It’s E3 2018 and Julian Gerighty is getting ready to show up at the Orpheum Theater to showcase The Division 2.
As the creative director prepared for Ubisoft’s press conference, his boss at the time — Ubisoft Massive CEO David Polfeldt — was in the foreground in a coffee shop “chatting” with Disney about the possibility of the two working together.
“They had a short list of developers they wanted to work with, and Massive happened to be on that list,” Gerighty shares with us. “David was also very excited about the relationship.
“I wasn’t sure we were going to be working on Star Wars. It could have been other Disney properties. But inside each of us, we all dream of one day being able to make a Star Wars game. So that was the origin of the direction.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard of a major licensing deal due to E3. In fact, the very next year at E3 2019, Disney met with Rare, which led to the inclusion of Pirates of the Caribbean in Sea of Thieves.
“It’s kind of a concentration of everyone in the same place, rather than one person at this end of town and that person at that 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 have been developed side-by-side at Ubisoft Massive, the other being last December’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Thanks to this, the Swedish studio expanded significantly and established partnerships with other co-developers.
“It grew bigger and bigger,” Gerighty says. “[Mario + Rabbids developer] Ubisoft Milan is a brand new collaboration with us. We had 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 lot of people for Avatar as well. But generally we’ve found people who share the same DNA. The person in charge of running the speeder and the ship is from Criterion who worked on Battlefront, it’s a small industry and people are really excited about working on Star Wars.”
“I mourn E3 because we don’t have these moments anymore”
Despite the expansion, Gerighty says the core team on Star Wars Outlaws is the same group that worked on The Division 2 and has been together for more than a decade. Still, 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 require a lot more oversight.
“It was actually surprisingly easy and super enjoyable,” Gerighty says. “Working very closely with Lucasfilm Games from day one, we created the creative framework together. It was an open-world, single-player action-adventure with a scoundrel archetype. At the time, we called it The Scoundrel Archetype, which is Star Wars speak for the space pirate or outlaws, and we came from learning Star Wars design, Star Wars visuals, Star Wars twists, Star Wars storytelling, and that brought everyone on the team to a higher level.
“We love worlds, we love building worlds, and there’s a simplicity to Star Wars that has generally helped us improve our game.”
The Star Wars lore has become more complex in recent years, with numerous live-action and animated TV shows alongside the movies. And the key to managing this increasing complexity has been to focus on what makes sense of the story they’re telling.
“It was decided almost on day one that we were the original trilogy,” Gerighty says. “We were set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. And since then I haven’t cared about anything else. It’s telling a new story with familiar touchpoints. It’s a story about nothings, so maybe you don’t meet people who don’t belong in the villainous Leia story , maybe it doesn’t make sense, but Qi’ra, Jabba’s hut, Lando… you definitely don’t want the galaxy to feel too small hits of all the Star Wars characters.”
The decision to focus on the original trilogy influenced Massive’s entire approach to Outlaws. The team had at least one or two calls a week with Lucasfilm Games and leaned on the licensee when it came to recreating the look of Star Wars from the 1970s.
“We developed a lens for indoor use [game engine] snowdrop, a camera lens that replicates 1970s film lenses,” says Gerighty. “So if you look, there’s a slight distortion. There is vignetting of the Panavision lens chromatic aberration. Lenses are present. All of these things are here to remind you of the lenses of the original trilogy through new technology. We even worked 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 it. That’s why we present everything in ultra widescreen to give it a cinematic presentation.”
“There’s an added pressure of ‘you can’t screw it up'”
The team’s director of production — which is someone who handles things like cinematography, transitions, stage acting, dialogue selection, etc. — also comes from Industrial Light and Magic, the special effects department responsible for Star Wars.
“He worked on several Star Wars projects,” says Gerighty. “He basically studied how things were done in the original trilogy. The set-pieces, the classic screen wipes that you could notice when you died…little things like that to remind you that this is the biggest galaxy ever created. “
The demos we played in LA definitely felt cinematic, but they were all linear backdrops 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 at their own pace. Doesn’t that make it difficult to fully deliver a movie-like experience?
“It never crossed my mind,” Gerighty insists. “Video games to me are not about linear content. It’s more about the agency of the player doing what they’re doing. So when we talk about cinematography, it’s the execution that’s cinematic, and not necessarily a linear story.
“The opportunity that games have is that it gives you the director’s chair. You’re the one who decides these things. That, to me, is why video games are such a beautiful art form.”
Ubisoft is known for its big 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 be 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 overlaid.
“We’re hyper aware of the Ubisoft house style,” says Gerighty. “Massive has always been different. The Division and The Division 2 were different. Originally, Massive was an indie studio, then an Activision studio, so it always thought very differently. Massive’s DNA is completely unique from Ubisoft. But there are many great lessons you can learn from Ubisoft in creating games.
“And Star Wars itself has designed several different ways of doing things. I’ll give you one example. Instead of a skill tree and an upgrade tree like in a traditional game, you look for experts to create this padawan/master relationship in a world that takes you on an adventure with improve your character. It’s all rooted in the people and the world.”
Star Wars Outlaws is gold and there are high hopes for this game. It is one of the world’s leading game developers creating a game based on one of the world’s most popular media franchises. It also comes after a very slow period of AAA game releases. So there will be plenty of eyes on it when it comes out at the end of August.
“Every time we ship, the pressure is on to deliver a really good game,” concludes Gerighty. “But because it’s a childhood dream come true for a lot of us, there’s the added pressure of ‘you can’t screw this up’. But we’re proud of what we’ve presented.”