An inside look at how Ubisoft Toronto and Massive create a scene in Star Wars Outlaws

The video game industry is notoriously secretive.

While anyone from the public can visit pretty much every major Hollywood studio for behind-the-scenes looks at their favourite movies and TV shows, gaming companies are typically far more guarded. All too often, developers don’t show much about how the sausage is made, outside of the odd documentary or series of developer interviews.

It’s for that reason that I was especially intrigued to receive an invite to a special media visit at Ubisoft Toronto (Far Cry 6, Splinter Cell: Blacklist) this month. While I’ve been to the studio several times now, I’ve only gotten brief glimpses, at most, of the development spaces. On this trip, however, the Canadian developer offered a surprisingly extensive look at what goes into making a big AAA game: in this case, Star Wars Outlaws, a brand-new action-adventure title set in the galaxy far, far away. Over the past few years, the Toronto team has been working on Outlaws with lead developer Massive Entertainment (The Division, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora) in Malmö, Sweden.

Ubisoft Toronto is located in the city’s Junction area.

As part of the studio visit, we got to hear from several members of Toronto and Massive development teams and get a special look at a scene being acted out in the performance capture (P-cap) studio. All in all, it was an insightful experience that had me appreciating even more the many complexities of game development. Here’s what we learned.

It starts on the page… sort of

Like any movie or television show, Star Wars Outlaws required a script. As it turns out, much of that was spearheaded by Ubisoft Toronto’s Navid Khavari (narrative director) and Nikki Foy (lead writer). Early on, they knew they wanted this to be a story about a plucky scoundrel, Kay Vess (Toronto-based actor Humberly González from Netflix’s Ginny & Georgia), who struggles to survive in the Galactic Empire. But something that makes Outlaws more complex than most other Star Wars projects is the fact that it’s a 30-plus-hour open-world game in which there are a slew of main missions and side activities for Kay to take on.

“There’s a lot of explaining, and especially with an open-world game, you can imagine it’s 10 times more clarifying that needs to happen,” says Khavari of his role as narrative director, which he likens to being a showrunner on a TV set. “But really, it’s to provide the context, and then also we can table read, stepping through the script. And we talk about this a lot — the script isn’t really finished until you shoot, until the actors say the words. And sometimes is a little back and forth with audio [teams] — ‘the script’s locked, the script’s locked.’ Well, not until they say it.”

An Outlaws table read. From left to right: Humberly González (Kay Vess), Joel Labelle (Gadeek, standing in for Shadi Janho), Alex Crowther (a protocol droid, standing in for Robert Montcalm), Nikki Foy (lead writer), Navid Khavari (narrative director) and Bogdan Draghici (realization director).

As an example of that fluidity, Khavari says Kay was originally written to be “very snarky” and “quippy,” but it was González who suggested during their first shoot that they rein in some of that edge to add more “heart” to her character. “We had to go back and say, ‘Wait a second, this needs to be someone we all relate to. That became a really big theme of, she can make jokes, she can situationally react to things, but we need to relate to this person and want to spend time with her,” he said.

“Once we got Humberly, we really landed on Kay being charming in the way that a scoundrel should be because of the situations that she’s in, not what she’s saying. So we have her failing forward a lot, and we try really hard to make the situation interesting in a way that how Kay fumbles through it, or finesses her way through it, is what’s charming, instead of always entertaining with a joke which was, of course, an instinct,” added Foy with a laugh.

Then, of course, there’s bringing the world around Kay to life. Unlike film or TV productions, where you have either real landscapes or constructed sets to play in, P-cap work for games takes place in a 12,000 square foot sterile and padded white room. (Ubisoft’s two major P-cap studios are located in Toronto and Montreal and contribute to every game the French publisher releases.) As González told us in a previous interview: “There’s no sets, or makeup or costumes or props; you’re fully creating something out of nothing, almost. It’s a very stripped version of bringing such a full world to life.”

Part of that process involved bringing in a real puppeteer, Camille Loiselle-D’Aragon, to handle a stuffed doll meant to stand in for Kay’s cute alien companion, Nix.

Gonzàlez with the Nix puppet.

“I wondered — I’ve done motion capture before, and I thought, ‘Is Nix going to be there? Is it just going to be a piece of tape I look at? Is this going to be a tennis ball?’ Because that’s kind of how motion capture works. I was really grateful to know that Nix actually came to life with a real puppeteer on set,” said González. Like the spandex-like P-cap suits that she and her fellow actors wear, the Nix puppet might look goofy, but it helps create an anchor for everyone to play off.

“He’s just like a blue stuffed toy on a stick, and our puppeteer, she is incredible. She actually built him, and every time we came back to shoot new scenes, he just kept getting better and better. He got hair, he got a mouth and a tongue — a glow-up, truly!” said González.

“One of my favourite things was you would be shooting and in between takes, you would just sort of be petting Nix or talking to him. We’re not shooting, but the puppeteer, Camille, would just react and do chirps and stuff to stay in character,” added Khavari.

“He’s my emotional support!” she quipped.

Not your average shoot

But of course, the writing and acting are only part of the equation. Because this is a game, and so much of the world has to be meticulously created digitally, you need some particularly talented, technical-minded people.

That’s where someone like Massive Entertainment’s realization director Bogdan Draghici comes in. It’s his job to work with the actors and the animation and cinematics teams to figure out how to best bring to life the script from Khavari and his fellow writers. “It’s our job as directors to help out the talent and to help out even the artists to understand how this is going to look at the end. So they need to be able to project that and to create from nothing something that looks beautiful and something that is going to steer some sort of emotional reaction from the audience,” explains Draghici.

Draghici directs González in a scene.

What’s particularly notable about Draghici is that he’s a nearly 20-year director and VFX supervisor veteran who’s worked both on massive games like Far Cry 3 and The Division and blockbuster films like Avengers: Endgame and Solo: A Star Wars Story. He says learning about production pipelines and workflows at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) and other companies helped inform his approach to games.

For instance, he says he consulted visual effects supervisor and ILM CCO John Knoll and studied each Star Wars film director to get a feel for their unique styles. In particular, he looked for inspiration from filmmaking techniques that director Gareth Edwards and cinematographer Greig Fraser employed on Rogue One to recreate old-feeling movies with grounded and modern visuals. But of course, games have their own unique challenges.

“In a film, whatever you shoot in the camera, that’s all there is. And more than that, you have the fidelity of real actors and micro-expressions that are captured by the camera. You have beautiful sets. [In games], most of the time, we capture the animation, we capture the facials, and then all that gets transposed to a 3D puppet,” Draghici explains. “So some of that fidelity will get lost, and we need to shift a little bit the focus point and the point of interest into, ‘How do we keep the player engaged when we don’t have that fidelity of Harrison Ford’s micro-expressions? How is that the player going to be engaged?’ And then we put a little bit more [focus] on entire action or maybe we balance an action scene with a dialogue scene. Maybe instead of having a super close-up, we go into a medium shot and we try to balance it with other types of solutions.”

All in all, he says that the team produced over 1,000 storyboards to lay out photography, framing, camera movement and more. When you consider that each storyboard has 15 to 20 frames, that works out to over 20,000 frames in total. As an example of this, he shows us an early cinematic of Kay’s ship, The Trailblazer, crash-landing on the savannah planet of Toshara. The script provides a basic overview of the scene and then it’s up to Draghici and the other developers to figure out how to artfully bring it to life.

From left to right: Michael Hollenback (Ubisoft Toronto associate animation director), Draghici and Jason Cook (Ubisoft Toronto associate realization director)

Aiding him in that process are Ubisoft Toronto’s Jason Cook (associate realization director) and Michael Hollenbeck (associate animation director). The former is responsible for figuring out the “connective tissue” between narrative beats (i.e. transitions from cinematics to gameplay), while the latter is in charge of polishing all of the animation that comes through, as well as directing and blocking in a lot of scenes. They also expressed excitement over getting to both direct some of the acting talent in the P-cap studio.

“One of the great things that I love about working on these kinds of scenes at Ubisoft is that every step of the way, it’s a collaboration. It comes from game design; they need a moment and then narrative can write a script. But as we start prototyping and storyboarding and things, the scene can evolve. We can all help to make it the best version of that scene,” said Cook. “So people can suggest ideas in terms of blocking, or the way the cameras cover the scene itself, and that can all influence things. And maybe the script gets updated to reflect that. So it’s not like a one-way street. It’s a creative collaboration at every step of the way, which is really exciting to watch happen sometimes.”

Of course, this can also present some challenges. “You have lots of moments where you have a global effort of all these teams making assets all at the same time, so there may be a moment where the world is not fully complete or an objective is not fully identified in the landscape yet. And so the mountain range may say, ‘Change for a moment,’ and you would have framed it up for what you thought was the best thing,” says Hollenbeck. “But then, once it becomes finalized from the world team, you’ll have to make an adjustment to make a better composition and stuff. So just trying to maintain and monitor all of [that] to make changes is the challenge, but also an opportunity to make improvements.”

A swivelling motion-capture speeder bike. Ubisoft Toronto was in charge of creating the introductory cinematics for the one in-game.

At the same time, he’s nothing but effusive about the process of his Toronto-based team working with peers all the way in Europe.

“I think it’s fantastic. You can really get a real fantastic synergy happening if you do it right. So knowing that Sweden is six hours ahead of us — if we are presenting, say, a playlist for them to approve of realization content that we’ve produced here, and we want Bogdan’s opinion on it all, then we’ll put together that playlist maybe 24 hours ahead of time, and send it off to him. And that way, we go to bed, and then he wakes up, he’ll have time to, review it, put notes down,” he said. “And then when we collect it, when we wake up in the morning, we’ll collect up together on the crossover hours, and then we’ll have these really, really efficient meetings where we can just kind of go through the notes that were on there and we can ask any questions if we need to. But it really makes for a fantastic cycle that you can do if you set it up.”

It’s a fruitful partnership that has let the Ubisoft Toronto team get to work on everything from scene introductions for Kay’s speeder and ship to the iconic rancor. Yes, just like Luke Skywalker, Kay will find herself coming into contact with that horrifying creature in Jabba the Hutt’s palace, and the Canadian Outlaws staff say that was a highlight of the whole production.

The rancor in Return of the Jedi. (Image credit: Lucasfilm)

“When the opportunity came that we could produce that content here in Toronto, we were so, so excited,” said Hollenback. “And so basically, [we were] researching the rancor and all of the moments that it’s appeared in either a series or a film, and trying to replicate that feeling or that memory you had when you first saw it in Return of the Jedi and pitching some ideas to Bogdan and Navid and getting it greenlit and seeing it all the way through to what it is today. The animation I’m super, super proud of and super proud of what the team has done, and I’m really excited for people to see it.”

Clearly, a lot of work goes into making a game, especially one as big as Star Wars Outlaws. And while I had a very surface-level idea of how the performance-capture process works, it was fascinating to see how that goes hand-in-hand with other groups within the team, like those for realization and animation.

We’ll see how it all comes together when Star Wars Outlaws launches on August 30th on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.