Highlights
- Star Wars Outlaws has already showcased 10 minutes of gameplay, exhibiting the developer's confidence in its progress and potential.
- The game will offer narrative-altering decisions, giving players the ability to shape the story and potentially explore the morally grey aspects of the Star Wars universe.
- Outlaws will hopefully allow for unrestricted gameplay, allowing players to engage in activities such as swindling and bounty hunting, providing a refreshing and immersive experience in the Star Wars setting.
Star Wars Outlaws has shown quite a bit of gameplay for not even having a concrete release date yet and only a wide release window of 2024. Many games have been announced before and after Outlaws’ announcement and subsequent gameplay reveal that don’t have footage out, for example, while Outlaws was already prepared to share over 10 minutes. It’s impossible to say how Outlaws’ development might progress between now and 2024, and yet the gameplay reveal makes Massive seem fairly confident in what it has in the oven right now.
One of the more significant portions of Outlaws’ gameplay reveal was the fact that players will have narrative-altering decisions. These decisions may or may not necessitate multiple endings, but it will be interesting to see how actions can be caused or averted depending on which paths players take. Therefore, it’s probably a guarantee at the moment that Outlaws lets players be a scoundrel in the beginning whose experiences throughout the game give them a newfound plight and moral compass. However, because there are choices players can make, Massive can’t shy away from letting players become immoral smugglers whom the galaxy could grow to revere.
Star Wars Has Leaned on the Good Guys for Too Long
Star Wars has tended to feature the light side of the Force in its protagonists exclusively, even when Anakin was a deuteragonist to Obi-Wan in the prequels. Star Wars itself is highly predicated on this balance of light and dark, good and bad, etc., and there hasn’t truly been a story thus far that similarly centered around the dark side. Even with the Force out of the immediate equation, genuinely antagonistic individuals hadn’t been portrayed with more of a morally grey complexion until Andor, which is perhaps why the series was so refreshing despite not having the traditional action spectacle fans have come to expect from Star Wars.
Andor himself is an incredibly complicated character who still belongs outside any rigid box the IP could try to place him in whether he had joined the Resistance or not, and it’s that complexity that Outlaws needs to deem essential for Kay. If Kay is written purely to be a ‘good’ character, all questionable decisions notwithstanding, then it’ll feel like more of the same story that has been regurgitated now since Star Wars’ inception.
Star Wars Outlaws Shouldn’t Pull Its Punches with Players’ Nasty Choices
Instead, it would be fantastic if fans could play out all of their Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption fantasies in Star Wars’ setting with Outlaws letting them swindle Sabacc opponents, hunt bounties, mistreat NPCs, or generally role-play however they’d like. Choices in the game seem to give players a binary option between different ways of handling a situation, but the reputation system Outlaws features could be wonderful if tied to narrative events where the player is pursued by authorities—specifically because they are legitimate ne’er-do-wells, and not because the Galactic Empire is cruel and pursues anybody.
It’s been baked into every fan’s brain that the Empire composes the ‘bad’ allegiance in Star Wars, and still players should be able to cause their own brand of potentially significant mayhem, even if their only goal is to steal credits to survive in a hostile world. If players are scripted to join the Resistance or lean too far toward a lighthearted moral compass, then there is no way that it will satisfy fans of the exciting premise Outlaws promises to deliver.
Star Wars Outlaws releases in 2024 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
