Since the last three Assassin's Creed games are gigantic RPGs with equally as expansive maps, there's understandable anxiety when Ubisoft announces a new RPG--will it be an unfathomable time sink of hundreds of hours? With Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft says no.
Speaking to IGN at San Diego Comic-Con, creative director Julian Gerighty addressed worries that we'd have another Valhalla on our hands, which many criticised for its enormous but uninteresting map, usually with repetitive objectives or empty stretches of land separating objectives A and B.
"Too big is a game that people don't manage to play, enjoy, and finish," Gerighty said. "Our objective is to get people into a very dense, rich [...] 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."
Ubisoft told IGN that each planet will be split into two to three zones of a similar size to Odyssey's. So far, four planets have been confirmed, which means that there are at least eight to 12 zones, compared to Odyssey's 39. That doesn't include everything you can do in space, however.
"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 realising that this might be Kay Vess' first entry into a planet like Toshara that we've crafted for this," narrative director Navid Khavari said. "So that's always on top of [the] mind, is fusing that narrative element with the game."
While this sounds closer to something like God of War Ragnarok, Final Fantasy 16, or Jedi Survivor than Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Odyssey, and Origins, Outlaws is still the first-ever open-world Star Wars game. It might not be a 200-to-300-hour epic that will eat away at all of your free time, but we still don't know how long it will take.
Unlike Starfield, which is also an open-world RPG boasting a number of planets available to explore, though 1,000 is a bit more than the four on offer here, Outlaws doesn't use procedural generation. That means each and every zone is hand-crafted, which has led to the inclusion of places like Mos Eisley and Jabba's Palace. Not that many people are excited to go back to Tattooine... again.
But with a smaller number of hand-crafted zones and fewer planets, Outlaws is shaping up to be a more manageable experience than recent Ubisoft outings.