The Big Star Wars: Galactic Racer Interview — Why It's Not Open World, How Its Story Mode Works, and When It's Set

Following last week's Star Wars: Galactic Racer gameplay trailer reveal, I sat down with the game's makers for an in-depth chat revealing its new systems and story mode, and a proper discussion on why this marks the triumphant return of track-based racing, after so many open world games.

Galactic Racer is the first project from British studio Fuse Games, which was founded in 2023 by a core of former colleagues from Criterion, the beloved band behind Burnout and later Need for Speed titles, before it got gobbled up to become part of Battlefield Studios.

Now, as Fuse Games' team races towards a galaxy far, far away, I caught up with its CEO and founder Matt Webster, plus creative director Kieran Crimmins, for an intriguing chat on what's to come.

Obviously you've been announced for a little while now, but I've been looking forward to seeing more from the moment Fuse Games was announced, considering your long heritage at Criterion. And the game looks great, from what I've seen of it.

Matt Webster: Was it along the lines of what you imagined?

Well, I remember you did that GI interview and you were sort of hedging your bets on what genre of game you were going to be working on... And I was like, 'they're clearly making a racing game, I don't even know why they're pretending.'

Kieran Crimmins: [Laughs] We've made spaceship stuff before, so that was possible. It's not [what we're making] but possible. Who were we kidding!

Maybe you were working on another Battlefield game! But probably not.

Crimmins: [Laughs] Yeah, fair enough.

I had lots of questions about what kind of racer you guys were planning to make — open world or not, and we'll get onto that. But when you made that announcement about first setting up, did you have an outline of what you wanted to make? What was that journey like from leaving Criterion to the announcement of Star Wars?

Webster: We thought we were going really fast, but we're three years old now.

Crimmins: That's crazy it, you've made whole games in that time before. [But] we've never set up studios in that time.

Webster: That is true. Where this comes from is, first of all, a shared love of racing and a shared love of Star Wars. But when there's a new studio, new team, new tech, new creative... every time there's new, you've got an element of risk. So when we're thinking about it at studio level going, 'well, okay, well how do you mitigate some of those risks?' We can mitigate tech risk by using Unreal or technologies that exist. We can mitigate people risk by working with some folks that we already know and we can mitigate some creative risk by playing in some things that we already know. So I guess it's a mixture of those two, but the more you think about it, you then say, 'okay, why hasn't there been a Star Wars racing game for so long?'

"We always play to our strengths..." Crimmins: Yeah, I mean obviously we kicked around a bunch of concepts because that's good game making. You want to think about what you're doing. We always play to our strengths. We've got a certain sensibilities of how we like to make games. I'm sure if you've played any of what we've worked on that DNA is going to be present here, as it is in everything we do. And that's one of the things that the studio is based, that mutual understanding and long history of shared love for certain types of mechanics and experiences around thrilling, fast arcade racing games. [And then there was that] shared love for the Star Wars universe... we were like, 'oh my gosh, imagine all the things that we love but actually transferred into there as well as the heritage of the movies with podracing or all the racing experiences in there.

Anyway, when you put that together, it was fairly obvious that was probably going to be the best game we could make for our first game. It would just be the best game that we could make full stop. And then we took that to our partners in Lucasfilm, because we worked with them before, we know them, so we could say, 'Hey guys, what do you think of this thing?' And they basically said the same thing back to us where they were like, 'yeah, we are really excited about this stuff. We love that stuff that you doing. That absolutely makes sense for us.' And as soon as you have that kind of mutual excitement, it's like, we've got to make this happen.

It sounds like there was a sort of mutual appreciation there from Lucasfilm.

Webster: Well, we've got a shared history. I think our first [time on Star Wars was] when we were at Criterion, I remember the folks at DICE were like, 'we think it's an impossible mission, but if anyone can do it, you can,' and it was speeder bikes through Endor, just that fantasy. We've all got it in our heads. And so we just approached that as we would do delivering on any fantasies. Our previous fantasies used to be sports car fantasies. Well, the best way around the corner for me was always all four wheels smoking and sideways with a big smile on your face. We work on those levels, and as Kieran was saying earlier, there's that shared appreciation of the type of experience we want to do, but that history just means something.

And then through to the [Star Wars Battlefront Rogue One] X-Wing VR mission [a free VR add-on to Star Wars Battlefront], which was one of our most favorite things to do and was really wonderful. There's clearly an appreciation of the work and that goes a long way. So I think there's the meeting of those two things together, people with an understanding of how both sides work, a mutual respect of one another and a desire to go and execute on something that looks like a wonderful opportunity. It's a great starting point.

You mentioned a question there that I'd love to ask back to you, which is: why hasn't there been a Star Wars racer in so long? Is it that you guys weren't free, you were busy making Battlefield?

Webster: Maybe! I dunno, the obvious answers are only obvious once they exist, I suppose. For us at least, there's that thing of 'can we make a Star Wars racing game?' And then there's the 'okay, well what should we do?' Because I think we wanted to do things a little differently or we wanted to do something different, and that extends to what you are racing. Some of the mechanics inside racing we want to bring some fresh life into, as well as it being a Star Wars racing experience. I can't answer the question of how come no one else has thought about it? Maybe it's a question of timing. But once we had that, it was like, 'okay, how can we do something different with racing and Star Wars?'

Crimmins: Yeah, it's funny. I see it more like the time was right now rather than the time was wrong before. You're right we were on other projects, we were talking about other things and I'm sure there were other teams working other things, but it's that weird thing of both luck and timing. Whenever you make a video game, it's a mixture of so many elements. It's a little bit hard to get the lightning in the bottle, but when we did this brief and we got this together, we were like, 'this is the perfect time to make this thing.' And I believe we're the perfect studio to make it.

You mentioned wanting to do things in a Star Wars racer that haven't been done before. We got a look at gameplay last week but what more can you say about what you are doing, and also how people familiar with your past work might feel that DNA in this?

Webster: Well, you'll be the best judge of that. It should come through immediately what we're aiming for here in terms of the experience, [addressing] that in some ways HD players have been a little bit underserved by just some kickass track racing experiences. We love those types of games. We love making them, we love playing them, but we wanted to bring a modern view on what that experience could be. You touched on it a little bit earlier about open world, but we wanted to actually come back to tracks. There's a lot of great stuff about tracks in that I replay, my mastery of a circuit comes from replayability, and we definitely are leaning into that from a game structure perspective. That recognition and the repetition and the familiarity of racing circuits, gets you outside some of the compromises you might make when you do an open world racing game. We knew we wanted to come back into delivering that type of experience for a modern player at 4K 60 with just really super strong visuals in a galaxy far, far away.

But like I said, we want to do things differently. So how can we breed some innovation in racing? We're doing that in a couple of ways we can touch into. One is the mechanical boost system. Boost has been in and around racing games forever. Press the button, go fast, consume the boost, and you've got a sort of a tactical decision-making going on there. But we wanted to do something more. So we have a two-phase boost system. The second phase is something called a ramjet, which just goes really, really, really fast, but it's got a consequence too — it generates a load of heat, and if run it for too long, you're going to explode. So you've got consequence there. You've got a second phase of tactical decision making going on. And more importantly, it ties into Star Wars locations. So when we think about where we race in Star Wars, the locations are characters in amongst themselves.

"So we have a two-phase boost system..." We all know them by name — Hoth, Endor, Jakku, Tatooine — and we really wanted to bring that in as an integral part of the game. So the environment has a tactical part to play in terms of your racing, and it plays its part in the ramjet. So in Lantaana — a lush, tropical rainforest vibe on an active volcano island planet — we've got rivers of lava and rivers of water, hot and cold. And so you have those decisions — the environmental heat helps get my ramjet up to operating temperature, but it's obviously going to get it hotter, quicker. I can also cool the ramjet, running it for longer over the colder water. And that's just a little example of a mechanical change that we're getting people thinking differently about [as they're making] their racing line choices at a second to second level.

Crimmins: Yeah, this is probably the first game we've made where the racing line can be that variable depending on the vehicle you're driving, the kind of build you've got within that vehicle, and the environment. This is a game where there isn't just one racing line, there's the one for your current situation, which means every time you attend the galactic tour it's a different experience and a different set of things that you're thinking about. There's quite a lot there and we're not talking about all of it now, but high level, we want to make an arcade racing experience that's richer than it's ever been before with more options and more things to do than ever before. I really think we've got some interesting stuff in this game that I've certainly never done in a video game, and I don't think I've seen it in other racing games either.

Webster: While not losing that essence of delivering a racing pilot fantasy from second one, [where you] pick up the path, have a great time, but because you'll know from our past and the way we go about engineering things, you've got a pretty high skill ceiling there for players that really want to drive for mastery so we can support a really broad range of play motivations.

You've given some great reasons for this to be a track racer, but I wanted to get your thoughts on open world racing, which you've got a lot of history with too. It was really interesting to see the debate about it going on last year — sparked by Mario Kart World, which obviously is a very different kind of racer — but I saw a lot of people come out and suggest there was a nostalgia for a track-based experience. Have you noticed that too? Did it help you feel more emboldened with your approach?

Crimmins: [Laughs] I didn't notice that, but I would say this... I did play all those games and felt all those things. I absolutely love making open world races. I've made a bunch, there's plenty more in me, I look forward to doing some of those at some point. I absolutely love track base races, some of my favorite early games track based races, and I think there's wonderful experiences to be had there.

Has open world reached a point where it's just been done a lot?

Crimmins: I don't think it's as simple as that overall. I think there's great fun, innovation and things to do in both of those spaces. And I certainly, if I go to design a game or picture a game, I'm going to pick the version that does the thing that we want the best rather than I want this one or I want this one. In this game we really wanted something that was really replayable, something that really had that great replay loop, something that every time you replayed it, you felt like you got something new out of it.

It is weird, I can't remember who wrote it but there was an article about 'why aren't racing games like shooters, why is the innovation different?' I think it's because racers, you just need more stuff to do in the race in the second-to-second. We talked about the tactical layer of the ramjet system and how that works with the boost, but I think that goes across the board with the whole genre. It used to be a very, very innovative genre, but it's hard to push innovation in a space where your cognitive load is fairly small because you're in a kind of dynamic system of where you're moving around. Getting that right is a lot harder than other games. I just like to see really, really great experiences that really tighten focus. Then that's what we want to make here.

The reason we're a track-based racer is because we wanted to have that replayability loop that expands over time. All those benefits people learn in the tracks, the more they play, learning the handling, that familiarity getting them better rather than just a massive smorgasbord of a thing, which is a slightly different kind of 'play with the toys' experience. This is high consequence, high action, high replayability and something that creates player stories that you wouldn't have seen in other games. And I don't think we could do that if we would go in and say, okay, we're also going to do this open world thing. That's a whole set of different challenges.

Webster: You're right, and you can also say, well, this is the Galactic League, right? This is sport, and we've seen racing as an activity and as a sport in Star Wars has been around in many forms, right? Episode 1's podracing we all know and love, Bad Batch's riot racing in Season 2 was just awesome. Star Wars Resistance has got the Aces and low-altitude starfighter racing. Racing as a sport and activity is something that's inside Star Wars, and tracks lend themselves to that really well at an action level. And the other thing we realize more broadly is we are inside Star Wars. And Star Wars fans crave the characters and a story.

So we wanted to go there as well, in a way that frames the racing action. So, you play as a character who is racing, as opposed to it being a racing game. We've made plenty of racing games where you're just a faceless silhouette in a car. Now you're inhabiting Shade, you're a canonical new Star Wars character. You walk down one of the shots in the trailer, you're walking down the ramp of your starship, you're going into a paddock. And this is really interesting addition here where the paddock gives us a place, a low intensity space where we can get up close with our Star Wars stuff, we can move a narrative on, we can see characters inside there. It gives us a low intensity space as a counterpoint and a contrast to the super high intensity racing. And I think it's a really important distinction for us now as we call this a racing adventure.

In the trailer, we see Shade interacting with other characters in that area. So to be clear, it's not just a place for cutscenes between races. There is an area where you can walk around rather than drive around and interact with characters.

Crimmins: In those spaces, yeah, you can walk around, interact with characters, you can build rivalries, you can upgrade your plethora of skimmers and have some nice character moments as well, because as Matt said, this is the story of the Galactic Racing League and Shade coming to that and to tell that story, we needed some time with the characters as well.

It is funny, I wasn't thinking about it as a key innovation because it's kind of a no-brainer. This is a Star Wars racing game, and we wanted to have a proper single-player mode in there where we could actually tell a story in this world of what this Galactic Racing league is and immerse people in the authentic Star Wars world with both familiar characters and a plethora of new characters as well. We had to have a space where you're able to do that and we're a gameplay first studio, so we didn't want that to be a cut-scene space.

"We learned making Burnout: you can only spend so long with your eyes on stalks at 200 miles an hour — or in our case, 400 miles an hour" We've shown podracers, but these things are like seven or eight meters long and they're enormous, but you don't really get that sense of scale unless you are walking around them as a character and looking around at all this beautiful detail that we built into them. That space serves so many purposes for us in terms of as an immersion space, as a lower intensity. We learned while making Burnout: there's only so long you can spend with your eyes on stalks at 200 miles an hour — or in our case, 400 miles an hour. You need a decompressed moment. And the paddock does a brilliant job of allowing us that mechanism for us to do all of those things.

I'm running out of time, but we've now seen Ben Quadinaros and Sebulba. Are there any more familiar faces in there?

Crimmins: There's going to be a good mix of familiar faces and new characters. Obviously we want to get that mix right, so no matter what kind of Star Wars media you've engaged with, whether it be a movie or game, there's a bunch of familiarity in there when it comes to the space. Otherwise it wouldn't feel like an authentic Star Wars experience.

Are you using any kind of season pass model?

Webster: No. This is a premium release, right? We have our campaign and we have arcade mode and we have multiplayer, and it's a self-contained thing. But what we also recognize is that the landscape of Star Wars evolves and changes over time and so do games as they go. So we see an opportunity for us to tap into more Star Wars or new Star Wars over time, but in terms of us outlining what we think post launch is going to look like, that's not something that we see. The only reason I say a blind no to it is, in my head, season pass is connected to free-to-play games, and that's not what we are making.

Crimmins: Our mindset right now is a premium release, to try and get an amazing experience out the box. Obviously we wouldn't close the door to doing something later, but that isn't what we are really thinking about right now. We just want it to be the very best game it can be, and we want it to be complete when it comes out.

People have been avidly working out when the game takes place in canon and according to Wookiepedia it's definitely after 5ABY because of the crashed Star Destroyers following the Battle of Jakku. How much are you playing into the established canon? We've already seen Sebulba — and I suppose that was a surprise to me that he'd made it through the events of the trilogy alive. Will we find out exactly when it's set or does that not really matter?

Webster: I don't think it really matters. As you say, you're on Jakku after the events of Return of the Jedi, the galactic civil war is over and that's where sport becomes a more interesting opportunity. I don't think we're ever specific about timeline beyond that.

I love Sebulba's beard, I just wanted to say.

Crimmins: Old Bulba!

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social