Highlights
- Star Wars games set in established timelines, like Jedi: Survivor and Outlaws, suffer from a lack of impact on the franchise's overall narrative due to their protagonists being absent from existing Star Wars content.
- Despite this limitation, Survivor and Outlaws still have compelling stories and characters that make them worth experiencing, even if the outcome is already known.
- There is hope that characters like Cal Kestis and Kay Vess could make appearances in other Star Wars media, and focusing on eras not yet heavily explored in existing media could offer more opportunities for meaningful storytelling in future games.
In the wake of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor was a reveal for Star Wars Outlaws, highlighting a trend in Star Wars games after Disney's commitment to folding Star Wars content across every medium into its canon. Set in points across an already established timeline, the fate of each game's protagonist is a known quantity, and given that neither Cal Kestis nor Kay Vess are mentioned in any other preexisting Star Wars content, their impact on the overarching narrative of the franchise is somewhat doomed to obscurity.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor set a high bar for the franchises' games in the modern era, with a perfect blend of new and interesting characters intermingling with established icons and iconography from the movies. Cal Kestis and the crew of the Mantis are an endearing bunch, and their adventures have the high-stakes, galaxy-hanging-in-the-balance motif that falls right in line with Star Wars' more mainline heroes. But, therein lies the rub to having such weighted implications to Star Wars Jedi: Survivor's story. Fans know the before, during, and after of Star Wars, and nowhere in its established lore is a plot line threaded with the legendary exploits of the fugitive Jedi Cal Kestis outside Respawn's two critically acclaimed games. Unfortunately, Kay Vess is dealing with the same issues.
A Story With a Spoiled Ending is Still Worth Telling
The same superfluous stakes haunt the upcoming plot of Star Wars Outlaws. Regardless of the scope of Kay Vess' journey through the criminal underworld of Star Wars, it is set between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, with its ultimate conclusion already etched in stone. The Galactic Civil War's outcome is locked in, and the largest impact that Kay Vess can possibly have on it is a retconned assistance to the Rebel cause a-la stealing the Death Star plans in Rogue One.
That is not to say that injecting stories between arcs in Star Wars' sweeping narrative is inherently bad. The included example of Rogue One as well as its prequel series Andor prove this, as they are some of the most well-constructed and memorable Star Wars content to date. It does slightly deaden the tension of more stirring moments, knowing that regardless of the upper-hand the Empire has at certain points in the story, they will inevitably be upended by the Rebels, and then once again a generation later by the New Republic.
Star Wars Has Endless Paths to Build Out Its Lore
There is hope that the legends of Cal, Kay, and others will not be lost to the annals of Star Wars obscurity. With the reins of the franchise now driven by Dave Filoni, who seems particularly inclined to throw obscure fan-service characters into his shows, these emerging video game protagonists might pop up in a new medium. There are speculative rumblings that Cal Kestis might even make a surprise cameo in the currently running Ahsoka show. A far-flung theory most likely to prove false, the fact remains that both he and Kay Vess are motion-captured and based on the likenesses of their voice actors, opening the door to their live-action introduction at some point in the franchises' future.
The other solution to this recent sad tradition in Star Wars video games is to explore its eras less concretely defined by existing media. Quantic Dream's upcoming Star Wars Eclipse will explore the route with its High Republic setting, which will hopefully be less constricted to the fringe of Star Wars' grand plot, set centuries before the events of the movies and television shows. Future titles could also be respectively set years after the events culminated in The Rise of Skywalker. It is more likely that Disney will want to develop that era via feature films, but it is possible that those films could be paired with video games more consequential to the franchises' ongoing narrative than they are currently.
Star Wars Outlaws is coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S in 2024.