Dan Brooks at StarWars.com interviewed Julian Gerighty, Creative Director of Star Wars Outlaws at Ubisoft’s Massive Entertainment, about the new story trailer, the threatening new crime syndicate, and the “dream opportunity” of creating a bounty hunter.
StarWars.com: The new trailer starts off with a meeting among the crime syndicates led by Sliro. He and Zerek Besh were created for the game. What can you tell us about them, as well as creating a criminal organization for the Star Wars galaxy that can stand on its own?
Julian Gerighty: I think it’s a wonderful observation because our job on Star Wars Outlaws was to really focus on the underworld of Star Wars. We worked with Lucasfilm Games on the Ashiga Clan, but we needed another criminal syndicate to make things really interesting between the dynamic — not only between the player, Kay, and the syndicates, but also the syndicates amongst themselves, too. And that’s the meeting that you had a glimpse of during the trailer.
Sliro is really interesting because he’s an extraordinarily wealthy person who’s built a crime syndicate around him, and you can see that Zerek Besh are very different from any one of the other syndicates. So it’s something that, in terms of silhouette or behavior, is going to act extremely different for the player, too.
Zerek Besh is making waves and it’s already taking its place amongst the most powerful crime syndicates in the galaxy. And where he crosses Kay’s path is when a job goes wrong and Kay finds herself on the run from one of the largest bounties ever placed on anybody in the galaxy. And that’s where we discover that dynamic there.
StarWars.com: I wanted to ask about the look of Zerek Besh, because their helmets seem to take inspiration from a welder’s helmet, and they’re armored up. They’re more militaristic than some other syndicate goons we’ve seen. How did you come up with that design, and how might it connect to who they are?
Julian Gerighty: I think that’s the thing. When you have something that is extraordinarily well funded, you can put a lot of time and effort and cost into creating an armor that is able to withstand a little bit more than just regular armor. That was the idea behind Sliro’s invention of this soldier for Zerek Besh.
Once we had that sort of militaristic behavior down on paper, [we moved onto] the iconography and the shape language — you know how important helmets are to Star Wars. We wanted to have something that was very distinctive by itself, as well. So that’s really what we decided to lean into — a very militaristic profile, plus something that was very, very unique and stood out amongst all of those iconic, different helmets.
StarWars.com: Sliro and Zerek Besh are interesting names. Can you talk about where they came from?
Julian Gerighty: You know what, I wish I could. But my only request was that they don’t sound terrestrial. I think these were coined by John Björling, who’s an associate narrative director at Massive. He gave a lot of names, and there are some that nobody responded to, but these two are ones that we really, really thought lived within the underworld of Star Wars. That’s what we were looking for there.
StarWars.com: We’re also introduced to Jaylen, who recruits Kay for a job in stealing from Sliro.
Julian Gerighty: So Jaylen comes in a little bit later on and he sort of head hunts Kay. He sees something in her and he’s almost like a mentor. He’s trying to give her a context, a framework with which to put her talents to work. And you can see that Jaylen’s seen better days. He’s a little bit down on his luck, but he sees an opportunity not only to teach, but to profit from his relationship with Kay.
StarWars.com: Vail is a bounty hunter hired by Sliro to kill Kay. And I’m guessing that means that she’s good at what she does, because he could probably afford anyone. Can you talk about developing Vail with Lucasfilm?
Julian Gerighty: It’s one of those extraordinary opportunities, a childhood dream opportunity of saying, “Okay, what if we came up with a brand-new bounty hunter?” And we wanted somebody who of course had ambiguous morals, but was extremely self-sufficient, extremely professional, extremely single-minded in their approach, but had a little bit of a wider view of things, too. So there are questions that she’s going to ask herself about the situation, of Sliro’s motivations, of all of those things that really bring the character a dimension that we don’t usually see with the sort of normal bounty hunter character trope.
StarWars.com: When it comes to Vail’s design, there’s really none of the typical bounty hunter armor or gear. I thought that was an interesting choice, because it shows you that there’s a human being there.
Julian Gerighty: It came through iteration and it came through what we wanted to tell with the character, as well. I can’t go into too many details about it, but we did want the person behind the bounty hunter to be very much front and center, and we went through a lot of different iterations with more outlandish designs to the one that we finalized on. And I think you see this in the trailer, but she has some robotic elements. Her fingers are mechanical. There are things about her that are very elegant and very well integrated that still make her very much a human and a character to be discovered during the game.
StarWars.com: Another thing I picked up on is the game seems to be, at least partially, about learning the ropes in being a scoundrel. That was an element of Solo: A Star Wars Story that I loved. Was that film a touchpoint in developing Star Wars Outlaws?
Julian Gerighty: A hundred percent. I think all of the Star Wars movies, in particular the original trilogy and Solo and Rogue One, were the founding texts. But when we started working with Lucasfilm, we were always coming back to, “What is a scoundrel? What is this archetype within the Star Wars galaxy?” But even wider than that, there are many scoundrels that are super interesting to look at. Maybe it’s Pirates of the Caribbean or Indiana Jones, but is there that one story that we could own about the coming of age of somebody who’s basically a petty thief that grows up to be a real outlaw. So Solo is a great reference there.
StarWars.com: Since scoundrels do things that can be on the wrong side of what’s morally right, is that a hard balance to achieve? I don’t think you want to create a protagonist that’s going to make the player feel uneasy about their actions.
Julian Gerighty: Well, we always went into it with the sort of creative framework of, this has to be matinee action. So it wasn’t a gritty tone, it wasn’t that sort of fantasy. It was fun, lighthearted, where we wanted the player to have dilemmas, but it was never a punching down. It was always punching up. And with that creative framework, you have something where the player’s always going to feel good about playing one syndicate to go and work with another, or backstabbing both to keep the profits from themselves. There is a joy in that scoundrel roleplaying nature of the experience.
StarWars.com: So on that note, the underworld has been such a big part of Star Wars since A New Hope. But in gaming it’s really been kind of underserved. What has been the most rewarding aspect of getting to define that experience?
Julian Gerighty: For me, it’s getting to know the syndicates a bit better, getting to know Star Wars through the lens of criminal syndicates and the possibilities that that opens up for the archetype — the player fantasy archetype that we settled upon, which is the scoundrel, the outlaw. It is the perfect setup for that sort of player experience. So it’s all of the reputation choices that you are going to be making to balance your reputation between the different syndicates. That, for me, is the possibility space, which is the most exciting.
StarWars.com: And what has been most challenging?
Julian Gerighty: Exactly the same thing. [Laughs.] I think it’s two sides of the same coin. It’s making sure that those reputation decisions that we’re asking you [to make] have an impact, are fun to make, leave the player with a personally very different story from everybody else’s through the lens of their decisions in the different situations that we’re putting forward to them.
Read the interview in full here, and preorder Star Wars Outlaws from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Star Wars Outlaws is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC in Standard, Gold and Ultimate Editions from August 30th, 2024.
Happy gaming!
