Star Wars Outlaws new gameplay footage might have the most effective graphics ever

Although the Xbox Games Showcase has clearly ‘won’ this year’s not-E3 marathon of preview events, the competition has technically not ended yet. The Nintendo Direct doesn’t even have a date yet and while not much is expected, given the Switch 2 won’t be unveiled this month, you never really known with Nintendo.

There’s only one third party publisher with an event this year though and that’s Ubisoft, who ran another of their Ubisoft Forward events on Monday evening, which announced… nothing entirely new.

Instead, their focus was on Star Wars Outlaws and Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which although announced before haven’t been seen in action much up until now. Neither had much in the way of surprises in that department but in terms of visuals Outlaws proved absolutely stunning.

Although it’s a multiformat game, Outlaws was unveiled at last year’s Xbox Games Showcase and is billed as both the first proper open world Star Wars games and a Han Solo simulator without Han Solo.

Instead, you play as a new character named Kay Vess, who Ubisoft employees appear contractually obligated to refer to as a ‘scoundrel’ every time they mention her name. The game is set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi and while the overriding storyline is still obscured the idea is that you’ve got enough freedom to work for any criminal cartel you like, picking up jobs and travelling to different planets as you want.

The main new gameplay trailer from Ubisoft Forward starts off with Kay leaving a seedy bar on one planet to travel to the even seedier cantina on Tatooine, leaving time for a brief space dogfight in what seems to be a random event.

The graphics for both bars are absolutely superb, with tons of alien creatures wandering around, lots of authentic Star Wars detail, and excellent lighting. The exterior scenes, where Kay is driving around on a speeder bike, are also very impressive. Although Ubisoft probably weren’t counting on everyone being sick to death of seeing Tatooine again and again, when the game was first planned out all those years ago.

In terms of gameplay it’s clear there’s nothing terribly complicated going on in terms of either combat or stealth, with the most unique gimmick being that Kay has a pet alien named Nix which she can order about to distract or attack guards, and operate machinery. It’s a neat trick, although obviously everything has to be designed with Nix in mind, so there doesn’t seem to be much opportunity to do your own thing.

The most interesting element of gameplay is that the mission you’re on isn’t some super important story mission but an attempt to find a local gunslinger who can treat you a new move, with various other experts offering similarly new skills if you track them down through other multi-stage missions.

That, at least, is unusual and hopefully an indication of the game’s open-ended design. Although as Star Wars nerds we can’t help but admit that what we got most excited about was the binary sunset of Tatooine, the Imperial Troop Transport pulling up, and the fact that the freighters you rescue in the space mission look exactly like the one out of the old PC X-Wing games.

Star Wars authenticity isn’t something Outlaws has to worry about, but whether there’s enough meat on the game’s bones is. It won’t be long till we find out though, as despite this being its first proper gameplay viewing it’s out on August 30 for Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC.

Ubisoft’s Avatar game, by the same studio (which is getting new DLC next month), turned out well so there’s reason to hope this will too. And either way it’s going to be one of the most graphically impressive video games this generation.