LogIn"It is absolutely not a 200 or 300 hour epic unfinishable RPG."
Last week, Julian Gerighty, the Creative Director at Massive Entertainment, addressed player concerns about whether Star Wars: Outlaws would utilize procedural generation to create thousands of planets. He assured the community that the game has taken a different approach, opting for a more "handcrafted" and "manageable" method, and clarified that they had not procedurally generated entire planets.
However, during the discussion, Gerighty unintentionally sparked new worries among players by mentioning that the planets in Outlaws would be approximately the size of two zones found in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. This led some players to fear that the game might end up with tons of unnecessary filler content, a fear that can hardly be called unjustified, considering Ubisoft's latest tendency to bloat their games with tedious material.
During San Diego Comic-Con 2023, Gerighty, alongside Narrative Director Navid Khavari, spoke to IGN about the said problem, emphasizing that Star Wars: Outlaws won't be "too big", with "too big" in their eyes meaning "a game that people don't manage to play, enjoy, and finish". Moreover, Gerighty reassured the audience that the game wouldn't be artificially inflated and wouldn't require excessive "200 or 300" hours to complete.
"Our objective is to really get people into a very dense, rich adventure, open world adventure that they can explore at their own rhythm," commented Gerighty. "So it is absolutely not a 200 or 300 hour epic unfinishable RPG. This is a very focused action-adventure RPG that will take people on a ride and is very manageable."
Khavari also added on the matter, saying that Ubisoft wants players to approach the world of Outlaws from the main character's perspective:
"We've talked about this a lot on the team is that yes, we're building open worlds, we're building bustling cities and cantinas and wide open plains, but we always try to approach it from a place of character, from a place of story and realizing that this might be Kay Vess' first entry into a planet like Toshara that we've crafted for this," Khavari said. "So that's always in top of mind, is fusing that narrative element with the game."
Furthermore, Khavari commented on the abundance of map icons in Ubisoft games, hinting that Outlaws won't have a messy map UI:
"I think our job is to make sure that the player organizes their experience according to their desires," he continued. "That's one of the big pluses with an open-world game is the agency of the player. So if we do our job right, it'll be so dense and so rich with different distractions that we won't have to rely on so many UI indications for them."
Star Wars: Outlaws is expected to be released in 2024 for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5. You can learn more about the upcoming title here.
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