Big things aren’t always good. Cheeseburgers. Penises. Ubisoft games. All things at risk of becoming overwhelming thanks to their overzealous size. Sometimes it’s okay to admit that something a little smaller might work just as well, and in many instances, is much preferred.
With Assassin’s Creed Mirage set to directly address the series’ relationship with needless bloat later this year, it seems future instalments such as Red and Hexe will instead capitalise further on the endless streams of content present in games like Origins, Odyssey, and the polarising Valhalla. Quantity over quality is the goal here, regardless of whether the content we’re engaging with is actually enjoyable to consume or dares to stick in our memories.
Star Wars Outlaws doesn’t seem to be learning any of these lessons either, and as the first true open world game set in a galaxy far, far away it wants to let us free on individual planets the size of entire Assassin’s Creed games. That’s going by creative director Julian Gerighty in a new interview with Edge Magazine:
“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.”
For context, zones in Odyssey can range from individual islands hiding minotaurs guarding a rare treasure or entire regions of Ancient Greece recreated down to the smallest of details. If that is to be believed, Star Wars Outlaws could present a multitude of planets keen to devour hours of our time at once. Gerighty also makes it clear that all of the planets are individually handcrafted and don’t make deliberate use of procedural generation. The idea of being free to explore entire worlds in the Star Wars universe without fear of narrative obstacles and the inevitable invisible wall cropping up to block my progress sounds exhilarating, but given this game is coming from Ubisoft, the thought is also exhausting. How much of this game will be worth seeing once you look past all the same collectibles and forgettable side quests made to keep our attention rather than tell worthwhile stories in their own right? This worries me.
Perhaps my time in this industry has allowed an outer shell of cynicism to form around my cold, dead heart. Or maybe I’ve seen so many massively ambitious projects like this promise the world only to deliver something far more underwhelming. Star Wars isn’t immune to such failures, and Outlaws daring to pitch itself as an open world experience without equal will only make it harder and harder to impress us when it finally comes around. Planets can be so big they take several actual hours to walk across, but if all this traversal is in service of repetitive enemy outposts and bland side quests, then is this level of scale even worth it?
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor fell short in this regard too, and was arguably weaker by giving us open spaces like Koboh which only served to highlight its mechanical and visual flaws. The promise of finding a mullet in a chest hidden in a cave somewhere wasn’t worth the trade-off of tight, choreographed combat encounters and more focused level design that Fallen Order seemed to better understand. Even similar RPGs like Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect present us with an entire galaxy to explore, but still curate specific environments for the sake of storytelling without ever making it feel like the universe we inhabit is somehow small or limited. Big doesn’t necessarily have to mean big, we just have to be convinced it does. Star Wars Outlaws wishes to go all the way, and I’m not sure if that’s for the best.