It’s E3 2018 and Julian Gerighty is getting ready to take the stage at The Orpheum Theater to screen The Division 2 .
As the creative director prepared for Ubisoft’s press conference, his boss at the time — Ubisoft Massive managing director David Polfeldt — was at the front of a coffee shop “to chat” with Disney about the possibility that the two to work together.
“They had a short list of developers they wanted to work with and Massive was on that list,” Gerighty shares with us. “David was also very enthusiastic about that relationship.
“I wasn’t sure we were going to work on Star Wars. It could have been other Disney properties. But inside each of us, we all dream of being able to make a Star Wars game one day. So that was the origin point.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard of a major licensing deal coming due to an E3 meeting. In fact, the following year at E3 2019, Disney met with Rare, which led to the inclusion of Pirates of the Caribbean in Sea of Thieves.
“It’s that concentration of everybody in the same place, instead of one person being on this end of town and this person on this end of town,” Gerighty says. “I mourn E3 because we don’t have these moments anymore.”
Star Wars Outlaws is one of two major licensed productions that ran side-by-side at Ubisoft Massive, the other being last December’s Avatar: Pandora’s Box. As a result, the Swedish studio has expanded significantly and collaborated with more co-developers.
“He’s gotten bigger and bigger,” says Gerighty. “[Mario + Rabbids developer] Ubisoft Milan is a brand new collaboration with us. We have never worked with them before, and they did a phenomenal job. Their animation work is stellar.
“The team at Massive has grown. We’ve hired a bunch of people because of Avatar as well. But overall we’ve found people who share the same DNA. The person responsible for speed and ship control comes from Criterion. Who worked on Battlefront It’s a small industry and people are really passionate about working on Star Wars.
“I mourn E3 because we don’t have these moments anymore”
Despite the expansion, Gerighty says the core Star Wars Outlaws team is the same group that worked on The Division 2 and has been together for more than a decade. However, this was new territory. Although The Division was technically a licensed IP (it’s part of the Tom Clancy universe), working on Star Wars would inevitably involve a lot more oversight.
“It’s actually been surprisingly easy and super fun,” Gerighty says. “Working very closely with Lucasfilm Games from day one, we created a creative framework together. It was an open-world, single-player adventure game with the villain archetype. At the time, we called it Archetype of scoundrel, which is Star Wars talks about the space pirate or outlaw and starting from that, he was to learn Star Wars design, Star Wars visuals, Star Wars twists on things, Star Wars storytelling and this it just made everyone team level.
“We love worlds, we love building worlds, and there’s a simplicity to Star Wars that really helped us improve our game overall.”
Star Wars lore has become more complex in recent years, with multiple live-action and animated TV shows standing alongside the films. And the key to managing this growing complexity was focusing on what made sense for the story they were telling.
“Almost on day one it was decided that we were the original trilogy,” Gerighty says. “We were set between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. And from then on, I don’t worry about anything else. It’s telling a new story with familiar touchpoints. It’s a dirty story, so maybe you’re not Meeting people who don’t belong in a villainous story might not make sense, but Qi’ra, Jabba the Hutt, Lando… you absolutely don’t want the galaxy to feel too small by besting the hits of all the characters of Star Wars.”
The decision to focus on the original trilogy informed Massive’s entire approach to Outlaws. The team would have at least one or two calls a week with Lucasfilm Games and relied on the licensee when it came to recreating the look of 1970s Star Wars.
“We developed a lens for indoor use [game engine] hydrangeas, a camera lens, which replicates the cinema lens of the 1970s,” Gerighty says. “So if you look, there’s a slight distortion. There is a chromatic aberration of the Panavision lens. There are lens features that are present. All these things are there to remind you of the lenses of the original trilogy through new technology. We even partnered with Lucasfilm to get the camera values for Rogue One, so we were as close to the original trilogy as possible, but through the lens of modern technology.
He continues: “We love that. That’s why we present everything in ultra-wide format, to give it that cinematic look.”
“There’s this added pressure of ‘you can’t mess this up'”
The team’s production director — who is someone who directs things like cinematography, transitions, set acting, dialogue choices, etc. — also comes from Industrial Light and Magic, the special effects department responsible for Star Wars.
“He’s worked on multiple Star Wars projects,” says Gerighty. “He’s basically studied how things were done in the original trilogy. The scene setups, the classic screen wipes that you might notice when you die… little things like that that remind you that this is the galaxy the greatest ever created.”
The demos we played in LA certainly felt cinematic, but they were all linear sets designed to showcase different elements of the game. Star Wars Outlaws is an open world game and players will be able to explore and play it at their own pace. Doesn’t that make it difficult to fully deliver that movie-like experience?
“It never occurred to me,” Gerighty insists. “Video games, to me, aren’t about linear content. It’s more about the player’s agency in doing what they’re doing. So when we talk about cinematography, it’s the execution that’s cinematic, and not necessarily that it’s a linear story.
“The opportunity that games have is that it puts you in the director’s seat. You are the one who decides those things. That, to me, is why video games are such a beautiful art form.”
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Ubisoft is known for its massive open-world experiences like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry. And one criticism the company has faced over the years is that these experiences can feel familiar to each other. Gerighty says that Massive is aware of this and that Outlaws is a Star Wars game, not a Ubisoft game with Star Wars layered on top.
“We’re mindful of Ubisoft’s house style,” says Gerighty. “Massive has always been different. Division and Division 2 were different. First Massive was an independent studio, then an Activision studio, so it’s always thought very differently. Massive’s DNA is quite unique from Ubisoft. But it has many many great lessons to be learned from Ubisoft’s way of making games.
“And Star Wars itself suggested a few different ways of doing things. I’ll give you an example. Instead of having a skill tree and an upgrade tree like a traditional game, here you look to experts, to create this padawan/master relationship in the world, which will take you on adventures to improve your character, all rooted in the people and the world.”
Star Wars Outlaws has gone gold, and there are high hopes for this game. It’s one of the world’s top game developers making a game based on one of the world’s most popular media franchises. It also arrives after a very slow period for AAA game releases. So there will be a lot of eyes on this one when it comes out at the end of August.
“There’s pressure to deliver a really good game every time we ship,” concludes Gerighty. “But since this is a childhood dream come true for many of us, there’s an added pressure of ‘you can’t mess this up’. But we’re proud of what we’ve put forward.”