Ubisoft’s recent curse of creating games with far too much content will not affect Star Wars Outlaws. After years of creating 300-hour RPGs for Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft is showing restraint with its new open-world Star Wars title.
In an interview with IGN, Ubisoft confirmed that Star Wars Outlaws will not have hundreds of hours of gameplay. Instead, the game will be more concise, allowing players to properly engage with its lovingly handcrafted planets.
Outlaws’ creative director Julian Gerighty explained that the team is trying to avoid the recent trend of making games “too big”. Past Ubisoft games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla are so vast that most players won’t even experience half of the game’s content, oftentimes missing some of the best quests.
“Too big is a game that people don't manage to play, enjoy, and finish,” the game’s director explained. "Our objective is to really get people into a very dense, rich adventure, open world adventure that they can explore at their own rhythm. 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."
Gerighty continued to explain that the density of Outlaws is what’s most important, creating richly detailed environments filled with character instead of vast expanses with nothing to do.
“We’re building open worlds, we're building bustling cities and cantinas and wide open plains,” he said. “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. So that's always in top of mind, is fusing that narrative element with the game."
Described as GTA in space, Star Wars Outlaws allows players to rack up bounties from the Empire and dart between planets and space to escape them. From the gameplay we’ve seen, Outlaws looks like a Star Wars game like no other, and fans are hungry for more. (Not just the game’s ridiculously hot Droid companion.)
Ubisoft has not provided a solid release date for its new Star Wars game as of yet, but the title is set to release sometime in 2024.