Much ado has been made about Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft’s new open-world Star Wars game revealed at this year’s Summer Game Fest. The single-player, third-person game focuses on Kay Vess, an outlaw scoundrel attempting to pull off a huge heist. She’s accompanied by Nix, a cute little guy you can instruct to do things for you, and the game will feature space combat, vehicle combat, stealth and open combat, and branching dialogue. As we’ve also recently found out, each planet in the game will be the size of about two or three zones in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and each of them will be “hand-crafted” instead of procedurally generated.
This is a good thing. Starfield, famously, will have over a thousand procedurally generated planets, but like our own Stacey Henley, I’m not interested in that. Yes, many of those will have bespoke, hand-crafted content, but the majority of each planet will be large tiles that are “wrapped” around the world. Sure, there will be plenty of planets to visit, but why would you if there isn’t much to do on them? It makes Starfield feel huge, but it’s also kind of boring. I’m most interested in space exploration when there are new populations to interact with and things to actually do. I want to see alien cultures, their own complicated societies and the things they build on their unique planets. Less Starfield, more Knights Of The Old Republic, if you will.
It seems that Star Wars Outlaws will, in fact, be a little less Starfield, a little more KOTOR. According to the game’s creative director, every explorable area will be made by the studio instead of generated, which probably means more specific design, more interactivity, and more things to do. This is a great thing for players, and though some may be disappointed at the game’s ‘lack of size’, it means more content that’s actually fun. Far be it from me to dictate what people can enjoy, but scope really isn’t everything when it comes to story-driven, narrative games. Maybe flying around in space and settling on random planets just to see what’s up is your jam, but it’s not great for the story when most of the planets you land on have nothing going on – in fact, I consider it filler. Open-world doesn’t always have to mean gigantic, and a game’s world is often more fleshed-out and vibrant when care has been taken to make every explorable region feel individual and alive in its own way.
In general, I find the trend of games getting bigger very alarming. The business of game development is quickly becoming more and more unsustainable, as players demand more and more content from every game. Technical achievements do not actually make a game good, and they certainly are not worth the crunch and countless delays that inevitably happen. Costs to make and buy games are rising, and yet gamers start exercising their Twitter fingers if their open-world game doesn’t have enough empty space for them to romp around in. I’m very happy to spend my time in a world crafted for my enjoyment and not to meet some arbitrary benchmark of size, and I wish more gamers felt the same.