Star Wars Outlaws composers take us inside the music of the first open-world Star Wars video game (Exclusive)

Earlier this fall, Ubisoft released Star Wars Outlaws, a brand new game set in the galaxy far, far away. Outlaws is notable for a few reasons. To start, it's the first Star Wars game to be released since EA's decade-long exclusivity contract to produce Star Wars games expired, which means that some fresh studios finally got to give their own takes on the universe. Second, it's the first ever open-world Star Wars game, produced by Massive Entertainment in collaboration with Lucasfilm and Ubisoft, the studio behind the Assassin's Creed games. That means that Star Wars Outlaws is a big, sprawling video game, and players can largely decide how to approach its vast worlds at their own pace.

In Star Wars Outlaws, players assume the role of Kay Vess, a budding scoundrel who wants to make a name for herself in the galaxy's criminal underworld. She's helped along on that mission by her merqaal companion Nix, who's essentially a little axolotl critter that helps her steal things, distract her enemies, and accomplish a number of other useful tasks. In their starship, the Trailblazer, Kay and Nix visit iconic Star Wars locations like Luke Skywalker's desert homeworld of Tatooine as well as brand new planets like the windswept plains of Toshara, making friends (or enemies) with some of the franchise's biggest crime syndicates along the way.

I've logged upwards of 70 hours in Star Wars Outlaws at this point, and have been loving every second of living in this video game rendition of the Star Wars galaxy. That's long enough that I've gotten to fully experience one of the game's secret weapons: the music, which helps bring its expressive worlds to life. This is an area where Star Wars Outlaws truly outdid itself, with dozens of unique songs accentuating the various landscapes and peoples in the game. Then you step into one of the many cantinas known to harbor scum and villainy, and there's a whole other soundtrack with different songs depending on the locale to give each bar its own unique flavor.

The process of building that massive soundscape was every bit as much of an undertaking as you might imagine. To go behind the music of Star Wars Outlaws, I spoke with composers Wilbert Roget, II and Cody Matthew Johnson. Roget, II was responsible for helming the scoring of the game, composing many of the themes which you hear in the soundtrack and coordinating with partner composers Kazuma Jinnouchi and Jon Everist to fill out the rest. Johnson, meanwhile, composed all of the songs which play in the various cantinas, keeping in mind the differences between the various planets to bring out what made each one unique.

As is fitting for the enormous soundtrack of Star Wars Outlaws, there are currently not one, but two albums you can listen to on Spotify for the game. If you'd like to get a feel for Wilbert Roget, II's score, there's the Star Wars Outlaws: Original Video Game Soundtrack. And if you'd rather spend some time at a cantina, Cody Matthew Johnson's Songs from the Underworld: Original Music from Star Wars Outlaws is just the ticket.

To find out more about how these two visionary composers went about creating the music for Star Wars Outlaws, read on for our exclusive interview with Wilbert Roget, II and Cody Matthew Johnson. I recommend throwing on one of the soundtracks in the background for the full experience.

DANIEL ROMAN for Winter Is Coming: Hi Wilbert and Cody, thanks for joining us today! Let's start at the beginning. How did you both become involved with Star Wars Outlaws?

WILBERT ROGET, II: I had worked in-house at LucasArts from 2008-2013, so I already had experience with the Star Wars franchise — most notably as a music editor and implementer on the Force Unleashed series, and composer on Star Wars: The Old Republic as well as the unreleased Star Wars: First Assault. Later I scored Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series, which lead to the team at Lucasfilm recommending me as a composer for Star Wars Outlaws.

After an initial meeting with the Ubisoft Massive audio director, Simon Koudriavsey, I scored a brief clip of gameplay footage, and also wrote the main character's theme as a demo — this eventually became the first track in the album, "Kay Vess - The Outlaw". The team thought my work would give Outlaws a unique vibe while still being unmistakably Star Wars, and so they hired me as the principal composer. I then hired Jon Everist and Kazuma Jinnouchi as my co-composers, to make sure that the game had a rich diversity of musical voices as the player goes on their interplanetary journey.

CODY MATTHEW JOHNSON: My involvement in Star Wars Outlaws picks up mid-development, after Wilbert had already been working on principle production of his score, but I look back and can pinpoint the origination about 5 years ago in 2019. I can't speak to whether or not Star Wars Outlaws was a twinkle in the creative eye of the folks at Ubisoft or Lucasfilm in 2019, but 2019 is when I met Wilbert at E3! After my music for Resident Evil 2 and Devil May Cry 5 released, Wilbert and I connected online and met up in Los Angeles during E3 — a simple, quick, friendly, and low stakes go-to-know hang turned into years of sans-collaboration friendship. Then in September 2022, Wilbert reached out to me about the potential of helping him out and working on a project he was also working on — not necessarily "together" but in tandem. As a friend I would do just about anything for Wilbert, so I was happy to jump into whatever it was if it meant helping a friend.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, it turned out to be a then code-named Star Wars game and I was in a vidcon call with Simon Koudriavtsey, our Audio Director, and Music Supervisors on the cantina music Häkan Glante and Tobias Gustavsson. They implicitly trusted Wilbert's recommendation that I was the right person for the job, bringing along my eclectic set of skills and experience producing many styles of music, both songs and score.

WiC: What most excited you about working on this project?

WRII: Ever since scoring the unreleased Star Wars: First Assault, I wanted to add to the franchise in a unique way — using instruments and musical traditions that go beyond the classic John Williams scores, and developing interactive music systems that dramatically add to the player's experience, all while retaining the signature of the franchise. Because Outlaws was an open-world game that dealt with crime syndicates and stealth gameplay (rather than Jedi, Sith and lightsaber battles), I had the rare opportunity to do both.

CMJ: I love lore — I can't overstate that enough. Lore, for me, is this fascinating crossroads of story, fictional culture, character development, world building, and more. Looking at the world and drawing conclusions about why characters developed the way they do, what problems have been solved or created by the natural resources, what conflicts have developed through differences of cultural values, resource scarcity, etc. That directly correlates to my love of ethnomusicology — which similarly is a crossroads of music cultures around the world, how the music culture develops, and how that music functions within a given culture.

Star Wars Outlaws proved to be the perfect sandbox and playground to explore the intersection of these tow loves: fictional lore and ethnomusicology. For the settings within Star Wars Outlaws that hold legacy, like Tatooine and Kijimi, I was able to sink my teeth very deep and explore the lore of those worlds and how they have been represented historically in the Star Wars universe. And then, most exciting for me, the settings of new worlds like Toshara and Akiva were a blank canvas. I was able to dig into the creative design, art, and story from Massive Entertainment to learn more about these planets and then was able to creatively explore how music would represent these cultures and theorize how music culture may have developed on these planets into the music you hear in the cantinas in game.

WiC: Were there any musical themes or ideas from the overall Star Wars franchise and John Williams iconic scores that you wanted to make sure you worked into Outlaws?

WRII: I decided early on that the Outlaws score should be most directly influenced by the very first Star Wars film, Episode IV: A New Hope. The game takes place during the original trilogy, but as this was the beginning of the protagonist Kay Vess' journey, I felt that A New Hope was the best analogue due to its focus on exploration and adventure.

As such, I didn't use any themes directly from the prequels or sequels, as none of the planets or factions fulfill the same role in the game as they do in these films. However, I did use the Stormtroopers' motif from Episode IV, as they are exactly the same in Outlaws as they are in the films. I expanded on their instrumentation too, using the same brass, snare drums and piano as the films, as well as designing synth patches based on samples from all three of these instruments to underscore stealth gameplay.

WiC: I've been playing Outlaws for a few months now, and have been so impressed with how vast the soundtrack is for this game. Can you talk a little about how you approached giving the planets and cantinas each their own sonic identity?

WRII: I hired Kazuma Jinnouchi and Jon Everist to score the planets Kijimi and Akiva respectively, as well as the Ashiga Clan and Crimson Dawn factions. We met a few times in person, and kept a music style guide document to notate our theme motifs for the planets and factions, and to track which unique signature sounds would be used for each. Our sonic decisions for the planets were based on their climates and their history; for factions, they were based around the characters involved, how they fight, how well-funded they are, and their philosophies.

CMJ: Expanding on my earlier answer, each world was presented with much detail on the biome of the planet, the key geographical ecological features down to the flora and fauna. Similarly to how music culture developed in response to not only cultural practices but also from accessibility of resources to make instruments, I designed instrumentation that would be heavily influenced by the resources of each planet... and then added in a bit of a "galactic space pop" influence — The Empire is everywhere and the music scene on Coruscant is inescapable in this timeline, seemingly just like The Empire! Then we add in the theoretical design of the music: scales, harmonic language, rhythmic cadences. These were all carefully designed by the cultures expressed through each biome — Akiva has many pan-equatorial elements; Kijimi has obvious arctic circle influence; Toshara has rolling African-like savannas — and those cultures served as the basis of elements to re-engineer unique music systems that feel both familiar, yet have a unique unexplainable "twist."

WiC: Wilbert, you've mentioned before that Outlaws has a "fully interactive music system" that rearranges based on gameplay. Can you talk about how that works, and how you went about scoring something like that?

WRII: Our open-world interactive music system basically has seven layers — three intensities of Combat, three of Stealth (or "Combat-Ready" as we call it), and a middle "Hiding" layer that plays when enemies were previously in Combat, have lost sight of the player, and are actively searching. The intensity levels are based on the estimated difficulty of enemies, for instances an area with elite guards or very many Stormtroopers might have a higher intensity than a single cannon-fodder enemy. And the Combat-Ready layers have several sub-layers that respond to enemy awareness, proximity, and player actions like melee takedowns.

Erik Jacobson, our music designer at Massive, had previous experience designing open-world music systems for The Division series, and I had also designed an open-world system for Yager Studios' original iteration of Dead Island 2 before its reboot, so we basically combined our ideas in a brainstorming meeting. There was a good bit of experimentation and iteration over the next several months, but the goal was always to underscore the action dynamically, with more interactivity than any of my previous Star Wars game scores.

WiC: Cody, the cantina songs are always such a blast to listen to that I find myself stopping while playing just to hang out at the bar on planets like Toshara and Akiva. Were there any specific real-world musical inspirations (or other games/media) that you drew from while working on the cantina music?

CMJ: Inspiration is found under every rock, behind every door, and around every corner! There was an unofficial playlist of music I listened to for inspiration made of late '70s and early '80s pop, jazz, and post-punk. Our setting is between Episode V and Episode VI of the original trilogy and thus we're right in the middle of the original trilogy timeline, which had obvious ties to the late '70s and '80s when Star Wars originally was released. With the connection to that specific time we always needed to keep at least one foot (maybe even one toe) in that time period to ensure creative continuity. By no means does that mean there is limitation to the musical expression of a seemingly endless count of worlds across the galaxy, but again we wanted to make sure it felt familiar to fans of the IP and retained a semblance of connection to the popular music of our world during the release of the original Star Wars.

WiC: I noticed some of the cantina songs have singing. Are those in alien languages, and how did you approach that element of the songwriting?

CMJ: Yes, alien languages! In an appropriate amirroring of my love for ethnomusicology, my cousin happens to be a highly regarded linguist — I found a lot of inspiration through her work while constructing alien languages for these songs. While I was not equipped to totally create a uique language (not a linguist!) nor wanted to use existing in-world languages (I felt this would be distracting to players and might detract from the immersive experience of the cantinas holistically), I did want the lyrics to feel lively and performed as if the performers knew the words they were saying. My solution was writing lyrics in English — each song has a long forgotten lyrical story — and then use a series of scripts to auto-translate into a variety of languages based on the earthly cultures present in each biome, and then through syllabic concatenation scripts recompiled new, entirely unique words that, again, felt familiar yet uniquely "Star Wars."

WiC: Alright, final question! Which planet in Star Wars Outlaws do you think has the most hoppin' music scene?

WRII: If I were to hazard a guess, it would be Cantonica. It's basically space-Vegas, where the rich travel from far and wide to gamble and party. So one would assume they can budget the best musical acts around!

CMJ: Specifically, I think Cantonica, with its socioeconomic dichotomous culture, would have a wide and far reaching music scene, but in my honest opinion I think the neutral space stations, like Renpali Station, that bring together the syndicates and citizens from across the galaxy likely have the most outrageous party scene!

A tremendous thank you to Wilbert Roget, II and Cody Matthew Johnson for taking the time to talk with us about their work on Star Wars Outlaws!

Star Wars Outlaws is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. Its first downloadable expansion, Wild Card, comes out on November 21, with a second expansion, titled A Pirate's Fortune, due to follow in 2025. Wild Card will see Kay Vess enter into a high stakes Sabacc tournament where she'll cross paths with legacy Star Wars character Lando Calrissian and discover that there's more to the card tournament than meets the eye.

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