Star Wars Outlaws Makes You Progress By Roaming Its Open World

Ubisoft Massive has planned out a new progression system for Star Wars Outlaws, that doesn’t involve grinding, but instead, exploring the open world.

In a new interview with Gamesradar, lead systems designer Matthieu Delisle lays it out.

“There are people in this galaxy who will teach you new tricks. Experts are our take on a progression system that kind of breaks away from more traditional types of progression. So we’re not talking about XP bars, or levels, or even ability trees.

To unlock new abilities in Outlaws, you will first need to find elusive experts. And the best place to start is in the cantinas, where you can pick up rumors and ask around to find some intel about where to find the local experts. Once you find them, they will ask you to go on an adventure to convince them to help.”

Delisle then shares the example of finding a speeder expert, who can teach you a new jump you can with your little thingamajig. Before they teach it to you, though, they want you to pull off a gnarly trick; doing a 60 meter speeder jump on your own. And you can do it without knowing the trick, but you have to find a place in the map where you have enough cliffs and ramps to give you that much momentum.

Delisle continues:

“From the get go, we wanted the game to be about exploration. So we wanted to reward player curiosity. And we really wanted to make the world kind of a character, that’s part of the story as well, because those worlds have so much personality.

So we came up with this idea of elusive experts that are hiding all around the galaxy that you need to find, and then they will teach you new tricks and new abilities, which is also something that you see a lot in Star Wars.”

Those oh so elusive experts have been around from since the original Star Wars trilogy, of course, whether that’s Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: A New Hope, or Yoda in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Of course, it all went full circle when Luke Skywalker, who went looking for Obi-Wan and Yoda, himself became the missing Jedi master found by Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

These were the obvious examples we gave here; we’re sure hardcore Star Wars fans can come up with the deep cuts. But with that in mind, Massive wants to mix things up since Kay Vess is supposed to be a roguish bounty hunter like Han Solo. But we’ll see how it all plays out when Star Wars Outlaws releases August 30, 2024, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows via Ubisoft Connect.