MEDIATATE ON THE SPOILERS FOR STAR WARS JEDI: SURVIVOR AND THE LAST OF US BELOW
The first ever Star Wars open-world game has been announced, Star Wars Outlaws, which is put out by open-world aficionado’s Ubi Soft. (You have quite a bit of freedom in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor too, they have open-world sections, but it’s more a hybrid of platformers/God of War/story-driven/open-world, etc, etc, etc than just pure open-world, I guess.)
Color me excited that so many more Star Wars video games are on the way and that Star Wars video games are seemingly unlocked from the chains that once seemed to bind them and are, you know, frakking great. Check out the trailer here:
And some Grand Theft Auto-y gameplay here:
I love that in about ten minutes we see how seamlessly Kay Vess moves from stealth to chase to a conversation choice to a starfighter dogfight. This moves at the pace of Star Wars, and it looks like, as Matthew Sweet would say, 100% fun.
One scene from the demo that perked up my eyes in particular was when Kay is given the option to Bribe/Do Not Bribe. It’s here that we see, much like in Red Dead Redemption or Grand Theft Auto, that you can make choices that make you Wanted by the law, so to speak. It also implies a kind of branching narrative - this could happen or that could happen, you can do anything you want! - which is always a sleight of hand in video games, but even sleight-ier of hand-ier in the world of Star Wars.
Some of my favorite video games tell good stories, I get a little bored in the sandbox after a while (collecting outfits is great, but you know…). Story is what compels me forward in a game. Red Dead Redemption 2 was an all-timer for me because it was an incredibly well-told story, and allowed you to really feel as if you were living in Arthur’s shoes with the Gang. If you played the story, the story was brilliant, if you went fishing that was fun too. In the end, though, the story missions do eventually funnel you into versions of the same ending. Those versions, though, have real difference depending on how you played Arthur. Most games that offer freedom eventually ask you to Choose Your Own Adventure, where you can create variations in how things play out. There are exceptions of course, series where endings can be wildly different, depending on how much you complete and the choices you make along the way. Grand Theft Auto V (will there ever be another?) allowed you to choose between three characters, flip between them, and in the end, make choices that vastly altered the way the game ended. There was a real sense of surprise and stakes in your choices, which added to the sense of role play.
With Star Wars, as we know, everything is canon. That means the story of Kay Vess will be supported by comics and books and short stories and action figures. How her story plays out cannot, because it’s canon, wind up in vastly different places. Kay won’t join the Empire in one version and destroy it in another. Or, at least, I can’t imagine how that could work. It creates cohesion inside the narrative and a great way to cross-pollinate mediums, but means always coloring inside the lines.
This is why “everything is canon” is such a double-edged sword. It ensures that Star Wars is One Big Story, which is one of the wonderful things about Star Wars. But it’s also why Star Wars Visions is such a breath of fresh air: you feel no anxiety at all about making things match up. It’s pure creativity. Canon is about building something, it’s a game of “yes-and,” but it can’t, by its nature, offer freedom.
I felt that acutely playing Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. There were a few moments where the story asserted itself and took my own role playing away, for the sake of being canonical. There’s a moment where Cal is in such dire straits that you’re given the option to Embrace The Darkness. If you don’t (which I tried!) you just die. Embracing The Darkness is the next part of the story, it’s not really optional, even if they give you a button to push. That becomes, essentially, a part of Cal’s abilities, just a big red button that says Go Nuts You’re Full of Red Darkness and it’s very fun, but as a light-side guy, it feels a certain way.
When you reach the end of the game’s story, and Cal is facing down Bode, our hero shoots his former friend (well, where they ever really friends?) in the chest - twice. There’s no option to let him go and show him mercy.
In that moment, you realize you’re playing part two of a trilogy. You are enacting a moment where Cal faces down some hard truths about himself and perhaps loses a battle with his own pain and rage. It reminded me of The Last of Us video game series. In the endings of both Last of Us games, you play characters you love that are doing increasingly painful things. You watch in horror at their behavior even though you are, ostensibly, in control. It’s a kind of storytelling unique to video games. You feel complicit, as you press the button over and over to brutalize someone out of sheer revenge or incoherent protectiveness. The point of the games is to make you feel those things - they use your lack of agency as a feature not a bug. They tell you a story, basically, that you feel like you’re writing as you play.
Star Wars Outlaws will necessarily have to walk the storytelling line in a fascinating way. The whole idea of Open World games is to make you feel in control, you can go anywhere, you can just live in that world. But the constraints of canon insist otherwise, removing the option of multiple endings. The freedom will be in the margins, or in choices like Bribe/Do Not Bribe, which I imagine alters if you have to run away or walk away, not who Kay Vess is. You may change her clothes, or see things that you’d only see if you go exploring, but Kay Vess will be Kay Vess. The joy of the game, perhaps, will not be in designing her or deciding who she is, but discovering who she is as we play.
I’m looking forward to discovering even more of the Star Wars galaxy through this medium. The portion timeline this takes place in, between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, is rarely visited, so there’s lots of great old-fashioned, in the thick-of-it Rebellion and Empire storytelling to navigate through with stealth and speeders. Bring on GTA: Galactic Edition!
First open world Star Wars game?! Are we forgetting Knights of the Old Republic!?! Or at least I considered that open world. Not trying to be pedantic. But that game brings to mind your point on the choice/canon dichotomy.
KOTOR and its sequel could afford to be choice-heavy and have multiple endings because while it took place in on the Star Wars universe, it was in a time frame wholly removed from the main plots.
I’m not sure what time Outlaws takes place in (Early Rebellion, I think they call it?) but I think it’s interesting they didn’t put this in the High Republic timeline that they seem to have created for this very sort of free-of-canon-consequence reason.