karlson as well as the game’s lead concept artist Samuel De Vos, and Ubisoft Annecy director Thibaut Machin about everything from the design of Nix to working with Lucasfilm on creating new planets for an iconic universe.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
How did you decide what planets would be in the game, and what does that design process look like? Are there certain rules or guidelines you go through working with Lucasfilm?
Karlson: When you’re sitting there with this enormous galaxy of opportunities and things to draw from, the biggest challenge is to know where to stop and where to find the balance between the iconic and familiar, and the brand new. Then there’s things in between that have been featured very lightly before, like Kijimi, which we got an opportunity to bring to life and show in an expanded sense.
Lucasfilm has always been incredibly open to us creating new things. So the relationship with them and the iterations we went through to get to today were never about “you can’t go here, or don’t do this.” It was like “Okay, you want to do that. Let’s talk about how we make that Star Wars.” That was something we couldn’t have done without Lucasfilm.
“Anyone who starts this game should be able to finish it.”
Did you feel any extra pressure during development, with Outlaws being the first true open world Star Wars game? How did you deal with the scope and ambition of the project?
Karlson: The first feeling was excitement. What’s important early in the process is you have to put the fandom a little bit on the shelf — not completely, you can never totally disconnect from it — but you have to take a step back and say, it’s not just about what we want as fans, it’s about what the larger world wants as fans.
It comes down to not making size, as in let’s see how big we can go, the primary marker. Size has no value without substance. We really tried to calibrate size to substance, and at the same time capture the DNA of each place that we're going to.
Of course, we can't make Tatooine feel claustrophobic, because it's not in its nature. It's wide open dunes, it's long sight lines where small disruptions on the horizon will stand out. Whereas the narrow streets of Kijimi need to be a little smaller, because it's cool, it’s dark, and it should feel different.
At the end of the day, we said, “Anyone who starts this game should be able to finish it.” And that informs a lot of things, from accessibility to difficulty settings. Making it as long as possible was never an ambition, 25-65 hours feels very manageable for most people, even those who have kids.
What did the design process for Nix look like? Did you go through multiple iterations, and what real-life animals is he based on? Does Outlaws have more weird alien creatures we can expect?
De Vos: Nix is a completely new creature to the Star Wars universe, ‘merqaal” is the name of the species and it's from an unknown rainforest planet.
With Star Wars, there is always a very grounded aspect to the elements with alien twists, and some of the grounding can be found in many different animals. For example, you will recognize some of the structures on Nix’s head look like an Axolotl. The scales on the back are inspired by Pangolin, the tail is from a Komodo Dragon. The combination of everything gives it that alien twist.
What was really important is the contrast. Nix has that furry belly that’s more on the cute side. You can see that furry belly makes contact with Kay, sitting on the back of her jacket. But then you have the blaster-proof scales on his back, which represent the gameplay opportunity that Nix gives Kay. The main character of our game is that duo.
I am very excited about some of the wildlife that was added by Ubisoft into the Star Wars universe, there’s actually a lot of wildlife that are brand new additions.
“We also looked at some of the original inspirations that Lucas had when creating Star Wars — Kurasawa films, Spaghetti Westerns.”
Machin: Besides the wildlife, there are so many alien species in the game that we’re adding, and it’s great to see how they interact with each other. You have a few people at a Sabacc table and they’re all talking to and understanding each other, but aren’t from the same species. That’s pure Star Wars magic to me.
With Outlaws you have these different factions and syndicates. What were these new factions' designs based on? Did you look at any real-life crime operations?
De Vos: One of the design pillars for Star Wars Outlaws was that we want everything to feel very grounded. We have something called the “three-second rule” where you can make visual context for something in three seconds. For example, when you see a chair, in three seconds it needs to read like a chair, that's quite simple.
Then there are obviously more complex elements like a new criminal syndicate. Ashiga, the new criminal syndicate, is based on Kijimi. something that we've seen a sliver of already. It takes a lot of information from '60s and ‘70s samurai movies, as well as Southeast Asian architecture. The Ashiga clan have been there for generations upon generations, so it's natural for their outfits and architecture, to take a lot of inspiration from that same era from that Japanese culture. So you will see some resemblance with samurai designs in their outfits.
They're also blind, so you’ll see that tactile element present in their clothing, the weapons that they interact with, and even the environment itself.
What was it like working within the original trilogy? What pieces of Star Wars did you look to as inspiration?
Karlson: We went back to, of course, the original trilogy, and we looked at Rogue One, which has a very similar cinematic feel.
We also looked at some of the original inspirations that Lucas had when creating Star Wars — Kurasawa films, Spaghetti Westerns — and really tried to immerse ourselves in the same headspace that led to these films being created.
We came to realize fairly soon that Outlaws should be a cinematic game regardless of whether you're in a cinematic, or flying your ship in space, or riding your speeder on the planet's surface. We went to great lengths to recreate the actual cinematic visuals of the original trilogy by simulating the same lenses — anamorphic lenses that create oval bokeh and lens breathing and barrel distortion, field grain and having an ultra-wide setting, etc. It’s something really powerful because, whatever you’re doing in the game, even if it’s active gameplay, it has that same texture to it as the original films.
