Star Wars Outlaws revealed gameplay at Ubisoft Forward on June 12, and it also unsheathed an important fact about society: people want to fuck robots. Fucking robots does not, of course, have any evolutionary or social benefit—and then there’s the question of logistics—but enthusiastic Star Wars fans are putting all that aside when it comes to commando droid ND-5.
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ND-5 was shown just briefly in the 10 minute trailer, which otherwise has burgeoning scoundrel Kay Vess filling seedy jobs and avoiding bounty hunters in the open-world game. She eventually reaches the moon settlement Jaunta’s Hope and joins ND-5, a nondescript, aside from his supple leather trench coat, BX-series droid, at a diner.
Her client is in the next room. ND stomps toward it with her, but he isn’t allowed to pass—he’s only a droid.
So “be careful,” he gruffly instructs Kay. And then viewers around the world faint into their gaming chairs.
“I’m sorry, the developers sat down and decided to make a sexy droid—there’s no other explanation,” sheevthan said about ND-5’s “voice and body language.”
“If this game doesn’t let me romance this droid, I don’t want it,” Twitter user red_robyn_hood_ said.
“What is happening,” the official Star Wars account tweeted.
What is happening is that, as French philosopher Jean Baudrillard writes in the essay “The Automation of the Robot,” the animated “automaton plays the part of courtier and good company.”
In this way, ND-5 is an attractive and “perfect double for man.” To embrace him means accepting that “that there is no difference, that the soul is over with and now it is an ideally naturalized body which absorbs its energy,” Baudrillard continues. Becoming fascinated by ND is natural, “like God: what’s underneath it all, what’s inside, what’s in the back of it?”
By that, I think Baudrillard means that the Star Wars droid has a war-worn, broad chest and the illusion of a six pack, and so people want to kiss it. We’ll—fingers crossed—learn more about the back of it when Star Wars Outlaws releases sometime in 2024 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.