Star Wars: Outlaws developer Massive Entertainment has revealed more about the game’s open world and declared it isn’t going down the Starfield-esque procedurally-generated route.
Speaking to Edge Magazine, creative director Julian Gerighty said Outlaws, the upcoming sci-fi adventure set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, takes a more “handcrafted” and “manageable” approach to the open-world formula.
“It’s a crude analogy, but the size of one planet might be [equivalent to] two of the zones in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey,” said Gerighty. “It could be two to three zones. But it’s not this sort of epic ‘the whole of England recreated’ approach.”
These zones seemingly refer to the regions that make up Odyssey’s colossal map, which are still fairly large by themselves. Attika is one example, which encompasses the entirety of Athens and a significant portion of the surrounding area.
It’s unknown how many planets will be in Outlaws, but Gerighty made clear it won’t be an effectively endless open world like fellow space RPG Starfield. Bethesda’s latest is set to feature more than 1,000 planets with a lot of procedurally generated content, but still more handcrafted elements than any previous game from the developer.
Outlaws was revealed at the 2023 Xbox Games Showcase with a gameplay presentation coming soon after. It stars Kay Vess, an outlaw looking to make it big in the criminal underworld of the Star Wars Galaxy, and fans are already obsessing over her axolotl-like alien pet Nix.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.