Star Wars Outlaws publisher Ubisoft says its swashbuckling take on the Star Wars universe won’t be one of the company’s many unfinishable RPGs. Ubisoft Massive creative director Julian Gerighty and narrative director Navid Khavari touched on the length of their game during a recent interview with IGN. They say the team isn’t making a giant adventure that will take weeks or months to finish, instead opting to give fans something far more focused.
“Too big is a game that people don’t manage to play, enjoy, and finish,” Gerighty said. “And our objective is to really get people into a very dense, rich adventure, open world adventure that they can rhythm the way that they want. 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.”
Part of this also means that Star Wars Outlaws players likely won’t be bombarded with map icons like we’ve seen in games such as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Instead, Khavari said that the team has done its best to make exploration feel organic as players move through the world.
“I think our job is to make sure that the player organizes their experience according to their desires,” Khavari 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.”
Khavari expanded on these thoughts, suggesting that Ubisoft team is, before all else, making sure it properly tells the story of main character Kay Vess. However, that doesn’t mean that we won’t see larger areas when Star Wars Outlaws eventually launches.
“And 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,” Khavari added, “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, right?”
Depending on what kind of Ubisoft fan you are, Gerighty and Khavari’s words could be calming or concerning. Still, there’s no shortage of seemingly endless Ubisoft RPGs, so it’s nice to hear that the company is giving the narrative a bit more focus this time around. We’ll know about how it all shapes up when Star Wars Outlaws launches in 2024 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X | S.
