By Ubisoft Star Wars Outlaws is the latest in a long line of single-player open world games from the multinational developer/publisher, but if it surprised you that Tom Clancy's The Division development studio, Ubisoft Massive, was in charge of the project, you'd be right. Although part of the team was working on Avatar: Pandora's FrontiersThis was the first single-player game for many of the team, including creative director Julian Gerighty.
This can be a risky leap in game development. Single-player and multiplayer online games not only have different play styles, but also different technical and design conventions that require unique skills to pull off. The fact that the studio managed to take the game from concept to release in about four relatively short years is a huge (pun intended?) success for the company.
What should developers learn from the studio's success here? For Gerighty, it's all about “the pride of craftsmanship in a job well done.”
“In Sweden, we always focus on craftsmanship,” he said in an interview with Game Developer at this year’s Gamescom. “There’s a personal sense of pride in doing good work.”
Of course, if you want to take pride in the craft of game development, you have to articulate the trials and tribulations of the production process. To make a good game, Gerighty said the team needed to relearn how players move around single-player spaces and solve the incredible technical challenge of flight transitions from ground to space.
And then they had to learn to overcome one of the most unexpected challenges: when the game was introduced to the world, how to stay focused on success even when racist and sexist fans tried to destroy the rogue protagonist Kay Vess.
A correct pre-production has foreseen the critical points for the realization Star Wars Outlaws
According to Gerighty, morale has been “very high” for a long time Star Wars Outlawspartly out of excitement at working on a Star Wars game, but also because the team apparently entered production with some foresight into the obstacles it would encounter along the way (they also spoke highly of the importance of remote meetings due to COVID-19, which remained an integral part of development even after in-person meetings resumed).
Gerighty said that an intensive concept and pre-production process, like the one that began at that time, is a “non-negotiable” part of Ubisoft Massive’s development process. Team sizes and scope of projects can change, but investing time and effort at this stage helps identify which game features will be the biggest challenges down the road.
For OutlawThese challenges focused on vehicles such as speeder bikes and the player's own spaceship, called the “EML 850 light freighter”.
“We knew the streaming speed on the speeder [and] the size of the world, all the big challenges that we hadn't faced before,” Gerighty said. The developers probably realized that seamlessly flying the light freighter between ground and space environments was a huge technical challenge, so difficult that even Bethesda Softworks excluded from implementation in 2023 Star field.
“We knew it was going to be a headache, so we hired some of the best people,” he recalled.
But since no game development process is perfect (Gerighty himself said there were “hidden efficiencies” that Ubisoft Massive hasn’t discovered yet), there had to be some unseen snags in pre-production, right? The creative director was hesitant about most specifics here, but did note that a development pain point can be when a team struggles with features they previously assumed they were good at.
For Ubisoft Massive, it was all about player navigation and pathfinding. There was a concerted effort to ensure that players could navigate the game world with as much freedom from waypoint markers and maps as possible, and the former Division developers took it for granted that they had nailed it.
Not really, apparently. He credited the Star Wars series’ environmental design as the solution (there’s “a purity” to that design, he said, explaining that it lends itself to ensuring that every location that looks “interesting” actually has something interesting waiting for the player). But despite the team’s confidence in this area, he said it didn’t come to fruition until “very late” in development.
Making a big-budget game comes with its own unique set of pressures, but some licenses like Star Wars come with an inordinate amount of pressure. Gamers, licensing partners Disney and Lucasfilm Ltd., and even the developers themselves have high expectations for the series, and it seems likely that there will be a fair amount of nervousness as these issues are ironed out.
Gerighty personally collected the first feedback during meetings with other creative directors of Ubisoft such as Jean-Marc Geffroy and Davide Soliani (who has left the company in the meantime). The top developers also met with a “community of practice,” a support group of other creative directors, to ask for advice (or offer feedback for other projects) during development.
In this process, Gerighty said, developers must have “a minimum of professional maturity to accept criticism and feedback” to hone that personal sense of craftsmanship that spills over into the final product.
Moving Forward in the Face of Bigotry
The revelation of Star Wars Outlaws was met with enthusiasm by fans of Ubisoft games and the Star Wars series. But soon after, another group of fans whose love for Star Wars is not so inclusive he was quick to express outrage on the protagonist Kay Vess. Their (family) objections are often confusing and might best be summed up by saying that Vess' race, gender, and appearance are some sort of political agenda pushed by Ubisoft.
Developers have become more resistant to this type of backlash over the past decade, but these reactionaries have worked themselves into a newfound frenzy in 2024. We asked Gerighty how he’s responded to the hate, especially when it seems completely at odds with the heroic themes of the Star Wars series.
His answer: For him, it's all about focusing on the work. “Craftsmanship is what matters here,” he replied, explaining that he sees creating new worlds from ones and zeros as “the best job in the world.”
“I want to create experiences with hundreds of other developers that transport people, and I guarantee you that this game will be played for hundreds of millions of hours,” he said. “So that’s what I’m focused on… doing the best job I can.”
He described the negative reactions as no different from those from “detractors” of any other game he’s worked on, and as always, he’s focusing on the “big fans” who will enjoy the game he’s worked so hard on.
Delving into the art of the beloved sci-fi saga is always a joyous endeavor, and in the world of video games, developers they had a lot of of opportunities for learn from their peers who have worked hard on the series. For all the sermons about how the “mono-myth” can be a template for stories, there are a thousand little details baked into the franchise, all of them crafted by individual workers who, as Gerighty said, have been very focused on the craft.