Star Wars Outlaws Trailer Smuggles Some Cinematics
A couple of days after the Star Wars Outlaws community manager was outed as an annoying woke activist who doesn’t particularly care for white people, especially men, Ubisoft released a trailer for the upcoming video game. Is this an attempt to change the narrative? Perhaps. At any rate, this is a cinematic trailer, so you don’t get much of a sense of the gameplay, but it reveals a decent amount about the story and characters, as well as the setting. Star Wars Outlaws is scheduled to be released for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows for PC gaming on August 30, 2024. You can see the trailer below:
Star Wars Outlaws looks fine to me insofar as the look and story go. It appears to take place between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, based on the image of Han Solo frozen in carbonite. (I’m convinced Lucasfilm is afraid the world would starve if they didn’t keep serving up ‘member berries.) I like the idea of focusing on small-scale crooks, gangsters, and smugglers rather than the Empire and the Rebellion; there’s only so much you can do with that, and I’d rather see something new that explores a different aspect of that world. The crime lords probably don’t care what happens in the war because they don’t operate legitimate businesses anyway; no matter who’s in charge, what they’re doing will be illegal. The main character, Kay Vess, talks a lot about freedom, which is kind of odd for someone who doesn’t want to get involved in a war against a tyrannical empire. Then again, AT-STs show up later in the trailer, so maybe she gets swept up in the war anyway.
Speaking of Kay Vess, I don’t mind her look. People are rolling their eyes at another less-than-beautiful woman in a video game, and I get it – this isn’t happening in a vacuum, so it seems like more of the same. And in terms of Ubisoft’s intent, it probably is. But I like her look; she feels like an 80s sci-fi movie heroine, and I think that aesthetic works for a scrappy criminal type in a story like this. She reminds me of Ripley from Aliens (more so than Alien) or Melina from Total Recall (which is 90s, not 80s, but why split hairs?), and that kind of character can be very cool. And despite some of the lame jokes, they seem to be trying to make her fallible and relatable, which, if they succeed, would be a nice change of pace for modern Star Wars. But I understand this is just a trailer, and they could be misleading gamers. And I think Yellowflash makes a good point in his video on Star Wars Outlaws when he says that her outfit makes her look like a female Han Solo. That’s fair, and given that she’s a smuggler who doesn’t care about the war but looks like she may be drawn into it, it’s easy to see this as a woman replacing him in a story that could have easily been about Han if it took place a little earlier. But I guess we’ll see in August.
