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The hardest part of game development can sometimes come from the parts you feel you're good at, says Ubisoft Massive creative director Julian Gerighty.
Ubisoft's Star Wars Outlaws is the latest in a long line of open world single-player games from the multinational developer/publisher—but if you were surprised that Tom Clancy's The Division developer studio Ubisoft Massive was in charge of the project, that would be fair. Though one end of the team had been working on Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, this was the first single-player game for many team members, including creative director Julian Gerighty.
That can be a risky jump in game development. Online multi-player and single-player games don't just have different gameplay styles, they each have different technical and design conventions that require unique skills to pull off. That the studio managed to take the game from conception to release in about a relatively slim four years is a massive (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 the craft," he said in an interview with Game Developer at this year's Gamescom. "There's a personal sense of pride in doing a good job."
Of course if you're going to take pride in "the craft" of game development, you need to articulate the trials and tribulations of the production process. To make a well-crafted game, Gerighty said the team needed to learn how re-learn how players navigate single-player spaces and crack the incredible technical challenge of ground-to-space flight transitions.
And then they had to learn to make it through one of the most unexpected challenges—as the game was revealed to the world, how to stay focused on success even as racist and sexist fans tried to tear down scoundrel protagonist Kay Vess.
According to Gerighty, morale was "very high" for a long time on Star Wars Outlaws, partly because of the excitement of working on a Star Wars game, but also because the team apparently entered production with a decent view of the speed bumps on the road ahead (he also spoke highly of the power of COVID-19 driven remote meetings, which remained a persistent part of development even as in-person meetings resumed).
Gerighty said that a intensive conception and pre-production process, like the one that began in this time, is a "non-negotiable" part of Ubisoft Massive's development process. The size of teams and scope of projects can change, but investing time and effort int his phase helps identify what game features will be the biggest challenges on the road ahead.
For Outlaws, those challenges focused on vehicles like speeder bikes, and the player's spaceship, referred to as an "EML 850 light freighter."
"We knew the streaming speeds on the speeder [and] the size of the world, all of the big challenges that we hadn't dealt with before," Gerighty said. Developers probably clocked that letting players seamlessly fly the light freighter between terrestrial and space environments was a massive technical challenge—one so difficult that even Bethesda Softworks tapped out of implementing it in 2023's Starfield.
"We knew that was going to be a headache, so we put some of the best people on it," he recalled.
But because no game development process is perfect (Gerighty himself said there were "hidden efficiencies" that Ubisoft Massive hasn't cracked yet), there had to be some obstacles not seen in pre-production right? Here the creative director demurred on most specifics, but he called out that a painful point in development can be when a team struggles with features it had previously assumed it was strong at implementing.
For Ubisoft Massive, that was player navigation and pathfinding. There was a concerted effort to ensure players could navigate the game world with as much freedom from waypoint markers and maps as possible, and the former Division developers assumed they had that in the bag.
Not quite, as it turns out. He credited the environmental design of the Star Wars series as lending itself to the solutions (there's "a purity" in that design, he said, explaining that it lends itself to making sure every location that looks "interesting" does indeed have something interesting waiting for the player). But despite the team's confidence in this area he said it didn't come together until "very late" in development.
Making any big-budget game comes with a host of unique pressures, but some licenses like Star Wars come with an excess amount of pressure. Players, licensing partners at Disney and Lucasfilm Ltd, and even developers themselves have high expectations for the series, and it seems likely there'd be a fair amount of nerves present while these problems are being solved.
Gerighty personally fielded early feedback in meetings with other Ubisoft creative directors like Jean-Marc Geffroy and Davide Soliani (who's since left the company). Upper-level developers also met with a "community of practice," a support group of other creative directors, to seek advice (or offer feedback of their own for other projects) during development.
In this process, Gerighty said developers need to have "a little bit of professional maturity to accept criticism and feedback" to hone that personal sense of craft that goes into the final product.
The reveal of Star Wars Outlaws was greeted with excitement by fans of Ubisoft's games and the Star Wars series. But swiftly after, another group of fans whose love for Star Wars is not so inclusive raced to voice outrage over protagonist Kay Vess. Their (familiar) objections are often garbled by could best be summarized as claiming Vess' race, gender, and appearance as being some kind of political agenda pushed by Ubisoft.
Developers have grown more resistant to such backlash in the last decade, but these reactionaries have whipped themselves into a newfound frenzy in 2024. We asked Gerighty about how he's reacted to the hatred, especially when it seems to be completely at odds with the heroic themes of the Star Wars series.
His response: for him, it's just about focusing on the work. "The craftsmanship is what matters here," he replied, explaining that he sees creating new worlds out of ones and zeroes as being "the best job in the world."
"I want to create experiences with hundreds of other developers that transport people, and I guarantee you this game will be played for hundreds of millions of hours," he said. "So that's what I'm focusing on...doing the best jobs possible."
He framed the backlash as being no different from the "detractors" on any other game he's worked on, and that as always, he's focusing on the "huge fans" who will enjoy the game he's worked so hard on.
Digging into the craft of the beloved science fiction saga is always a joyful effort, and in the video game world, developers have had loads of opportunities to learn from their peers who've worked hard on the series. For all the preaching about how the "mono-myth" can be a template for stories, there's a thousand little details baked into the franchise all put there by individual workers who, as Gerighty said, focused greatly on the craft.
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