Why Star Wars Outlaws is the most authentic Star Wars sequel since Rogue One

As a lifelong Star Wars fan, and someone who’s old enough to (just barely!) remember seeing the original film at the Studio Cinema in Bletchley in 1978, there are moments in Star Wars Outlaws that fill me with overwhelming nostalgia. Walking through Mos Eisley, past Stormtroopers with their heavy, standard-issue assault rifles and Jawas selling gently used Astromech droids, was one hell of an experience – but it’s only part of what makes Ubisoft’s game such a faithful Star Wars experience. Like the critically acclaimed sequel Rogue One, it captures so much of the style and significance of the first three films.

There are a few things Massive Entertainment did to achieve this. One key factor is that the designers took inspiration not just from Star Wars , but also from the films and filmmakers that influenced Lucas himself when he was writing the screenplay – they looked to John Ford and spaghetti westerns, and also Kurosawa films. “We had the best first few weeks,” creative director Julian Gerighty says of that research process. “It was a blast, and it was also about making sure that everyone in the core team was on the same page. That’s what we were trying to achieve in terms of tonality. The other inspiration was Rogue One – the aesthetic of it is so influenced by the original trilogy, but with today’s technology. That was super inspiring for the visuals of this game.”

There’s a lot of John Ford in both Star Wars and Outlaws. Kay Vess is the reluctant hero drawn against her will into a larger conflict, a regular Ford theme that Lucas reworked into Luke Skywalker. Ford was also interested in life on the fringes of the American frontier: small backwater towns, seedy cantinas, corrupt lawmakers, a thriving underworld – this is reflected in the Outlaws setting, with its outer rim planets and criminal gangs. The whole Gunslinger quest, in which Kay sets out to help a Tatooine sheriff defend her town from bandits, is a classic Western tale. Meanwhile, the samurai-inspired Ashiga clan, with its complex codes of honor and duty, is a nod to Kurosawa. The game’s entire story, of a rootless warrior trying to find his own path through a vast and devastating war, is the essence of Hidden Fortress – the Kurosawa film to which Star Wars owes the most.

Don’t let the past die

The Trailblazer starship is fired upon by a TIE Fighter in Star Wars Outlaws

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Back to Tatooine

Star Wars Outlaws Screenshot — (Image credit: Ubisoft)

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The tone and energy of the game also draws on the classic Saturday morning adventure shows of the 1930s-50s, like Flash Gordon, Zorro and Dick Tracey, that Lucas loved as a kid and that directly influenced the feel of Star Wars. These adventures were filled with gangsters, smugglers and alien warriors, but they were accessible to everyone. Gerighty says his team spent weeks watching these shows in the early stages of development. “It’s super easy to make the Dark Star Wars game,” he says. “That wasn’t our intention at all. We went back to the original premise that George Lucas and Ralph McQuarrie had: this is matinee action. It’s fun. It’s inspired by the shows from the 1940s that could be scary and action-packed, but they were family-oriented and wanted to bring people together.”

Interestingly, Rogue One also went back to the same wellsprings. “I definitely started by going back to the early roots of Star Wars, especially since Rogue One is so closely tied to it,” says the film’s co-writer Gary Whitta. “It was a great opportunity to go back and look at The Hidden Fortress , Flash Gordon , and George’s other known influences. I even pulled all of George’s student films from the Lucasfilm archives. The general idea was to try to get a real understanding of what made the original film work so well, so that we could imbue Rogue One with some of that same DNA and make sure that the two films felt like they belonged together not just chronologically and narratively, but thematically and emotionally as well.”

But Outlaws also feels intimately related to the original Star Wars trilogy – in one obvious sense, because, set between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi , it brings us right back to the themes, worlds, and visual language of those films. Star Wars began in a post-Clone War era of battered technology and corrupt galaxies surviving on the fringes of Imperial rule. Outlaws is there too. It returns to Tatooine, the heart of the Star Wars mythos, and weaves in iconic characters like Jabba and Lando, and, like Rogue One , makes brief but brilliant use of Darth Vader and the Death Star. Just as importantly, Outlaws uses the aesthetics, iconography, and milieu of the original films: the cantinas, with their shadowy corners populated by assorted aliens; Imperial bases, with their monochrome interiors and walls of blinking computer panels; starship cockpits, with their analog switches and levers. A New Hope, Rogue One, and Outlaws all revolve around physical technology – hard drives and memory banks, computer hacking tools and stolen plans. While Kay is breaking into vaults for loot and data, there are agents of the Rebel Alliance doing the same. Which brings us back to the spies we talked about in the original film.

Kay Vess and Nix fight to escape an Imperial base in Star Wars Outlaws

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

And while the Outlaws universe feels practical and weathered—a stark contrast to the digital precision and opulence of the prequel trilogy—the story also feels grounded. It’s about outlaws and gangsters, and it’s set in seedy bars and on the streets of bustling cities. There’s none of the meandering Jedi, Sith, and Mandalorian mythologies that plagued the Disney TV spinoffs or the concluding film trilogy of the Skywalker saga. What this results in is a world that feels instantly understandable. “We have an incredible team that would really dissect these planets, from demographics to fauna, flora, aesthetics,” says story director Navid Khavari. “We followed the three-second rule, which was so critical to Star Wars: ‘Do I understand what I’m looking at within three seconds? Do I understand the story?’ Whether that’s a setting or a character, it was important.”

The building blocks of the Outlaws story – its structure and underlying themes – take us back to the opening trilogy and its reliance on Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Hero’s Journey, which was a huge inspiration for Lucas. Like New Hope, Outlaws is a story about assembling a crew and embarking on a quest: in the first story, Luke gathers C3PO, R2D2, and Ben Kenobi, and then Han and Leia; in the final story, Kay has Nix, but she brings other experts along, starting with battle droid ND-5. The same was true of Rogue One – a classic crew-assembly story with Jyn assembling a team of disparate warriors. But on a deeper level, both Rogue One and Outlaws return to the absolutely fundamental theme of Star Wars – parental abandonment and rediscovery. Just as Luke must deal with Vader, Kay’s relationship with her unfaithful mother forms the foundation of the story and drives it forward. As Whitta says of Rogue One, “One of the things that’s very clear from the original trilogy is that it’s about a fallen man who is redeemed by the love of, and for, his son. So that’s where the idea of Jyn’s father being one of the architects of the Death Star came from, a similar theme of the daughter redeeming the sins of the father.”

Outlaws isn’t a perfect game, and it’s not a perfect Star Wars sequel either. The stealth action is a little too simplistic, and the story never quite lets Kay tap into the evasive charm and ingenuity of fellow villains Han and Lando. But it does brilliantly carry on the visual style, energy, and atmosphere of the original trilogy as first imagined by Lucas and experienced by a generation of young moviegoers. For me, playing Outlaws is like watching Star Wars on VHS – it’s the closest I can get to being back in the Bletchley cinema, watching the opening lines crawl, and hearing that theme tune for the first time.

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