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We recently had the chance to spend two days at Massive Entertainment’s studio in Malmö, Sweden, playing Star Wars Outlaws and speaking to the team behind the project to get an understanding of what’s going into the game and how it’s all coming together.
You can read our first big feature piece from the trip here, and there’s more to come, but below you’ll find a full transcript of one of our chats, in this case with Associate World Director, Cloe Hammoud, and Art & World Director, Benedikt Podlesnigg, where the two revealed the immense amount of worked put into crafting the game’s locales – including entire bibles of research on Star Wars’ enormous universe and history.
Some comments have been edited for clarity and readability.
The first open-world Star Wars game! Can you walk me through how you built these play spaces to keep them in line with the tone and feel of the films?
Cloe Hammoud: We had a very fruitful collaboration with Lucasfilm Games, which allowed us to nail the authenticity. We thought we knew Star Wars, but you start to be very humble when you actually create content for this franchise, making sure it can be as timeless as the ship or vehicles they (Lucasfilm) created. We did a lot of research. We did a lot of style guides as well to be able to understand, for example, the Imperial shape language, what they were using in their compounds, and what was not allowed in terms of materials or even lighting, for example. So all of these different elements allow us to be as truthful as we could be but we were also eager to add a little bit of new things. And it comes down to having this good balance of new locations, but also iconic locations. I think what also is interesting is the cinematic realism… and making sure the game feels as well a bit like a movie.
Benedikt Podlesnigg: I think it’s taking a step back and looking at it as the big picture. Every single element comes together. It’s not just the Star Wars aesthetic, it’s not just the science fiction or the fantasy elements. It’s the camera, the feel, capturing that original movie vibe with a modern twist. You’ve seen in Rogue One where they did that on the movie side and that creates this entire feeling. One of the most important steps is not to be self-referential. You’re not referencing Star Wars with everything you do, but you’re actually referencing the things that inspired, or the time that inspired, the movies when you create any props or characters or anything. So making sure you create something fresh that is new and not just building on variants of what is already there.
Speaking of, you folks got to create a whole new moon for Outlaws in Toshara. My understanding is that in the lore this is a place that evolved separated from the Republic so does that distinction give you more license to create an aesthetic that does differ from the rest of Star Wars?
BP: The planet Toshal is a large gas giant that Toshara circles around and that creates a very turbulent atmosphere in the space region. Whenever a ship jumps in, if you don’t know how to navigate this very scientific gravitation current, you would have a hard time. You see that in space with a lot of shipwrecks, a lot of broken down ships that are fairly old. Then it gives you the freedom to do a lot with the elements on the surface. If the surface then is like, ‘Oh, they’re settlers that manage to navigate those, but it’s still very hard to get there’ so they might have a time where they can thrive and build up their society. So we created this whole culture around the Toshari (the locals) and here you see all these connections of the space debris in the sky. They use that as building material, so that’s why there’s a lot of metallic buildings on the surface. So they repurposed these materials because there’s very little raw materials that are useful on Toshara because of the Ambrein. And ambrein is, as we designed, is not necessarily useful and that’s why nobody needs to mine it. It doesn’t have value necessarily. Those are these connection[s], that you get to design really something that feels very coherent and very consistent in the approach.
CH: We push a lot the world-building and we create a lot of documentation, not only for the team to understand how to realise and execute things, but also making sure Lucasfilm understand our intentions, and we create a whole backstory for the planet, for the people that live there, for all of these different ingredients, natural materials, but also architecture-wise, to make sure we create something that feels very consistent, and we can create micro-stories on this, create a quest, or an expert has a specific story to tell to Kay and Nix. That’s something that feels very unique.
Toshara or otherwise, we’ve heard that each planet in Outlaws will have some form of city to better facilitate the underbelly/crime world experience no matter where the player goes. How did you go about differentiating these cities so that it didn’t just feel like that repeated open-world content that I think a lot of players are probably a little bit tired of at this point?
BP: Every city has differences… you take Kijimi, it’s on the mountain. It’s very hilly. It’s literally on the summit of a mountain where all the buildings were built with the material of the mountain itself versus on Tatooine, it’s more widespread. It’s more flat. There’s more lower buildings. Akiva was very interesting because Akiva is only described in the books. We read through the books and we did a fantastic job on marking everything out and doing all the research on that. You pick some elements out. For us, it was the water, the rain, how the society deals with that element so the locals are very prone to know when it will start to rain. So as soon as you see somebody running, you will probably know that it will be going to be raining, that’s one little detail.
CH: I think they are all different from one another. I don’t think it was a conscious thing of how we need them to be different, I think we just created different cities. We wanted to create different things, whether it’s in terms of architecture, but also, for example, people will have different clothing because it’s a different types of weather. You will find different crime syndicates, so different opportunities related to vendors, what type [of] items you will be able to buy. There are many different things, and we wanted to translate that. I think players will definitely feel like, Okay, I’m in a new space, a new place. And it’s a different local culture.
Which is such an integral part of the Star Wars film fantasies too of course, but on an open-world scale you have so much more space to fill in and fewer unseen corners of the galaxy than ever before. What went into filling in side streets and homes to make players feel as if they’re truly able to explore the galaxy far, far away?
BP: We spent a lot of time really thinking about every location, especially not just cities, but the open world. We created detailed maps where we know exactly what is happening here and what is happening over here. Or this is a movie location, but looking at it through all sorts of material is like, Okay, how does that connect to this and what could be there? There’s a lot of heavy research going on. Cloe created amazing World Bibles. I wish we could release them as books.
CH: That would be great to be able to publish these materials. I think the gamers will be able to see a glimpse of the thought process that went into that, and many mood boards as well. We also thought about what type of sounds that will be in this environment. For example, if it’s an Imperial hangar, you would hear that type of noise. I think that helped us really paint a picture of, okay, what this space and their functions, how it’s been just used on a regular basis by people.
BP: Knowing the things that might not even be on the surface level that you will see in the game, but that we know about. Like the history of a place, the when, where, and what questions. Answering these for us helps tremendously to recreate all these extra parts of the city.
Star Wars Outlaws launches on August 30th for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. Amazon has pre-orders available for $89 with free release day delivery for Prime members.
James was a guest of Ubisoft with travel and accommodation covered for the purpose of this coverage.
