Star Wars Games Should Leave Tatooine Behind

I've never really understood the appeal of the desert. Though classic movies (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lawrence of Arabia) and modern blockbusters (Mad Max: Fury Road, Dune) make their homes in the sand, the setting has always been a liability to me, not an asset. There just isn't all that much you can do with the desert that you couldn't also do in a room with blank white walls. It's mostly empty space. There are a few exciting parts — towns, taverns, camps — but those are exciting because they're not deserted.

Tatooine Isn't The Destination, It's The Place Luke Needs To Leave

The original Star Wars seemed to share this attitude, positioning desert planet Tatooine as a place Luke needs to leave behind to start his journey of galactic self-discovery. Though Mark Hamill staring at the twin suns is an iconic image, it's iconic because it carries the symbolic weight of the need to see what else is out there, to leave the mundane life you've lived until this point behind. George Lucas closely modeled Star Wars on Joseph Campbell's monomyth (or the Hero's Journey) and Tatooine is the Ordinary World, the home the hero must leave in order to embark on their journey. Tatooine isn't the destination. It's the place where the adventure begins.

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When Lucas returned to Tatooine for The Phantom Menace, the planet served the same purpose. It was a dusty backwater that Anakin Skywalker needed to leave behind in order to join the Jedi order. J.J. Abrams used Tatooine Jakku this way in The Force Awakens, too, with a new desert planet subbing in for the old desert planet. Whatever you call it, it was a barren, out-of-the-way world that Rey needed to leave to begin her adventure.

Even when Jakku is featured in Star Wars games, such as a couple of the Lego titles, it struggles to differentiate itself from its sandy sibling.

This precedent is why I find it so puzzling that Star Wars media often treats Tatooine as the destination we've all been longing to visit. Much of The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett are set on Tatooine, and this year's Star Wars Outlaws uses Tatooine as one of its open zones.

Star Wars Outlaws Could Have Given Us A More Interesting Planet To Explore

I like Outlaws, but I was slightly disappointed when I saw that Tatooine was taking up space that could have gone to a less explored world. In video games, deserts are difficult to make interesting — especially when they cover an entire planet like Tatooine does. They are defined by what isn't there. Jungles have trees, tall grass, lots of animals, rivers, lakes, and old temples. Cities are filled with people to see and places to visit, stores to shop at and restaurants to try, quests on top of quests. But deserts are empty expanses.

This was my one minor complaint about Baldur's Gate 3. The Shadow-Cursed Lands aren't a desert, but they're similarly barren. The game loses some juice here, and doesn't kick back into gear until you emerge and reach the titular city.

That makes for a fun place to ride your speeder. It's one of the places in the game where you can stop worrying about running into something and having to waste a Bacta vial on fixing Kay's skinned knee. But Toshara is a much more interesting take on similar terrain, with red dirt instead of white sand, and more varied environments thanks to rivers and major cities.

Outlaws is much more expansive than any Star Wars game that came before it — save, maybe, The Old Republic, which, as a long-running MMO, has had 13 years to grow — but I wish it had used that space for something a little fresher. Don't get me wrong, I'll settle for poking around Tatooine yet again. But I'm still dreaming about exploring an open-world Coruscant. I will be until some developer makes it a reality.

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