James Whitbrook
Few characters have cheated death and regular incarceration in equal measure in contemporary Star Wars canon like Hondo Ohnaka. From Clone Wars to Rebels to an eventual cushy stay on Batuu for Galaxy’s Edge, Hondo has managed to outlive much of the Star Wars saga as we currently know it. And now, we’re going to be filling in another point in his life with the help of the upcoming game Outlaws.
Today Ubisoft announced its plans for a bevy of new premium content that will come to Outlaws after it launches later this month. Alongside a series of alternate outfit packs for Outlaws‘ smuggler hero Kay Vess and her animal companion Nix, and a bonus mission featuring Jabba the Hutt available at launch, purchasers of the Outlaws season pass will receive access to two new story packs featuring missions with familiar Star Wars faces.
The first, “Wild Card,” is due for release in fall 2024, and sees Kay infiltrate a high-stakes sabacc tournament, only to cross paths with Lando Calrissian and find herself embroiled in a much more dangerous game. The second, “A Pirate’s Fortune,” out in spring 2025, sees Kay team up with Hondo as the latter “[settles] old scores with a ruthless gang of pirates.”
Outlaws is set between the events of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, but this is not the furthest we’ve seen Hondo in Star Wars canon. We know he’s still around by the time of the sequel trilogy, as he appears running a trading company (with the help of Chewbacca and the Millennium Falcon) on Batuu in the storyline for the Disney theme park Galaxy’s Edge, set between The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker. But it is fun to see just how Hondo manages to keep worming his way through major galactic incident after major galactic incident to keep doing what he does best: piracy, smuggling, double-crossing people, making bad deals, and often getting arrested for them.
Just how Hondo’s little adventure with Kay goes, we’ll have to wait and see until Outlaws‘ story DLC drops in spring next year. But clearly Star Wars is far from done with putting Hondo wherever it can in its timeline. Maybe Rey will need a smuggling contact when her eventual standalone movie happens?
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