Star Wars Outlaws begins with Kay Vess and Nix living humble thieves’ lives in Canto Bight’s worker’s district where players immediately get a chance to bet on fathier races and pickpocket bystanders in the streets. Their journey to other planets begins soon afterward as they become entangled with Star Wars Outlaws’ Zerek Besh and consequently the Pykes, Crimson Dawn, Ashiga, and Hutts, landing them on Toshara, Kijimi, Akiva, and Tatooine.
Tons of interesting beats on these planets don’t have a focus on the golden path, especially in Expert NPC quests like MT-7’s. Of course, Lando Calrissian being an Expert himself was a fun surprise and it’s doubly neat knowing this won’t be the last players see of him in Star Wars Outlaws. Two DLC chapters are available via the game’s season pass—the first releasing this fall that centers on Sabacc with Lando and the second releasing in the spring that centers on ship exploits with Hondo—and, while not much else is known about them yet, it’d be fantastic if they each invite players to new parts of the galaxy.
Star Wars Outlaws’ Galaxy Map Reveals How Disappointingly Small Its Open World is
Star Wars Outlaws boasts its status as the first-ever single-player action-adventure open-world game but, with only a moon and four planets, it arguably underrepresents the larger Star Wars mythology. To be fair, Toshara and its Toshaal System orbit are more than enough to fill an open-world Star Wars game alone while familiar and unfamiliar environments alike are fully explorable with hours of content to experience.
Kijimi may be pared down to Kijimi City without a sandbox to ride a speeder through, but it too more than makes up for that real estate by populating snowy back alleys with tons of NPCs to interact with. Nevertheless, Outlaws’ chosen systems are a mere snapshot of the locations iconic characters have visited in the Star Wars universe and Ubisoft has given itself the proper outlets to broaden Kay and Nix’s understanding of the galaxy.
The galaxy map itself is remarkably sparse with explorable systems only appearing as tiny blips—it’s as if more systems were planned but cut back on, and even if that’s not the case it is a strange decision to show so much space in the galaxy and have only several points to travel to within it. Again, planets like Toshara and Tatooine have a wealth of content and real estate, but a macrocosmic look at Outlaws’ spread is a bit underwhelming in how it’s presented.
Star Wars Outlaws’ Story DLCs Would Be a Fine Excuse to Debut New Planets
With this in mind, Outlaws could take this opportunity to add a new planet or orbit for each of its upcoming season pass DLCs. Wild Card pairing Kay with Lando again would make for a well-deserved return to Cantonica’s Canto Bight to take on more high-rollers, for example, and especially since Massive has already depicted so much of the city it may already have a halfway decent framework to build from.
Otherwise, a new planet altogether would be exciting. It might be unlikely to expect a brand-new planet from a DLC revolving around Sabacc, but it could simply be the same scale as Kijimi and have players bounce between several tables in syndicate-run districts.
Regardless, taking players to an orbit they didn’t get to see in the base game would be excellent and even better if it had an accompanying planet for the DLC’s exposition to take place on. However, both of these DLCs taking place within the events of the base game and on the planets already established in Outlaws would help flesh out those systems further, which may be too good of an opportunity to pass up for wholly new regions, maps, and vistas it would have to design and implement so soon.