Ubisoft has become almost synonymous with open-world games in the past two decades thanks to franchises like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry. So it’s no surprise that people expect the publisher’s next game, Star Wars Outlaws, to take a lot of inspiration from those in-house tent-poles that have come before it. Yet Outlaws’ creative director, Julian Gerighty, has revealed that the biggest inspiration for the Star Wars open-world game came from outside of Ubisoft, in the form of PlayStation’s Ghost of Tsushima, a game which was itself heavily influenced by Ubisoft’s work in the genre. It’s the circle of life.
In much the same way that the original Star Wars trilogy took inspiration from the samurai movies of Akira Kurosawa, Outlaws takes notes from Sucker Punch’s amazing 2020 samurai RPG. “What I loved about [Ghost of Tsushima] was this purity of having a player fantasy and really leaning into it,” says Gerighty in a recent Gamesradar interview. “This is the story, the world, the character, everything fits together with the gameplay guiding everything.” Outlaws is essentially a space western: you take on the role of a down-on-her-luck smuggler and thief in the space equivalent of the wild west, run by crime syndicates constantly at war. With this premise it’s no surprise that Gerighty also mentions Red Dead Redemption as an inspiration, but Tsushima’s role as a touchstone for Outlaws is particularly fascinating to dig into.
Since its release in 2020, Sucker Punch’s samurai epic has received critical and public acclaim, with many calling it one of the best riffs on the Ubisoft-style open-world RPG. If you’ve played Ghost of Tsushima, you probably recognized how years of Assassin’s Creed inspired the PlayStation epic, to the point that many have called it the best Assassin’s Creed game…not made by Ubisoft, that is. Here we have a Ubisoft RPG taking inspiration from a game that itself is clearly inspired by Ubisoft RPGs of the past. There’s some kind of recursive loop of iterative game design going on here, with core concepts and gameplay fundamentals going from Ubisoft to Sony and now back to Ubisoft.
In our hands-on preview of the game, we noted that while it relies heavily on some signature Ubisoft systems that feel quite dated, Outlaws still shines thanks to its beautiful world and cast of characters, elements which Geraghty explicitly mentioned as being influenced by Ghost of Tsushima. Hopefully looking outside of Ubisoft for inspiration will pay off for Outlaws when it releases on August 30.
Updated: 8/01/2024 1:25 p.m. ET: A previous version of this article mistakenly named Insomniac as the developer of Ghost of Tsushima. Sucker Punch is the developer of the game, and the article has been updated to reflect this.
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