Ubisoft’s upcoming Star Wars Outlaws looks to be a massive open-world video game spanning multiple planets and cities. However, according to the game’s creative director, completing everything in Outlaws isn’t going to take you 100 to 200 hours like in some past Ubisoft games.
Star Wars Outlaws was announced during Summer Game Fest 2023. It’s being developed by Massive Entertainment, the same studio behind The Division 2 and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. While those games were big, Outlaws has the potential to be even larger as it is set in the pre-existing and giant Star Wars universe. If that has you worried that this might be an Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey-sized open-world adventure, Julian Gerighty, the creative director on Outlaws, says that it isn’t the case.
In an interview with VGC, Gerighty explained that “very early on” the studio decided that the main campaign or “golden path” in Outlaws would only take most players about 30 hours to complete. For folks looking to do everything, the creative director suggested between 50 to 60 hours.
“For a guy with a family and a job, it’s still a fair amount of time,” Gerighty told VGC, “But it’s not Assassin’s Creed epic, 200 hours’ worth of gameplay. So that allows us to really focus on the detail, it allows us to focus, maybe with a smaller team, on executing something that is manageable.”
In Kotaku’s hands-on preview of Outlaws, Alyssa Mercante noted the amount of detail on display in the game, explaining that she sometimes just wanted to stop playing and look around the incredibly dense Star Wars locales in the game’s SGF demo. So it seems that the decision to focus on quality over quantity will pay off in the long run.
You can’t swim in Outlaws, but you can play arcade games
Elsewhere in VGC’s interview, the creative director behind Outlaws explained that he’s a “big believer” in creating a plan early on that is “exciting, ambitious” but also “achievable.”
As an example of making sure the game doesn’t get too big or hard to manage, Gerighty shared a story about how, early on, Massive wanted to add swimming to Outlaws.
“So, for example, removed – we wanted swimming, like the first few iterations of the pitch that we did, we’d have loved to have had swimming. It’s not possible, animation said, it’s not possible in terms of the scope. So, OK, we can live without that, we’ll do without it, there’s plenty of other things that we can explore,” said Gerighty.
But, the director also explained that sometimes plans change and you end up making stuff you never intended to when you first started development.
“All of the mini-games [like Sabacc and the arcade games] that we have…none of those were planned originally, so those were added during the development, so there’s a little bit of give and take.”
Star Wars Outlaws launches August 30 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
