Star Wars Outlaws creative director says the Jedi "didn't even enter the picture" when deciding what the open-world game would be about

Star Wars Outlaws is set to launch later this year, and beyond offering an open world to explore, it's also going to allow players to step into the shoes of a scoundrel named Kay Vess. Needless to say, it's shaping up to be quite a departure from the lightsaber-swinging action we're used to from the recent Star Wars Jedi games, but the creative director of Outlaws says that the idea of having Jedi at the forefront of the game "didn't even enter the picture."

Outlaws might not be the first Star Wars game to let us play as someone who's not a Jedi, but the idea of wandering around an explorable world with a crime system as a scoundrel is pretty exciting. In a recent interview with Game Informer, creative director Julian Gerighty is asked about developer Massive Entertainment's decision to go against what could be considered the "conventional" direction of having another playable Jedi, to which he explains it's got a lot to do with the team's favorite character from the Star Wars movies.

"I genuinely think it's part of who we are as a team," Gerighty says. "When we were thinking about it, our favorite character wasn't Luke Skywalker, it was Han Solo in the movies. It was the outlaw, the scoundrel traveling the Galaxy, dodging one syndicate to pay off another syndicate, and traveling with his best friend, Chewbacca. I mean, that was our favorite character of those original movies. So for us, Jedis are fantastic, but they didn't even enter the picture at that point."

After this decision was made, though, Massive Entertainment was faced with the challenge of creating a character "compelling, interesting, and powerful enough not to be in the shade of all of these incredible other scoundrels" like Han Solo, Indiana Jones, and James Bond. "There are lots of scoundrels in popular media," Gerighty adds. 

"And that's where Kay Vess was born, and the journey of Kay Vess is really a journey of a coming of age story – going from a street thief to a fully-fledged scoundrel that's well known and kind of respected and feared by the syndicates."

The Han Solo inspiration behind Kay Vess's creation was first revealed by Gerighty last year. At that point, however, he said that Massive Entertainment wanted Outlaws' protagonist to feel "a little bit more relatable," and like "a rookie, a petty thief, who ends up in a situation that's much bigger than they ever expected." 

While you wait for the release of Star Wars Outlaws, be sure to check out our list of the top 10 best Star Wars games.