Star Wars: Outlaws arrives 30th August and Entertainment Weekly take a closer look at the characters of the game with Outlaws creative director Julian Gerighty who walks us through the leads, the star voices (including Dee Bradley Baker as Merqaal sidekick Nix) and the fact that the game has plenty of humour and lightness within the action.
Just one week before the COVID-19 lockdown began in March 2020, the team at Massive Entertainment pitched their idea for a brand-new Star Wars video game to Lucasfilm Games in San Francisco. It wasn’t your typical Jedi origin story, nor was it the classic “Rebels versus Empire” tale that gamers played before. It wasn’t even a LEGO remake. Instead, it was a heartfelt and harrowing story of a rookie scoundrel who must fight to survive amongst the galaxy’s most ruthless crime lords and, hopefully, manage to pull off one of the greatest heists of all time along the way.
The idea became Star Wars Outlaws, the franchise’s first-ever open-world video game, soon to be released by Ubisoft on Windows, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S on Aug. 30. Set in the one-year gap between the events of 1980’s Empire Strikes Back and 1983’s Return of the Jedi, the single-narrative game follows Kay Vess (Humberly González), a plucky street thief from Canto Bight, and her Merqaal sidekick Nix (voiced by Bad Batch alum Dee Bradley Baker). Their lives are forever changed when their decision to steal a spaceship from the notorious crime syndicate Zerek Besh results in a death mark placed upon their heads.
“The pure scoundrel fantasy really takes flight when the galaxy is in chaos,” Outlaws creative director Julian Gerighty tells Entertainment Weekly. “The Rebels have lost the battle of Hoth and they’re on the back foot. The Empire is taking more and more power in the galaxy, but that creates a space for criminal activities and criminal syndicates. That’s really the time of the underworld.”
