StarWars.com catch up with Julian Gerighty, creative director of Ubisoft’s Massive Entertainment to discuss the new story trailer for Star Wars: Outlaws, which it’s revealed will arrive 30th August 2024.
StarWars.com: The trailer shows a lot of different planets. Do you have a favorite location in the game that, hopefully, you can talk about?
Julian Gerighty: I’m doing a lot of play testing at the moment, so a few come to mind. But I think my favorite is Toshara, that we showed in the gameplay walkthrough at Ubisoft Forward. It’s such a combination of a huge city, Mirogana, which is teeming with different, unsavory characters, but also an Empire presence. It’s very dense and very full of different stories. The outskirts of the city, the wildlands with amberine outcrops that are very beautiful, the windswept nature, the settlements that we’ve created there — I’m incredibly proud of its creation and the collaboration that we had with Lucasfilm Games on its genesis. Bringing that to Star Wars, I think, is fantastic. And if you ask me for a second location, I’ve just been playing in Akiva, which was only in the Aftermath set of books before. The atmosphere in the cantina that we have there, called the Alkazar, is phenomenal. It has a huge tree in the middle of the cantina. It’s beautiful. There are patrons there that you will get to know and get to know well. It’s a really special place.
StarWars.com: When you’re developing these locations, and something like the cantina within them, how do you reach the point where you feel like, “Okay, this feels like Star Wars?”
Julian Gerighty: Yeah, I think it always starts with intention. And again, I can’t overstate how much the collaboration with Lucasfilm Games is important in this.
It starts with an intention and this idea that every cantina needs to have an identity. If we are just creating a bar, it’s not that interesting, but maybe an initial inspiration of a Film Noir jazz bar within a space station is going to take on a life of its own. A Korean barbecue joint on Kijimi, using thermal vents to heat up the grills, that becomes really interesting. Working with different things that make it incredibly well integrated within the world with a very different identity from anything that you’ve seen in Star Wars before, but through the lens of something that feels familiar and yet strange. So we are really leaning into what space sci-fi and Star Wars allows us to do. Having a huge tree in the middle of this bar in Akiva, that feels really different and it feels very Star Wars at the same time.
- Hardcover Book
- Barnes, Steven (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 416 Pages - 10/15/2024 (Publication Date) - Random House Worlds (Publisher)
