Lightsabers, blasters, and Jedi robes are all important parts of the universe’s iconography, but Star Wars just wouldn’t be Star Wars without ships. X-Wings. TIE Fighters. The Millenium Falcon. Just a quick look at any of these famous spaceships conjures up daydreams of freedom and adventure among the stars. And so, unsurprisingly, spaceships are kind of a big deal for Star Wars Outlaws.

“I’ve been a Star Wars fan for decades, and the space side of things is in particular quite important to me,” says Allen Frank, senior game designer at Massive Entertainment. “I grew up on games like X-Wing and TIE Fighter, Rogue Squadron.”

With five distinct, deeply detailed open worlds to explore in Outlaws’ galaxy, you’d be forgiven for thinking the inky black space surrounding each of them would be a little empty in comparison. But Massive has applied much of the same design ethos that it uses planetside to the outer space regions.

“There’s a lot to do,” says creative director Julian Gerighty. “There’s secrets to discover. There’s exploration, you can scan for opportunities. And of course there’ll be living world events or ‘living space events’.”

In an effort to bring the galaxy to life, a variety of NPC routines will break out into organic events. A freighter may come under attack from pirates, or the Empire may pull over a smuggling ship, and you’ll be free to intervene or stay back. Wrecked ships cast out distress beacons, but are they a source of riches or a trap? It’s events like these that will fill out the vacuum of space between Outlaws’ planet surface gameplay.

Between those moments, you’ll likely want to find a place to moor up, stretch your legs, and scout for new opportunities. That’s where space stations come in, which function akin to the cities you’ll explore planetside. “There’ll be a cantina, there’ll be a bar, there’ll be people to talk to, there’ll be opportunities, there’ll be sabacc [playing card] tables, there’ll be secrets, there’ll be exploration,” lists Gerighty.

There’s secrets to discover. There’s exploration, you can scan for opportunities. While outer space features some contracts and activities similar in scope to what can be accessed on the ground, Massive faced a distinct problem when it came to adventuring among the stars. “[Space in] Star Wars is a black space with stars, mostly,” says Benedikt Podlesnigg, Outlaws’ art and world director. “It’s very hard to make something with that because there’s no points of interest there.”

The answer was to push the visuals of space in Star Wars further than we typically see in the movies and TV shows. Each planet had to be surrounded by regions of space that looked unique, which in turn would offer interesting gameplay challenges.

“We have a ‘regulated space’, that’s the space that the Empire controls, which is our black space with stars,” Podlesnigg explains. “And then we have our unregulated space, which is the dangerous part you see [around the moon] Toshara. You see the dust cloud, the debris field. If you go in there it’s going to be more dangerous. It’s not Empire controlled. You will not see big freighters going into those, but there’s the pirates and so forth that might attack you.”

Surrounding the planet of Akiva is a dense asteroid field which promises its own challenges. Massive refuses to detail what surrounds the remaining three worlds in Outlaws’ galaxy, but promises each will “give some fun stuff for the players to do.”