How Star Wars Outlaws’ Reputation System Offers “Openness” and Player Agency

Star Wars Outlaws is indeed an open-world game – a first for Star Wars games overall – but it’s still got a mainline narrative to follow that takes every player through the story of Kay Vess, the game’s protagonist who’s also new to the Star Wars series. To achieve that sense of openness and give players room to create their own unique playthroughs while still maintaining a shared experience, Star Wars Outlaws developer Massive Entertainment employed the use of a reputation system that’ll govern what your standing looks like with the different factions at play in the game.

During a hands-on preview of Star Wars Outlaws, ComicBook spoke to John Björling, the associate narrative director working on Star Wars Outlaws, about this reputation system and how it’ll give you room to play around with the decisions you’ll end up making in-game.

“Because it’s an open-world game, and we want a lot of player agency while still telling Kay’s story as it should play out, we did try to strike a balance there,” Björling said. “What is the best approach to that player agency? And one of the things that we felt was the most valuable to do was focusing on the reputation system where you have these criminal syndicates like the Crimson Dawn, Ashiga Clan, Pykes, and Hutts.”

When playing Star Wars Outlaws, it was apparent that even main quests would give players room to make decisions that’d affect your reputation. Actions would sometimes result in popups that said your reputation with one group had increased while it decreased with another faction to indicate that someone really liked what you did, but the other didn’t care for it nearly as much. Björling compared Star Wars outlaws to a roller coaster in this sense where you’re often thrown into predetermined situations outside of your control, but you can still decide some things for yourself.

“In a lot of cases, you actually get to decide who you focus on and where you want to focus your efforts,” he said. “That ecosystem is what we felt was the best focus for that kind of openness. We didn’t really want to do something where we have multiple endings or anything like that. We knew that Kay’s story needs to go from A to B to C with certain milestones, but give as much freedom and openness in between those.”

Star Wars Outlaws is scheduled to release on August 30th.