Star Wars Outlaws might fulfill the promise of multiple Star Wars failures

Star Wars Outlaws feels like the payoff to more than a decade’s worth of promises for Star Wars video games: the opportunity to rub elbows with scum and villainy, to flex your scoundrel side, and to live as part of the galaxy’s underworld. Many Star Wars games cast players as the clear heroes of George Lucas’ universe, as members of the Rebel Alliance, as Jedi, or as villains redeemed. Getting to play as morally gray characters — smugglers like Han Solo or bounty hunters like Boba Fett — is much more rare, especially in recent decades. It hasn’t been for lack of trying on developers’ part; multiple Star Wars games have attempted and spectacularly failed to send players to the darker corners of Star Wars’ lore. But Outlaws looks to finally let players play in the muck, figuratively speaking. There has been at least one game that nominally fits the bill: the middling, Jango Fett-starring Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, a tie-in game launched months after Episode II - Attack of the Clones hit movie theaters. Bounty Hunter was a rote third-person action game of the GameCube and PS2 era that presented the Star Wars underworld through the lens of the prequel era — not the grimier, run-down, Empire-oppressed timeframe of Star Wars’ most memorable and beloved trilogy of films. Why has it been so hard to explore this niche of the Star Wars universe? Turns out it’s been nothing personal — it’s been strictly business. About 10 years after Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, developer LucasArts revealed a promising new action-adventure game in a similar vein. Star Wars: 1313 was unveiled at E3 2012 as a third-person shooter that was planned to star the mysterious bounty hunter Boba Fett. [Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_1_Nvn7DPM] Star Wars: 1313 dazzled those who saw early demos of it. It was clearly inspired by PlayStation’s Uncharted series, with its mix of exploration, cover-based gunplay, and traversal. 1313 had an elaborate cinematic presentation, and based on its impressive visuals, many assumed at the time it was being built with the next generation of consoles in mind — the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. But after an impressive debut showing, and an obligatory follow-up appearance at Gamescom 2012, LucasArts went dark on Star Wars: 1313. The game was officially canceled in 2013, in the wake of Disney buying Lucasfilm and the Star Wars franchise, and the company choosing to let outside studios make Star Wars games. Star Wars: 1313 was at one point conceived to tie into another scrapped Star Wars project: Star Wars: Underworld, a live-action television series set in the world of galactic gangsters, bounty hunters, and spacefaring scoundrels. There’s footage of both Star Wars: 1313 and Underworld out there, offering some insight into what could have been. After LucasArts tried to make its take on Uncharted-meets-Star Wars, another developer tried something similar. In 2014, former Uncharted series game director Amy Hennig kicked off a project at EA’s Visceral Games studio that would be a “story-based, linear adventure” in the Star Wars universe. The project stagnated and evolved over time, transforming into an open-world-style adventure in which players would switch between multiple “space scoundrels.” Codenamed Project Ragtag, Visceral’s Star Wars game was teased briefly in 2016 with “early in-game footage” that showed a man walking through the streets of Tatooine while Imperial ships hovered overhead. Like Star Wars: 1313, the project suffered a terrible fate: EA shut down the studio making it and handed off Project Ragtag to another team. Hennig quit EA shortly after. [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/Star-Wars-Ragtag.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] In 2019, EA finally canceled the project. Ragtag had been in development in various forms for six years, and the game’s cancellation indicated a disturbing lack of faith in story-based, single-player Star Wars games. Hennig has since gotten back into the Star Wars video game business. Her studio Skydance New Media is working on a “richly cinematic action-adventure game featuring an original story” set in the Star Wars universe. (Skydance just has to finish its World War II video game for Marvel first.) In 2021, Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment announced they’d be taking another stab at an open-world, story-driven Star Wars game. At the time, Yves Guillemot, co-founder and CEO of Ubisoft, called the announcement “the beginning of a long-term collaboration with Disney and Lucasfilm Games.” That project would ultimately be revealed as Star Wars Outlaws in 2023. It promises that players would get to experience the rougher side of Star Wars as smuggler Kay Vess. She’ll interact with cartels, Imperial officers, bounty hunters, and other smugglers in the open-world game that will span multiple planets and space routes in the Star Wars galaxy. Star Wars Outlaws appears to exist in spaces that other Star Wars games don’t, borrowing ideas from Ubisoft’s open-world games and the Grand Theft Auto series. Your compatriots in Outlaws are thieves, spies, and members of criminal syndicates. It’s not all dark and dirty, though; Vess has a comic-relief-programmed droid sidekick and an adorably furry alien pet to help make her more marketable than the grimiest characters we’ve come to know in the Star Wars underworld. Hopefully, Star Wars Outlaws will pay off on its promises, and continue the recent trend of the best Star Wars stories focusing on bounty hunters and cold-blooded killers, instead of those incredibly boring Jedi.