Star Wars Outlaws really likes sitting down. Sitting down is not a vital part of gameplay, Kay Vess is not the galaxy’s greatest sitter, she is not the first wielder of a mystical branch of the Force found in transcendental harmony through the medium of good lumbar support. Taking a moment to sit in the worlds Ubisoft and Massive crafted for their new open-world Star Wars shooter—the first of its kind—rarely offers you a tangible benefit as a player. It’s Star Wars Outlaws, not Star Wars Kijimi and Chill. You’re there to shoot, sneak, and roguishly charm your way across the galaxy.
But I really like sitting down in Star Wars Outlaws.
Outlaws gives you plenty of opportunities to consider this indulgence throughout the worlds you visit. The bar of a cantina to lean on, barriers overlooking the entrance to an outpost as speeders idly drift by and people go about their business, or seats huddled with other diners at the end of a busy street of vendors and food merchants hawking their wares. Sometimes, like I said, doing this does give you an actual benefit as a player: Kay will overhear all sorts of conversations leaning up against a wall or just vibing in the back end of cantina, ones that will give her intel that will plop a little snifter of information on your map to go check out. A bad deal over a contract could mark a base of a crime syndicate on your map to go take advantage of, a chat about smugglers cutting-and-running from an Imperial inspection could lead you to a treasure cache of parts for your blaster.
That’s not a guarantee every time, however. Sometimes you find yourself prompted to take a moment and just soak in the environment around you. The thump of a cantina jukebox or the pitter-patter of rain on the cobblestones of Akiva’s trade hub, Myrra, are just as valuable in the moment as things to add to the checklist that is your increasingly cluttered minimap.
That Outlaws puts a level of importance on this mechanic while not always guaranteeing a tangible mechanical benefit to the player is one of the most fascinating ways it reveals the Star Wars galaxy it has built. We’ve had plenty of lavish Star Wars games that painstakingly recreate the aesthetics and vistas of the films before, especially in our contemporary era of photorealistic graphics. Respawn’s Jedi games, DICE’s Battlefront duology, Motive’s Squadrons, they all put a premium on faithful accuracy, derived from direct access to props our endless passion for the films that inspired them. But for as good as those games are, by and large they were recreating that authenticity as a canvas to map the actual meat-and-potatoes of their games on them. No one’s stopping to smell the proverbial flowers in Battlefront, they’re laying down swaths of blaster fire as swarms of proverbial bodies try to wrestle control of a command point. Jedi Survivor has some wild locales for Cal to climb up and over on his journey, but they’re mostly arenas for you to slice up opponents with your lightsaber (and look damn good doing it).
Plenty of Star Wars games in the past have offered the chance to sit in its world in some regard before—just look at MMOs like The Old Republic and its player housing system, or the original Star Wars Galaxies, which even had non-combat jobs for players who preferred to live the life of a club dancer over that of a soldier. But Outlaws feels rare among its contemporaries as a Star Wars game that wants you to feel like there is a living, breathing world outside of the necessities of its stealth and action gameplay. Its cityscapes are bustling with pedestrians going about their business, the tiniest back alleys are littered with the grungy debris of life, but that would all similarly be set dressing if Outlaws never asked you to directly engage with it, for beneficial reasons or otherwise.
One of my favorite things I found while playing Outlaws was an unexpected “minigame” on each world you could visit. Certain food stalls dotted about the major cities of each world could have Kay and Nix take a seat and pay for some local cuisine to eat. What follows isn’t just a quick cutscene and an animation of your credits counter dipping by a couple hundred for the act of engaging in the world. There’s a whole little rhythm game attached, flicking buttons and directions on your gamepad or keyboard as Kay and Nix take a look over, and then dig into, whatever dish they ordered. It’s a couple of minutes each time, and yes, there is a tangible benefit to the act: doing so unlocks the ability for Kay to provide that recipe as a treat for Nix, giving him bonuses in regular gameplay, like the ability to distract multiple guards.
But again, you’re not really doing these moments for that specific gameplay benefit: it’s about savoring this little scene between Kay and her animal friend, this tiny cultural reflection of these different worlds, as you and they alike pore over whatever exotic, suitably Star Wars-ian dish gets laid out by the vendor droid in front of them. A weird fruit sliced “tableside” to reveal a cacophony of insects inside it, a chunk of ice served at the center of a spicy stew that melts to reveal bite-sized eels in its core. I don’t remember what each dish actually unlocked as an ability for Nix, but I remember those moments of respite: Kay and Nix cracking a joke together, or basking in the warmth and smells of whatever they’d ordered, or just simply sitting quietly and partaking in a good meal together.
It’s not a shootout with Imperial Death Troopers, or slinking my way through the territory of a crime syndicate that hates me so I can swipe a treasure I’ve been hired to steal by a rival. It’s not what Star Wars Outlaws is directly about, but it’s what it’s about passively. Kay is a person trying to make her own way in a galaxy buffeted by change, by all these grand powers—Empires, rebellions, syndicates, absorbing people and their lives into this higher scale and stakes. Putting that bigger picture aside and reveling in the small details that make the world so endearing, and make you feel why Kay wants to go on adventure from place to place and see all these sights, is just as much a part of the scoundrel fantasy and the gunplay or the stealth is. You become a rogue to make it and get to that quiet life, and Outlaws doesn’t just get that, but invites you to celebrate in that life whenever you can.
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