Star Wars Outlaws could achieve something few Star Wars games have
Star Wars Bandits feels like the reward for more than a decade of promise for Star Wars video games: the chance to rub shoulders with scum and villains, to show your villainous side and to live as part of the galaxy’s underworld.
Many Star Wars games cast players as the clear-cut heroes of George Lucas’ universe, whether as members of the Rebel Alliance, as Jedi, or as redeemed villains. It’s been far rarer to play as morally gray characters — smugglers like Han Solo or bounty hunters like Boba Fett — especially in recent decades.
It’s not for lack of trying; multiple Star Wars games have tried and failed spectacularly to send players into the dark corners of Star Wars lore. But Outsiders looks like players can finally play in the mud, figuratively speaking.
There is at least one game that fits this description: the mediocre game starring Jango Fett. Star Wars: Bounty Huntera tie-in game that was released months after launch Episode II – Attack of the Clones appear in cinemas. Bounty Hunter was a routine third-person action game from the GameCube and PS2 era that examined the underworld of Star Wars through the lens of the prequel era – not the grim, dilapidated, Empire-oppressed period of Star Wars’ most memorable and beloved film trilogy.
Why was it so difficult to explore this niche of the Star Wars universe? It turned out to be nothing personal — it was strictly business.
About 10 years later Star Wars: Bounty Hunterdeveloper LucasArts revealed a promising new action-adventure game in the same vein. Star Wars: 1313 was revealed at E3 2012 as a third-person shooter starring the mysterious bounty hunter Boba Fett.
Star Wars: 1313 baffled those who saw early demos of it. It was clearly inspired by PlayStation’s Uncharted series, with its mix of exploration, cover-based gunplay, and traversal. 1313 had an expansive cinematic presentation and based on the impressive visuals, many assumed at the time that it was being built with the next generation of consoles in mind: the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
But after an impressive debut showing and an obligatory follow-up appearance at Gamescom 2012, LucasArts went into administration. Star Wars: 1313The game was officially canceled in 2013, after Disney purchased Lucasfilm and the Star Wars franchise, and the company opted to have outside studios make Star Wars games.
Star Wars: 1313 was at one point conceived to tie in with another scrapped Star Wars project: Star Wars: Underworlda live-action television series set in the world of galactic gangsters, bounty hunters and space-faring villains. Footage from both Star Wars: 1313 And Underworld that provide insight into what could have been.
After LucasArts attempted to do Uncharted-meets-Star Wars, another developer tried something similar. In 2014, former Uncharted series game director Amy Hennig started a project at EA’s Visceral Games studio that was to be a “story-based, linear adventure” set in the Star Wars universe. The project fizzled and evolved over time, morphing into an open-world-style adventure where players would switch between multiple “space villains.”
Visceral’s Star Wars game, codenamed Project Ragtag, was briefly announced in 2016 with “early in-game footage” showing a man walking through the streets of Tatooine as Imperial ships hovered overhead. Star Wars: 1313The project suffered a terrible fate: EA closed the studio that made it and handed Project Ragtag over to another team. Hennig left EA shortly after.
In 2019, EA ultimately canceled the project. Ragtag had been in development in various forms for six years, and the game’s cancellation signaled a troubling lack of faith in story-based, single-player Star Wars games.
Hennig is now back in the Star Wars video game business. Her studio Skydance New Media is working on a “rich cinematic action-adventure game with an original story” set in the Star Wars universe. (Skydance first has to finish its World War II video game for Marvel.)
In 2021, Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment announced that they would be trying again with an open-world, story-driven Star Wars game. At the time, Ubisoft co-founder and CEO Yves Guillemot called the announcement “the beginning of a long-term partnership with Disney and Lucasfilm Games.”
That project would eventually be unveiled as Star Wars Bandits in 2023. It promises that players will experience the grittier side of Star Wars as smuggler Kay Vess. She will deal with cartels, Imperial officers, bounty hunters, and other smugglers in the open-world game that will span multiple planets and space routes across the Star Wars galaxy.
Star Wars Bandits seems to exist in spaces that other Star Wars games don’t, borrowing ideas from Ubisoft’s open-world games and the Grand Theft Auto series. Your compatriots in Outsiders are thieves, spies, and members of criminal syndicates. It’s not all dark and seedy, though; Vess has a programmed droid sidekick for comic relief and an adorable furry alien pet to make her more appealing than even the most grim characters we’ve seen from the Star Wars underworld.
Hopefully, Star Wars Bandits will deliver on its promises and continue the current trend of the best Star Wars stories focusing on bounty hunters and cold-blooded assassins, rather than those incredibly boring Jedi.