This Isn’t the Star Wars We Need Right Now
2024’s definitive Star Wars experience may very well be YouTuber Jenny Nicholson’s wildly popular, four-hour review of the late Galactic Starcruiser, better known as “the Star Wars hotel.” Nicholson’s exceedingly thorough takedown covers a lot of ground, largely casting the immersive experience as an effigy to corporate hubris, but it’s also the clearest summation of where Star Wars is right now: a brand that is too big to fail yet seems to be failing all the time.
Star Wars Outlaws doesn’t bear the massive weight of expectation that a $3,000-plus per-person role-play hotel does, but there is some pressure. It’s billed as the first open-world Star Wars video game, the kind of game that lets players wander around and make their own fun in addition to following an action-packed story suitable for blockbuster tastes. It is kind of strange that a Star Wars game has not taken this shape before — it’s been 23 years since Grand Theft Auto III popularized the open-world genre, enough time for eight whole Star Wars films to premiere, along with a staggering 13 TV series (14 once Skeleton Crew arrives in December). The expectations for what the ideal Star Wars video-game fantasy even is couldn’t be more diffuse right now, as the post–Skywalker Saga franchise casts about for purpose in movies, television, books, and theme parks alike.
Perhaps this is why Outlaws is very clear in its goal: It’s a Han Solo simulator, set in the corners of Star Wars characterized by scum and villainy. Or more accurately, it’s about becoming someone like Han Solo. The game casts you as Kay Vess, a small-time crook living in the seedy slums just outside the opulent casinos and estates of Canto Bight, which you might remember as the setting of The Last Jedi’s most divisive subplot. When Kay’s first big job goes sideways, she makes an enemy of one of the most powerful kingpins in the Outer Rim and is forced to flee her home world and make a name for herself among the cartels and crime syndicates abroad. Eventually, the story takes a familiar shape: Kay must become a scoundrel of renown so she can put together a team for one impossible heist and burn the man who burned her. It’s a revenge story by way of a heist thriller and a good spine for a video game.
It’s also one that’s notable for what it excludes: Jedi, Sith, and the Force are not part of Outlaws purview … Instead, it focuses exclusively on the scoundrel fantasy which mostly translates to “normal video-game shit.” You do a lot of climbing, a lot of sneaking, a lot of blastin’. You get a cool speeder bike and a spaceship, and get to do some chasing and dogfighting on each. It cannot be stressed enough how much of a normal-ass video game Star Wars Outlaws is.
Part of this can be explained by where the game comes from. Developed by Massive, a shop under the huge global umbrella of French publisher Ubisoft, Star Wars Outlaws is descended from a family of studios notorious for a formulaic approach to open-world game design honed over many games in the Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry franchises. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just means the idiosyncrasies of an Ubisoft open-world game aren’t readily apparent until you are well into it, seeing flashes of personality within the well-defined lines of formula. In Outlaws, this would be the way all the Star Wars accoutrements are implemented.
I don’t want to discount that special Star Wars sauce. Nearly 50 years of John Williams’s music cues and audibly indelible blaster splats have conditioned us, culturally, to feel as if we have returned to a womblike state whenever we hear the thrum of a lightsaber or see stars streaking as a ship punches it to light speed. Star Wars Outlaws does this Star Wars stuff quite well and can be fun when it has its own ideas to contribute. I’m particularly partial to Kessel Sabacc, a card game that’s kind of like blackjack, if blackjack also had Uno house rules designed to make everyone else hate you. It might be the best thing in the game. (Though it would be better if you could play against real people and not just in-game characters.)
And yet Outlaws can’t shake that feeling of just being kind of generic, which is a death knell for Star Wars — and the source of its modern ills. It’s no secret that Star Wars is dying from exposure, as a franchise once accompanied by great ceremony became slowly reduced to content grist. Video games remain one of the few arenas full of genuine potential for Star Wars, yet it remains hamstrung by realities of modern franchise management and big-budget video-game development, which result in products that are aggressively safe (for brand safety) and rare (because game development is expensive and slow). There are some bright spots — last year’s Star Wars Jedi: Survivor was an exceptional action game that found ways to marry the aesthetic pleasures of Star Wars’s signature space wizards with badass combat to make for one of that year’s best blockbuster games, and Outlaws itself isn’t without its charms.
It’s just that, once you play Outlaws long enough, the Star Wars charm wears off. You start to feel like you’ve done this all before. You likely have done this all before, in other, more interesting games. Just like you’ve probably seen better streaming shows or been to better hotels.
Toward the end of her sprawling video, Nicholson acknowledges that her negative review will likely not go over well for a vocal contingent of viewers. She attributes this to the sunk cost fallacy of fandom, years of investment in a brand translating to a team-sport mentality, and a blinder for reality. From here, Nicholson transitions to why it all matters: Disney knows how invested these fans are and has spent years taking them for a ride. What used to be complementary is now an up-charge, what used to be fueled by actors and human talent is now automated and impersonal, and what used to be special is anodyne and mundane. But people will pay.
Perhaps you find this comparison needlessly harsh. A $70 to $130 video game, while a pretty penny, is not meant to clear the same bar as a luxury LARP hotel with a sticker price in the thousands. But think like a scoundrel for a second, like Star Wars Outlaws asks you to. Whether you spend $70 or $3,000 for a subpar product, are you any less a sucker?
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