Star Wars Outlaws is the hotly anticipated open-world game fans of the franchise have been begging for for years, and its creative director has revealed his biggest inspiration for the game came from Sony’s Ghost of Tsushima.
In an interview with GamesRadar+, creative director Julian Gerighty said, “It’s super interesting because my biggest reference was Ghost of Tsushima, which is more on the Kurosawa side of inspiration than the Western, the John Ford side of the inspiration for George Lucas.”
Star Wars is clearly inspired by Westerns, and Westerns themselves are often inspired by Samurai movies and vice versa, so it’s interesting to see how all these references will be at play within Star Wars Outlaws. Akira Kurosawa, a filmmaker who inspired the aesthetic of Ghost of Tsushima, even studied the work of John Ford.
“Red Dead Redemption is phenomenal, [because it treats] the world as a world – not as a checklist of activities that are repeated often,” said Gerighty. “But I think that Ghost of Tsushima, what I loved about it was this purity of having a player fantasy and really leaning into it. This is the story, the world, the character, everything fits together with the gameplay guiding everything. That’s the fantasy of ‘you are a samurai ninja in Japan.’ That was one of the guiding lights for this.”
As for player fantasy, that’s something Star Wars Outlaws is hoping to deliver on as well. “It’s the outlaw player fantasy and it’s open world, those were the two main pillars that we pitched,” Gerighty explained.
Star Wars Outlaws is due to launch August 30, 2024 on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation.
In other news, Xbox consoles are not selling well, but game and services revenue is up by a lot.
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