Ubisoft has a penchant for making long games. A completionist run in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla run can take up to 143 hours according to HowLongtoBeat, and some fans are worried that Star Wars Outlaws may be more of the same.
The concerns stem from a recent interview confirming that a Star Wars Outlaws planet will comprise “two to three zones” from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. One of the main criticisms of Valhalla was that it felt bloated with content that many players felt underwhelming, which was exemplified by its huge number of map icons — an Ubisoft staple.
Speaking with IGN during San Diego Comic-Con, creative director Julian Gerighty and narrative director Navid Khavari addressed the question of what they consider to be “too big” in Star Wars Outlaws. Gerighty responded that “too big is a game that people don’t manage to play, enjoy, and finish.”
“Our objective is to really get people into a very dense, rich adventure, open world adventure that they can explore at their own rhythm,” Gerighty said. “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 added that Ubisoft wants players to “experience Kay Vess’ journey.”
“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. So that’s always in top of mind, is fusing that narrative element with the game.”
Billed as an open world Star Wars adventure featuring Kay Vess as a newly-minted scoundrel, Star Wars Outlaws will let players explore multiple worlds, navigate the politics of the galaxy’s criminal syndicates, and take on missions from Jabba the Hutt (or just betray him, whereupon the famously vengeful hunt will send out the bounty hunters).
[Star Wars Outlaws] is absolutely not a 200 or 300 hour epic unfinishable RPG
Star Wars Outlaws was first revealed during Summer Game Fest and subsequently shown in greater detail at San Diego Comic-Con, with Ubisoft discussing the process of crafting a fully-explorable Tatooine and teasing some sort of role for food.
We haven’t had a chance to try out Star Wars Outlaws for ourselves yet, so it’s unclear to what extent it will resemble a typical Ubisoft game. However, Khavid did suggest that it won’t be quire so packed with icons this time around.
“I think our job is to make sure that the player organizes their experience according to their desires,” Khavid said. “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.”
Look for our full interview with the Star Wars Outlaws developers later today. Star Wars Outlaws is slated to release in 2024.
Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
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