Highlights

  • Star Wars Outlaws lets players shape Kay's adventure by building her reputation with underworld factions, impacting missions and interactions.
  • Relationships with crime bosses and syndicates affect gameplay in Outlaws, with consequences for betrayals and alliances in the criminal underworld.
  • The Reputation system in Outlaws changes how NPCs interact with Kay.

The developers behind the upcoming Star Wars Outlaws just shared some insight into how the game’s Reputation system will shape Kay’s adventure across the Outer Rim. Almost two years after Ubisoft and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora studio Massive Entertainment announced that it was working on an open-world Star Wars game, they officially revealed Star Wars Outlaws during last summer’s Xbox Games Showcase. This crime caper will be set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and will put players in the role of an aspiring scoundrel trying to pull off the biggest heist in the history of the Star Wars criminal underworld.

To do this, Star Wars Outlaws protagonist Kay Vess and her allies will have to navigate said underworld, making deals and alliances with nefarious crime bosses like Jabba the Hutt across a mix of familiar Star Wars locations and brand-new worlds. Kay can perform various missions for these leaders and their syndicates, building her reputation among them with every task she performs - all while staying one step ahead of any patrolling Imperial forces she may bump into along the way.

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Star Wars Outlaws senior narrative systems designer Alice Rendell shared some major details about the game’s Reputation System during an interview with Game Informer. She says that while the main beats of Kay’s story will remain the same regardless of the player’s actions, Star Wars Outlaws’ gameplay will change depending on Kay’s standing with the game’s three big crime factions. For example, if Kay must steal something from the Pykes while having a bad reputation with them, their enforcers will make her task all the more difficult. However, should she have a good relationship with them, then Kay could walk into their base and take whatever she needs without incident.

Star Wars Outlaws’ Reputation System Alters How Missions Play Out

However, doing this will damage Kay’s standing with the Pykes, which Alice Rendell says is meant to capture the “transactional nature of the underworld” in Star Wars Outlaws. Both she and Lead Systems Designer Matthieu Delisle go on to describe how Kay’s alliances with the factions can and will shift as Star Wars Outlaws’ story goes on, adding an element of strategy to how players wish to approach situations based on their Reputation status.

Star Wars Outlaws’s Reputation mechanic doesn’t just impact how enemies react to Kay in combat, as merchants might offer her special discounts or raise their prices depending on her standing with the faction they are affiliated with. Other NPCs might have special storylines that are only available if the player has a good relationship with a certain criminal group. While Star Wars Outlaws’ Reputation system doesn’t affect the game’s main storyline in any drastic way, it does shape the journey Kay takes to get there, something that players will see for themselves when the game launches on August 30.