Star Wars Outlaws shows the limits of 'familiar, but with a twist'

I'm having a blast with Star Wars Outlaws. Are other players? Depends who you ask. The reviews run positive (when you filter out the bigoted weirdos with an axe to grind), but the sales ran so soft Ubisoft delayed its next open-world action-adventure game Assassin's Creed: Shadows.

Why are sales so sluggish? I have my theories, but they have far more to do with the saturation of the open-world genre and some bad pre-release word of mouth than the bigoted brigading. And as much fun as I'm having, I can't help but notice there's a certain "X factor" missing from parts of the game.

What is that "X factor?" Well, if I knew exactly what it was and how to execute it, Disney would probably have hired me already to team up with Dave Filoni. But it's something that's been scratching at me as the series has advanced, a question I keep asking: why do people love Star Wars, and what about it drives such intense reactions?

I quizzed Outlaws creative director Julian Gerighty about this at Gamescom. "This is our shared mythology," he said. "It's 100 percent George Lucas's obsession with the monomyth...it is so refreshing, so familiar, but with the alien twist."

In other words, Star Wars itself is some kind of universal experience, and its alien elements burn it into our memories.

Related:Star Wars Outlaws lead actor Humberly González made her character a 'dreamer'

It's a familiar analysis. Unfortunately, it's also lacking. Lucas and The Hero with A Thousand Faces author Joseph Campbell have done a great job branding Star Wars as this film that supposedly taps into universal myths about humanity but I've only grown skeptical of that idea as I've gotten older. Brian Jay Jones' book George Lucas: A Life paints a different picture of the beloved director's creative influences, and I personally think American Graffiti is a better reference text for the power of the galaxy far, far away than Campbell's sometimes-misogynistic philosophy.

But I'm wandering off track. Let's look closely at the idea of "familiar, but with a twist" idea that Gerighty described. It's a common bit of advice for creative direction in all forms, especially game development. Outlaws is, if nothing else, a fantastic case study of this philosophy. The game is a massive success in so many ways, but its reliance on this conceit often loops back around to being "familiar, but familiar."

Read on to see how a Weequay sheriff and an unexpectedly hot droid show the possibilities and limits of this philosophy.

A Weequay sheriff ain't as surprising as it used to be

I must admit I take a perverse joy in deploying Star Wars proper nouns on unsuspecting readers. Don't anger me or I'll start bombarding you with the names of various Yuuzhan Vong characters.

In Outlaws, the clearest example of an attempt at "familiar, but with a twist" comes in the form of Sheriff Quint. She's the sheriff of a small town called Wayfar. She's old, grizzled, and has a secret past with the Hutt Cartel harassing the town. She's also a Weequay, a species first seen in Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi, one of many rubber-forehead aliens populating the posse of the slug gangster Jabba the Hutt.

The Weequay have been expanded since then in various spinoffs and licensed stories, the most beloved being the fabulous backstabbing space pirate Hondo Ohnaka. If the year were 1986, she'd be a revelation. But in Outlaws, she is not.

Her flaws begin with her visual design and run right through how she interacts with the player. Ubisoft's artists seemed to have been given limited technical boundaries in their character design choices, so she and many other "experts" the players aren't that visually distinct from regular NPCs. At a distance you can clearly she fits the cowboy archetype, but her appearance only stands out at a close distance—and even then, she's not that distinctive from other generic Weequay that fill out the game.

Image by Bryant Francis, via Ubisoft.

She's a familiar sheriff archetype, but she's a spiky-faced alien. "Familiar but with a twist" in theory, but "familiar but familiar" in practice if you consider how audiences are probably used to spikey-faced aliens like her across many mediums. It doesn't help that Outlaws is stuffed to the gills with Star Wars aliens made more "human" by their fluent grasp of English.

Her story arc, unfortunately, also feels "familiar but familiar." As mentioned, Wayfar is being harassed by gangsters demanding its impoverished residents pay them money. She and the player character Kay Vess fend off a pair of raids by the bandits, the kind we've seen time and time again in films like High Noon. My heart dropped as the first of these setpieces stepped through the familiar tropes. The town is empty. The sheriff ventures onto the main street. The gangsters ride in. Everyone's hands drift to their guns. Then she quickdraws, blasts them dead, and gameplay begins as more rush in. "Familiar, but familiar" strikes again.

The sequence plays out similarly later on, when Quint teaches the player how to improve their own quickdraw ability, Adrenaline Rush (which works like the quickdraw ability from Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption series).

Ubisoft Massive unfortunately undercut its own "high noon" scenes by giving the player a far better experience with Adrenaline Rush, which is a great example of "familiar, but with a twist." Ubisoft did a fantastic job bringing in rapid camera swings and making it the core combat while racing on a speeder bike. It's dynamic, punchy, and far more interesting to do than watch it play out in a cutscene.

The rest of the player's time with Quint, unfortunately, is stuck in the same gunslinging tropes. Her relationship to the Hutt Cartel is also dulled by the fact that the player can become very good friends with the Hutt Cartel, meaning they're no worse than the sheriff, who's remorseful about her time as a hired killer.

All the familiar tropes of the Wild West sheriff are meant to be juiced up with that Star Wars alien vibe—but just making her a Weequay isn't enough to stop her from blending into the gorgeous backgrounds of the Great Chott Salt Flat.

ND-5 is a droid like no other

All right you've eaten your vegetables and now it's time for dessert. And that dessert is ND-5, a BX-series droid commando (first seen in the Star Wars: Clone Wars animated series) assigned to Kay by gangster Jaylen Vrax. The second he walked onscreen, my spouse exclaimed—and this is a word-for-word quote—"Why does he have a slutty waist?!"

Yes, as you may have heard, ND-5 has joined the ranks of attractive robots in the video game canon. He's a character that shows where Ubisoft Massive does succeed with "familiar, but with a twist." What makes ND-5 work is that he bridges the familiarity gap across Star Wars and other stories—he's not just a familiar archetype shaped by Star Wars, he's a Star Wars archetype shaped by other influences.

ND-5 is a "familiar" character in adventure stories, in that he's the brooding, gravelly-voiced muscle assigned to the heroine whose cold exterior hides a comforting core. Some stories might cast him as a romantic interest, but this one only allows the player to lust after him from the other side of the screen.

The "twist" is that he's a droid. But then he's "familiar" again, because he's a droid the audience has likely seen before. Even if you don't know about the BX-series commandos (they were introduced in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, seen in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, but never depicted in any films or live-action shows), he's close enough in design to the comic relief B1 battle droids introduced in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace to strike that sense of recognition. There's something potent about taking a character design designed to evoke comedy and gently nudging it towards brooding gruffness.

If you are familiar with BX commandos, "familiar but with a twist" strikes again. BX droids are often depicted as hunched forward with slim profiles. ND-5 stands tall and wears a trench coat that gives him artificially broad shoulders. The coat standing open also casts a contrasting silhouette for his body, which draws the eye to the uh, "slutty waist."

And let's not beat around the bush, his always-open coat and scars across his chest look vaguely inspired by a romance novel cover. A familiar look made fresh on this droid's body.

The trend continues with his role in the story. Because he's a machine bound by a restraining bolt, his relationship with Kay takes a different relationship than if it were human. He repeatedly rejects Kay's offers to help him reclaim his independence, at one point telling her emphatically, "I am not broken."

Image by Bryant Francis via Ubisoft.

Except when he says it, you can't help but feel he might mean the opposite. Actor Jay Rincon really put some grit into that line. It's only made all the more heartbreaking by an encounter with a dying (deactivating?) BX droid commando in a sidequest that unveils more of ND-5's backstory. While the gravel-voiced droid explains the history of the Clone Wars and his time fighting in it, the dying droid repeatedly begs for help finishing its mission, repeating the words "I am broken" over and over again.

These droids, who the player might have known to be villains, are given a shred of sympathy by portraying them through the eyes of a character who wouldn't have her own preconceptions of them.

ND-5's twists are familiar, and what's familiar is also a twist. The philosophy works here because traits from one category also fit inside the other. His mishmash of references gives players the freedom to forget what they expected from the character and plenty of room to take him as he is.

Don't just rely on "familiar but different"

I documented a number of other positive and negative "familiar but with a twist" examples across Outlaws (shoutout to the developers behind the quest "The Heavy," you know what you did), but Quint and ND-5 make for great compare-and-contrasts. It's also worth playing Outlaws and Jedi: Survivor in close proximity, just to see how Respawn Entertainment's swing at the series produces feels far more fresh in the same setting.

"Familiar but with a twist" is a common "pillar" you'll find in many game design documents. It's a quick way to explain your game to financiers and investors, and it can help developers think outside the box when conceiving game mechanics, character design, art environments, etc.

If you're not careful, the phrase can put you back inside the box you hoped to escape.

Image by Bryant Francis via Ubisoft.

What would be better would be to search for specifics in how you blend familiar concepts. I cracked open the art book for Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, and found references to paintings by Lawrence alma-Tadema, illustrations from LIFE Magazine by Chesley Bonstell, and the '60s TV show Swiss Family Robinson. You can trace a line from the referenced art to images in the film itself, and all those specifics tell us more about the power of Star Wars than the fabled monomyth.

All apologies to Gerighty but "familiar, with a twist" is not the "X factor" I've been trying to name. I am thus cursed again to cast out in search of the words that will capture why I keep coming back to the world's most corporate-friendly franchise that sometimes reaches right into my soul and other times makes me want to tear my hair out.