If you can set aside the funky reviews and stock dips brought on by the launch of Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws, there’s actually some fun MMORPG trivia packed into the game, specifically relating to one of our genre’s pet Star Wars games.
GamesRadar reports that the Ubisoft Massive devs actually took direct inspiration from Star Wars Galaxies when building its version of Tatooine – specifically the city of Bestine, which during the SWG era was a medium-sized stock Imperial hub in the desert.
“Creating the city of Bestine was fun, because it doesn’t really exist in any way – but it was in Star Wars Galaxies,” Outlaws art and world director Benedikt Podlesnigg says. “So we looked at that old game, at the city’s footprint, and then we had to figure out, OK, how do we expand on this but still keep it somewhat aligned with the overall layout. We tried to bring in elements that are known to Star Wars fans and still add in new stuff. […] We wanted a Star Wars fan to be able to look at Outlaws and go ‘Oh yeah, I know that thing’ or ‘I recognize that place.'”
The irony here, of course, is that the version of Bestine that launched in SWG in 2003 is not the most remarkable town to copy; if people remember anything specific about it at all, it’s probably because of its PvP activity and generic layout – not really the way it’s described in books. Still, we’re hard-pressed to be sad that SWG is still influencing games more than two decades later.
Note, GamesRadar’s piece – like Wookieepedia – says Bestine “featured in two expansions for Star Wars Galaxies,” but of course it launched with the game and therefore existed for all three of its expansions and wasn’t really a checkbox feature for any of them. In fact, you can go look at it right now as it exists in multiple rogue servers still in operation. The one I’m using for this post is one I took myself in SWG Legends.
