Star Wars Outlaws: How Scotland helped bring one of the most unique scores in the Star Wars universe to life

While crafting the soundtrack for the franchise’s first open world game, as well as enlisting the help of a number of co-composers and solo musicians, Roget travelled to Glasgow to record with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO).

“So I mean, as you know, they're a very famous orchestra for classical recordings,” he begins. “And they hadn't, to the best of my knowledge, done any film or game scoring until just before our first session with them, which I think was early 2023.”

Star Wars Outlaws was among the first games scored by Royal Scottish National Orchestra

Roget had originally wanted to record in London to ensure that elements of John Williams’ iconic orchestral score were present in the Outlaws soundtrack. But it was only after speaking with fellow composer Terrence Blanchard, who had just recorded the score for The Woman King in Glasgow, that Roget ended up looking into the RSNO as a possibility for the game.

“I found out that actually the contractor who handles Glasgow is someone who I'd worked with in the past on Star Wars: The Old Republic and so I had that contact. We kind of just made it work.”

Also having worked with conductor Allan Wilson in the past, Roget and the Star Wars Outlaws team flew to Glasgow for the first round of recordings.

Roget explains: “This was like main themes and all of the music for the Imperial faction, [which] we wanted to do in Glasgow because it just had that classic Star Wars sound.

“It had that British musicianship and they have their specific way that they play each of the instruments that's very difficult to get anywhere else, especially in the brass and percussion.”

He continues: “So we had those sessions, they went beautifully. I mean we were so impressed by the musicianship. The interpretations that they had and their level of sight reading is just sky high.

“Those initial recordings, I believe, are the very first time that this orchestra has scored a video game.”

It wouldn’t be the last time the RSNO scored a game, with the orchestra not only participating in the second half of Star Wars Outlaws recordings – which focused on more of the open world music and major themes – but also 2023 Ubisoft project Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

When asked about his impressions of Glasgow, Roget laughs: “It's just about as grey and soggy as here in Seattle so I felt right at home. Actually you know what? I tried haggis for the first time – I'd never had it. It's delicious.”

And while he admits to still not knowing what haggis is made of, one thing Roget certainly is familiar with is the Star Wars universe.

Roget wanted the game ‘to feel like a grand adventure’

One of his first jobs in the games industry was at LucasArts in 2008, where he worked as a music editor on the Star Wars Force Unleashed Series. His other projects with the company included writing original music for Star Wars: The Old Republic, a massively multiplayer online game (MMO), before Lucasfilm was acquired by Disney.

It was shortly after this point that Roget went freelance, scoring games including Call of Duty: WWII, Mortal Kombat 1, Helldivers 2 and Pacific Drive. He even returned to the Star Wars franchise in 2019 as the composer for virtual reality game Vader Immortal.

Despite this, he describes working on Star Wars Outlaws as an almost “full circle” moment.

“It's not a full circle just because of the Star Wars stuff,” Roget explains. “But because of all of the other projects that I worked on that had nothing to do with Star Wars but kind of were a great opportunity to explore different sounds outside of the orchestra.

“I think that what makes Outlaws distinctive, when compared to other Star Wars game scores, is that it's one of the first ones to very boldly use sounds that are well outside of the concept of the symphonic orchestra.

“I mean, this score has a lot of use of musical sound design; synthesised elements and produced elements. There's tons of soloist musicians from around the world and in all of, at least the scores that I've worked on, we really never had that opportunity before.”

He continues: “But because this was an open world, because there were lots of different planets and we wanted it to feel like a grand adventure, it sort of opened itself up to that style of instrumentation.”

Star Wars Outlaws may be set between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back but it follows Kay Vess, a scoundrel fighting for freedom alongside her companion Nix.

With players able to take on the open world game in any way they see fit, it presented a series of unique opportunities – and challenges – for Roget who joined the project after submitting a demo theme for the protagonist to Ubisoft.

“The theme for Kay Vess was exactly what you hear in the album, actually, aside from the live orchestra, so that was influenced by her character. I wanted to have these non-orchestral elements take the lead and then have a whole adventure. So I turned that in, and they hired me to score the game.”

Even from his earliest impressions of the game, which was just a three minute clip of gameplay, the composer knew that a dynamic music system – essentially background music which changes in response to the events of the game – would be key.

“Eventually we tried a couple of different things and what we settled on was a system where I could still write in a very John Williams orchestral style, but as long as I had enough elements outside of that, then we could kind of crossfade. We can have different arrangements of the same section, so that we would have lots of different intensity levels, even though it's essentially the same piece of music.”

Whether that was swapping out the strings or adding bigger drums, each element of the score can be layered and changed based on the game’s combat system, with the stealth system introducing layers of music which are “being dynamically assembled in real time”.

In summary?

“It's a lot of different layers and a lot of different stingers that can play during different situations.”

A collaborative approach was key to creating a unique Star Wars score

Considering he had already worked on a number of projects relating to Star Wars, Roget “wasn't incredibly intimidated” by the John Williams of it all, noting that the original score had “kind of just become a part of my own musical vocabulary”.

But what did present a challenge was working on a stealth game – specifically for Ubisoft, which is behind two huge stealth-based franchises.

“They have Assassin's Creed and they have Splinter Cell, and the level of musicality in both of those scores is astronomical. I did a lot of study of both of them, particularly Splinter Cell Blacklist, which I thought was probably my favourite of all of their stealth scores.”

He added: “I haven't done any stealth scoring before, so just getting into that mentality was quite difficult. But again, I'm very grateful to the teams at Ubisoft and Lucasfilm for giving us the opportunity to have that much leeway in the instrumentation and harmony, even, and rhythms in order to make something that's truly unique to Outlaws.”

But this massive score didn’t happen overnight or without the help of others, even outside of the RSNO’s performances which Roget says he is “eternally grateful” for.

“The original plan was about three hours of original music, but it's significantly higher than that now,” he explains.

“Not just with my own involvement but also the co-composers that I'd hired, which were Jon Everist and Kazuma Jinnouchi, and not only the three of us but also the cantina music. I had them hire Cody Matthew Johnson to produce the whole album of cantina music.

“And then on top of all of that, we also have the music editing team who took our stems – so the different sections, everything was kind of recorded separately and delivered separately – so that they could take these stems in the music and create new music based on them.”

Roget adds: “I don't even have an estimate of how much music there actually is in the game, but it's several hours and, again, very grateful to the entire team for putting all of this together.”

Working on Star Wars Outlaws was ‘cathartic’ for composer

His collaborative approach has proven successful with the release of the game. When asked how he’s found the response to his work so far, Roget replies: “Well, in a word, a bit overwhelming.

“I hoped that people would like the score, and they apparently really do and I'm incredibly grateful.”

He continues: “I've really only seen positive feedback from it – very positive in fact. The reason that's so meaningful is that this is a very personal score for me. It's something that I'd wanted to do for more than 10 years.

“My final score at LucasArts was a game called Star Wars First Assault, where I did similar things. We had Imperials, and they had a standard Star Wars at F3 type military sound. But then we had rebels. And at that point, I decided ‘well, wait, this is a diverse set of peoples across the entire galaxy, they should have diverse instrumentation’.”

Despite being mothballed as part of the Disney buyout, Roget was eventually able to see elements of that score come to life in this game.

“Star Wars Outlaws was just a very cathartic score. To be able to not only do what I'd wanted to do, now I guess about 12 years ago, but also kind of pay homage to some of the other scores that I'd done since then, and all of the things that I'd learned since then.”