Star Wars Outlaws Characters: Full Roster & Essential Backstories

I gotta be honest, when I first booted up Star Wars Outlaws I wasn’t expecting to care this much about the characters. Ubisoft games don’t exactly have a reputation for memorable protagonists. But Kay Vess? She grew on me. Fast. Kay’s the only character you actually control, and that’s a deliberate choice by Massive Entertainment. No switching between squad members, no Jedi powers to lean on. She’s just a street thief from Canto Bight who survived long enough to get good at it. Her whole deal is that she’s nobody special in the grand scheme of Star Wars. No Force sensitivity. No royal bloodline. Just fast hands and faster thinking. Her backstory is the kind of thing that happens all the time in the Outer Rim but nobody writes songs about. Grew up in the lower levels of Canto Bight, learned to pick pockets before she learned to read, got mixed up in a heist that went sideways. The specifics of what went wrong are doled out through flashbacks during the main campaign, but the short version is that someone betrayed her and she’s been running ever since. By the time the game proper starts in 3 ABY, right between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, she’s desperate enough to take on the kind of job that gets people killed. And then there’s Nix. I mean, technically Nix is a merqaal, a little critter native to the Outer Rim, but functionally he’s Kay’s partner in crime. He can distract guards, fetch items, trigger switches, and generally be the kind of companion that makes stealth missions feel less lonely. The game doesn’t let you play as Nix directly but honestly by mid-game I was using him so much it felt like co-op anyway. ND-5, or Ned if you’re feeling friendly, is where the character writing really shines. He’s a BX-series commando droid from the Clone Wars era, reprogrammed and memory-wiped so many times he barely knows what he is anymore. Kay frees him from a Pyke spice dealer early in the story and he becomes her reluctant bodyguard. The voice acting on this droid is something else, tbh. He starts out cold and clinical, like you’d expect from a Separatist killing machine, but as the hours pile up you start hearing these cracks in the programming. Little flashes of something almost like a personality. There are moments where old Clone Wars memory fragments surface and you get optional dialogue about Separatist installations that hit way harder than they have any right to. The syndicate leaders are where Massive actually did their homework on Star Wars lore. Qi’ra runs Crimson Dawn and yeah, it’s the same Qi’ra from the Solo movie. Emilia Clarke didn’t come back to voice her unfortunately, but the performance is solid. She’s colder now than she was in Solo, more calculating. Her missions tend toward infiltration and intelligence gathering, and she dangles these rare blaster mods as incentives that are honestly hard to resist. Gorro Pyke leads the Pyke Syndicate from their operations on Oba Diah. He’s not exactly charismatic but he’s predictable, which in the underworld is almost the same thing. You know where you stand with the Pykes. Jabba the Hutt controls Tatooine and honestly the game doesn’t try to reinvent him. He’s Jabba. Big, mean, surrounded by bounty hunters. His rewards lean toward cosmetic stuff like custom speeder paint jobs and unique outfit pieces. The Ashiga Clan is the new faction Massive created specifically for this game. They’re from Kijimi, that frozen mountain world from Rise of Skywalker, and they operate more like a hive than a traditional crime family. Haka Ashiga runs things and his faction specializes in tech and espionage gear. Their stealth cloaking device is maybe the single best reputation reward in the game, but it burns out after one use so you really gotta pick your moment. The reputation system ties all these characters together in a way that actually makes you care about who you’re helping and who you’re screwing over. Rep runs from 0 to 5 with each syndicate and it’s zero-sum in practice. Help the Pykes, the Hutts get mad. Do a job for Crimson Dawn, the Ashiga Clan takes notice. At low rep levels you just get basic shop access and nobody shoots at you. Push it to level 3 and the exclusive gear starts showing up. Level 5 unlocks a faction-specific finale mission with rewards that actually change how you play. I tanked my Pyke reputation early, thinking I could just ignore them and focus on Crimson Dawn. Big mistake. Three Pyke assassins jumped me in the middle of a routine supply run on Tatooine and I barely made it out. The game doesn’t warn you when hunter squads are incoming. You just hear the blaster fire and suddenly you’re scrambling. Beyond the syndicates, there’s a whole supporting cast worth mentioning. Gedeek the Rodian mechanic on Tatooine handles speeder upgrades. Mila the Twi’lek slicer on Kijimi sells hacking programs that get progressively more ridiculous. Lando Calrissian himself shows up in a side quest where you help him smuggle tibanna gas past an Imperial blockade. And Vane, a Gand bounty hunter, stalks Kay across multiple planets as a recurring threat you can’t just kill and be done with. You’re never gonna play as anyone except Kay. ND-5 follows you around and you can issue basic commands like attack or hold position, but direct control never happens. Your choices with syndicates do lock you out of content within a single playthrough. You can max maybe two factions, but the other two will be hostile by endgame. There’s no romance system either. A character named Riko flirts with Kay at one point but it’s purely narrative, no branching relationship trees or special endings tied to who you kiss. The focus stays on survival and the heist, which honestly feels right for this kind of story. I should mention the DLC characters too because they're not just cameos. Lando Calrissian gets a proper arc in Wild Card, a side campaign about a rigged sabacc tournament that turns into something way more dangerous than anyone expected. Hondo Ohnaka shows up in A Pirate's Fortune doing exactly what Hondo always does, talking his way into trouble and somehow talking his way back out. His chemistry with Kay is genuinely entertaining. She's too cynical to fall for his charm but not cynical enough to refuse the job, and watching them circle each other is one of the best parts of the post launch content.