Behind the sound of Star Wars Outlaws: a polarising game with a Grammy-nominated soundtrackUbisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws didn’t get the best reception when it launched in August this year. Mixed reviews of the open-world video game are still abound — some players bemoan the stealth, gun-focussed combat and intermittent bugs, while others celebrate the game for its likeable protagonists (Kay Vess and her alien companion, Nix), superb storyline and explorable environment, which makes them “feel like a tourist” in the Star Wars universe.
Myriad players and reviewers appear in agreement with one thing, though: The soundtrack and sound design is absolutely exquisite. It’s now been nominated for a 2025 Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games. Blending distorted synths and deep 808-style kicks with intense string sections and esoteric woodwind, the score makes for a distinctly modern Star Wars experience that retains the essence of the original franchise. What’s not to love?
“Man, the use of that terminology, ‘like a tourist in Star Wars’, that warms my heart; that’s exactly what we wanted to do,” says Wilbert Roget II, composer for the game’s score. “I like to see people’s reactions to the music, just to know what I’m doing wrong, what I’m doing right, and to make sure that my tastes are aligned with what fellow gamers actually want,” he adds of seeing the reviews of Outlaws.
Image: Press
“I’m thrilled to be a part of this. I’m very proud of my work and of the amount of work [that went into Outlaws],” adds Cody Matthew Johnson, composer for the Sounds of the Underworld Music from Star Wars Outlaws. “A lot goes into navigating a Star Wars game and making sure you live up to the legacy and honour it…I used to really let [reviews] get to my head, but as long as you can be objective with your performance on something, and be honest with yourself…I keep saying it: I’m just happy to be here and I’m stoked to be working on music in games, especially for Star Wars.”
Roget, Johnson and their colleagues in the audio department have earned their praise. From loading the main menu to exploring cantinas and getting into speeder chases, through to the in-game arcade games such as Jaunda’s Hope, the Outlaws soundtrack is outstanding. It never feels out of place in the game, it doesn’t lazily recycle any of John Williams’ original Star Wars music, and there’s an impressive diversity of otherworldly styles and sounds as you traverse the game.
Though Roget, Johnson and their team are talented technically in music and production, they also deserve credit for their conceptual approaches to Outlaws.
Wilbert Roget, II. Image: Press
“I wanted it to feel like music is simply emanating from the world, not like I’m this composer just imposing music,” explains Roget, who has produced soundtracks for games including Helldivers 2, Call Of Duty: WWII and Star Wars: The Old Republic. “So I’ll look at the art direction, the graphics and even the composition of the shots in films to see and like the colour palettes and see how can I connect that with musical elements.”
The team also pulled inspiration from original movies. Roget cites Outlaws’ iteration of Tatooine — Anakin and Luke Skywalker’s home planet in Star Wars — as an example. An eight-bar piece of music in Star Wars Episode II: Attack Of The Clones plays in a ⅝ time signature when Anakin first lands on Tatooine. Though this snippet is incredibly short, Roget used it as a reference, expanding on its use of plucked and orchestral instruments for the tracks, Tattooine, The Desert Frontier, and Mos Eisley.

“[The Desert Frontier] has these wide chords and double bass melody that’s almost melancholic — like a cross between danger and wonder,” explains Roget. “Then you get into Mos Eisley, and it just becomes a chaotic, busy market like everything is upside down. I recorded electric bass, but I played it with a double bass bow, so it sounds like a bowstring instrument that’s gone wrong. I had my friend Kristen Magus play some different types of world flutes for that as well, to represent the chaotic busyness of the market that you see all throughout the city.”
Johnson’s research into planets of the Outer Rim was extensive, too. The LA-based composer is a longtime Star Wars devotee; “I’ve seen, watched and played almost every single piece of Star Wars that is out there,” he says. However, his adventures in a galaxy far, far away haven’t always been as immersive as he’d hoped. He notes that, historically, the music that accompanies planets in Star Wars games isn’t often as deeply explored as it could be. With Sounds of the Underworld, he sought to change that.
Cody Matthew Johnson. Image: Press
“I can’t think of an expression of Mos Eisley that feels as grounded and accurate as in Star Wars Outlaws,” says Johnson, who has written music for Resident Evil 2 and the Marvel vs Capcom series. “You can really explore these worlds on a very large scale [in Outlaws]. And with planets like Toshara and Akiva, there wasn’t any history, so we could really explore new ideas. It [offered] a great opportunity to use diegetic music to paint more specifically about these worlds and the culture.”
Johnson’s Sounds of the Underworld score taps into the weirder, wilder side of Star Wars, soundtracking the cantinas, markets and arcades you navigate in Outlaws. As a rare treat, you can truly hear what a fictional band in the Star Wars universe might sound like — and not just Max Rebo’s band in Jabba’s Palace. “Max Rebo is my mortal enemy,” jokes Johnson.

Sourcing the sounds for these vast worlds wasn’t straightforward. Both Roget and Johnson had to get creative with their choices of instruments — and it sounds like they had a blast. (“You have to have a blast,” says Roget. “The way to determine if a score is good is if you can hear, as a listener, that the composer had fun writing it.”)
For the main Outlaws score, Roget looked to his stalwart Korg synths, the MS-20 and Minilogue, but also recorded unconventional acoustic instruments, such as a Pipa and a Biwa, alongside a traditional orchestra. “I like to think of synthesizers and world instruments as just another instrument in the palette,” he says. “Maybe I could do this part on a clarinet, or maybe I can dial up the Minilogue and do the same part there… Maybe [the sound] is in the same frequency band but, because I use this different [instrument] instead of the orchestra, it has a different character, and I can have a different subtext as a result.”
Image: Press
Roget adds that he and his team quickly realised that analogue synthesizers were a better fit for Star Wars, as opposed to digital. “There are some digital sounds in there but, generally speaking, the digital vibe doesn’t necessarily work alongside the orchestra. [Digital synths] make themselves known right at the front of the mix, whereas we needed something to sit back and be more polite.”
He also has a cupboard of so-called “foley instruments” — wine bottles, tin cans, cardboard — to use as percussion instruments.
Johnson, meanwhile, had other hair-brained ideas. His instrument choices, too, were intriguing, but his wackiest scheme was recording through an array of microphones inspired by the recording technology of the first half of the 1900s. The setup includes the Placid Audio Copperphone and Carbonphone, Trash Talk Audio’s Rotary Phone mic, Scope Lab’s The Periscope, and a Blue Bottle tube mic. He recorded everything through these five microphones in parallel.
Cody Matthew Johnson’s mic array for Star Wars Outlaws. Image: Press
“It’s not lo-fi, but it’s no hi-fi”, Johnson explains. “It’s like this fidelity that is unique to what I was trying to design: an expression of music technology leading up to 0 BBY [the fictional year that Star Wars: A New Hope takes place in], or the 1980s — when this fictional world meets ours.”
Beyond the score, Star Wars Outlaws also employs an impressive bespoke sound engine. With an open-world game, any number of things can happen to the player, whether it’s being attacked by an NPC or coming across a place where you’re character isn’t welcome. To enable the audio to react to your situation, the game engine has different states of combat, based on your proximity to an enemy, how difficult an enemy is, how many enemies there are, and other variable factors.
“If you’re not really close to enemies, then [the music] just has pitched elements. But as soon as you get close to enemies, we bring in some percussive elements to the mix to say, ‘Hey, you’re kind of in danger! Be careful,’” explains Roget. “And then we have a state that we call ‘Hiding’, which basically means that enemies have previously engaged you, but you’ve successfully broken their line of sight and they don’t exactly know where you are, so they’re actively searching for you. So this is more synth-based layers.”
Image: Press
“Any one of these states can crossfade into any other one, so we needed to make sure that we’ve recorded the orchestra in such a way that it was able to make these crossfades in a seamless manner,” Roget continues. To achieve this, the score was recorded in stems. As the player’s situation becomes more intense, more layers are introduced — brass, dramatic strings, and faster performances, for example.
“It was a very difficult and iterative process figuring out how to just compose music that still sounded like Star Wars, but had all of these modern game tech elements to it,” concludes Roget.
“It’s not that Outlaws is overwhelming, but it gives you a way to explore this galaxy, and with an agency that Star Wars hasn’t allowed you to do before,” adds Johnson. “It makes it feel like there’s real consequence or reward to how you play it, too.”
Image: Press
Star Wars Outlaws may not have immediately won over the entire Skywalker fanbase with some aspects of the gameplay. But as Ubisoft climbs uphill with the imminent Wild Card expansion and more downloadable content to come, the composers on Outlaws can feel assured that their work has paid off. Those players and fans who take the time to explore the in-game galaxy will hear the fun that Johnson and Roget had in building the soundtrack and the considerations they took to make Outlaws as authentic as possible. They may even win that Grammy.
Learn more about Star Wars Outlaws at Ubisoft.
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