Star Wars Outlaws Descriptive Video Works interview: “it makes for a very wonderful experience”

When it comes to AAA big budget video games, they don’t get much bigger than Star Wars Outlaws. The combination of the most popular sci-fi franchise of all time, Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft made for a wonderful video game that our own Chris White loved enough to put on his Game of the Year list. It was also praised heavily for its wonderful accessibility features, which includes audio narration.

I was lucky enough to get to chat with Jenna Jennissary of Descriptive Video Works and audio narrator for Star Wars Outlaws Ramya Amuthan, and talking to them was an absolute delight. I was able to ask them about the process of adding audio narration to a video game, Star Wars Outlaws’ Innovation in Accessibility nomination, and the future of audio narration in video games. So without delay, then, let’s get into it.

Star Wars is a franchise that is loved by millions and millions of people. How important was it to be able to help make Outlaws a game that as many of those as possible could play?

Jenna: Of course it’s extremely important to us. Not only is Star Wars very well loved, but there are a lot of blind gamers and low vision gamers out there that are super hyped about anything being released with accessibility. They’re bloggers, they’re streamers, they’re gamers. So anytime there’s anything at all with the promise of accessibility or a preview of some accessible thing that’s going to come up in a video game, or a console development, or even a physical accessible controller, people are very very excited. So yeah it’s just like a two in one icing on the cake that it’s also Star Wars that’s being featured with all this accessibility.

Star Wars has been, I guess as a franchise as a whole gradually increasing their inclusivity over the past few years and it’s nice to see that extend to not just representation, which they do very well, but also just ensuring more people can consume and enjoy that media. Ubisoft has also been doing a really great job with it. So by their forces combined, it makes for a very wonderful experience.

I’ve never played a game with better audio narration than Star Wars Outlaws. What was the process of finding actors and writing a script for this?

Jenna: Yeah, I can answer that part of it since I’m one of, I guess, three writers, technically now with the DLC who worked on Star Wars Outlaws. So audio description has been around for movies and TV shows for several decades now, but it only started coming to video games two years ago. It’s still very new and every game engine is different. So the workflow is going to be different for each of them.

But it’s challenging because instead of one contiguous piece of media that you write for from start to finish, you’re given dozens or hundreds of videos to cover and describe the cinematics that actually end up going into the game. Then you have to get additional context to fill in any storytelling that goes on between those cinematics.

So Star Wars Outlaws has audio description only for certain cinematics and not during gameplay portions. So then we have to be given additional reference materials to fill in who’s this character? Were they introduced outside of the cinematics? What order do these cinematics go in? What is this thing called? That came up a lot because it’s the Star Wars universe!

Then we had it once we had all of the scripts together we would send them to our lovely narrator Ramya who worked her magic. And I think one of the biggest challenges Ramya that you had to deal with was that we had to bombard you with pronunciations for all of these characters and races and unique items to the Star Wars universe.

Ramya: Yeah, it was quite fun actually. Sometimes we’d be like, what do you think it’s supposed to sound like? And then we’d be like, well let’s just not guess, let’s ask somebody.

Jenna: Yeah we had to go back and forth a couple of times because there were races that had not appeared in video media or in a format where the race would be called out in an auditory manner. So all we had were like text references. So we actually had to go back to Ubisoft and say, how is this one pronounced?

Those were just a handful of several challenges that you come across, but I think one of the biggest challenges is maintaining continuity in between all of those different chunks. From a writing perspective, because we have to know when a character is introduced, what their pronouns are, what their alien race is. And then, Ramya, you had to worry about maintaining narrative tone in what might have been cutscenes that happened one right after the other.

Ramya: Yeah, definitely with narration and especially with pacing like in Star Wars Outlaw, whether it’s story scenes or actual gameplay, you get a lot of conflict and fight scenes and things like that. Sometimes you’ve got to squeeze in a description into a two second, three second slot and rush through it because you’re matching the pace of the activity that’s going on, but also you’ve got to get it in. So there is a lot of that kind of tonal assistance that I get with whoever’s teching with me, the audio engineer. And we always find it really fun. Like do that again, but you know, she’s actually scared, not happy.

It’s also interesting if I can add coming from the perspective of a blind narrator because sometimes I think people might have the opportunity to watch the things that they’re going to be narrating and kind of get a cinematic context that way, a visual context.

But for me, that’s not necessarily the case. Sometimes I just go with the amount of space I have to narrate something and the script. Like it’s a very dry recording process. You might get some sound around it and need to be able to slot it in or punch it in, but not always and so sometimes I’m honestly just sort of making up whatever is going on based on just the limited context that I have.

Jenna: This is something that’s especially difficult for game projects in general, because when we’re working on writing or recording the script for audio description that goes into the game, the game itself is never finished by the time I look at it. There’s always going to be things that are missing. So there might be an explosion on screen, but the sound effect isn’t done for it yet. So you don’t hear the explosion. There might be climactic music that’s planned for like a really big swell and the music’s just not in there yet which can make that even even more difficult when trying to fill in the context of what the mood should be and what the director’s intent is for the scene. So we do the best we can given the context available to us.

So speaking of there being parts of the game that posed different challenges for audio narration for different reasons, are there any particular scenes in Star Wars Outlaws that come to mind as the scenes that were the hardest to work on?

Ramya: Great question. Considering I can’t remember all the scenes, it’s interesting to try and think. I probably would have to actually play the game to really understand where my voice fits into all this, if I’m being truly honest with you. Because that’s just the way it is. It’s like you narrate before you know the full script of the project or the full context of the storylines even. I’ve done this with movies as well. And then later on, I’d watch the movie and I’m like, oh, I was so off.

Jenna: But you are your own worst critic. I think you did an excellent job.

Ramya: Thank you. I will say the hardest for me was the more energetic scenes, like in the middle of conflict or fight scenes or action items, because I’d have to deliver like rushed or angry material and kind of predict the way that the characters are feeling or showing up in those scenes and hopefully feel like I’m matching the tone.

I loved anything with Nix though. Nix was cute, anything Nix does is adorable.

Jenna: Ramiya, I’m gonna gas you up a little bit because I think you’re way too critical of yourself. So I’ve been playing through the game and I’m almost finished with it and I haven’t come across a single scene where it seems like your narrative tone is off compared to the scene. I think you did an excellent job and I’ll just talk about one example, I came across my favourite scene just a couple of days ago.

So spoiler warning, this includes a reveal that happens near the end of the game. So be careful if you haven’t gotten to this part of the game yet. But there’s a scene near the end where Sliro is in his office and unexpectedly Darth Vader walks in and it’s Darth Vader doing what he does best. He’s just throwing the force around and bullying some Imperial officers into submission. And it’s this really cool scene where he breaks all the glass in the room and then makes it hover in a very threatening manner. And Ramya, you nailed the very ominous sort of threatening tone of that scene. also just like, there was very little dialogue during that scene comparatively. It gave us so much time to describe that the fact that you were able to chew on that and and really work with that was really fantastic. That’s my favourite scene that you did.

Ramya: Thank you. And I was just going to say, like as a continuation of that, that’s my favourite stuff to narrate. We’re talking more prose, more storytelling, not just a description of actions, like a scene that’s unfolding in front of you. I loved working around that for narration. And there were a few calm moments in this game, it wasn’t all just fight scenes, And during those moments you got to expand on the visuals around you. That was lovely to narrate.

Obviously when working in active game development there are money and time constraints that can get in the way of doing everything you want. If you had an unlimited budget and no time constraints at all are there audio narration features you’d like to implement?

Jenna: Love this question! Obviously, I would just want to see the scope of audio description explored to its maximum. We’ve seen a lot of developers explore audio description in new ways in the couple years since audio description has started being implemented in AAA releases. But I would want to see that expanded to like descriptions that aren’t time limited.

So optional player triggered descriptions of character cosmetics, environments, like just the appearance of how a menu is laid out. Are you using a really cool scripted font? Are you using a high contrast neon? Does the menu look like a flickering neon sign? I wanna know that. Like there’s just so many cool design elements that should be described in my opinion.

Ramya: Yeah, you’re 100% spot on. That’s exactly what I think about as well, there’s so much just about the vibe of a video game. You know, when you put it on or turn it up or whatever, you’re in a zone, you’re entering a universe. And the way that we think of audio description at its bare minimum is, what allows me to play this video game? What allows me to actually go through it and be a player. But that’s not the scope of a video game, right? Like that’s the bare minimum. I want to know everything. What are my weapon choices? Cool. But what do they look like? What do they feel like? How does my player hold it?

And then everything else around it, like you said, the aesthetics of environments, of different places, the stages of fight scenes. Just so many things people are able to lock in as they’re playing that adds to the full experience of a video game that currently we’re not doing. Like it’s not being offered. To experience that now you’d probably have to take a snapshot and run it through an AI or sit with somebody else who’s gaming with you and be able to talk about the aesthetics and how things look cool. But when I was growing up playing anything, I would love to go back into those video games and know exactly what I was doing.

Jenna: Just like going beyond just functionality, it would be nice to have full immersion. Also, I think we should start a hashtag #DescribeTheVibe.

Star Wars Outlaws was nominated for Innovation in Accessibility at The Game Awards, how does it feel to be part of a project that received such positive acclaim for its accessibility features?

Ramya: Yeah, I mean, of course, it’s fabulous in the sense that we know this kind of influences big games, big companies, big universes in video gaming. When you think of accessibility being talked about in the context of just like enormous universes or enormous video game opportunities. It’s huge. It’s huge for the community. It’s huge for the conversations. It’s huge for next steps for empowerment and influence and inspiration around accessibility. And like we’ve pointed out, Jenna and I through these conversations, we want more. So the more we can get it out there the better. We want to hear these conversations. Wasn’t this audio description awesome? Or wasn’t the narration on this so good? Or hey, did you even realize there was audio description in video games? Whoever is talking about it, right? Then you get the ripple effect of big outlets picking it up and awards being given.

Jenna: Ubisoft definitely deserves the recognition. They put a lot of work into all of the accessibility features, not just the vision accessibility. They picked up several other nominations with the Game Accessibility Conference Awards. But like Ramya was saying, it’s nice to see accessibility features making it into the zeitgeist, it’s nice to see it being talked about more in the mainstream.

And I would say that people are much more likely to explore all of the settings available in a video game than they are to look at the spoken language options on a major streaming service, because that’s where audio description exists in that. So it’s cool that it’s more likely that someone will stumble across this feature that might be very helpful to them and they just didn’t know about it.

Thanks to Jenna and Ramya for their time. Star Wars Outlaws is out now for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S|X.