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Star Wars Outlaws will be the first truly open-world Star Wars game, and Massive Entertainment’s creative director Julian Gerighty has revealed some details on the map size and scope of the game.
In an interview with IGN, Gerighty revealed the planet where players start their Star Wars Outlaws adventure is Toshara and isn’t actually a planet, it’s a moon, and traveling across the whole surface takes “four or five minutes nonstop” if you hop on a Speeder.
He compared it to one of Ubisoft’s other open worlds to provide context, comparing the planet to “two or three” zones from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
He said that four or five minutes “doesn’t sound like a lot, but once you’re committed it’s a fairly large amount and you are always going to be distracted.” The game’s director, Mathias Karlson, described the “living world system” that helped make their previous open-world games, The Division and The Division 2, a success, as key to making Star Wars Outlaws engaging, especially if traversing long distances.
Star Wars Outlaws’ maps will not be big for the sake of it
Greighty also discussed the kind of emergent gameplay that will come out of this living world system, saying “Every two, three minutes there’ll be something that’s happening, whether it’s an ambush or the empire arresting some civilians or getting into combat with some criminal syndicates. And it’s up to you whether you want to engage or not.”
However, Massive Entertainment has always had a clear plan for Outlaws that they are hoping helps them avoid open-world pitfalls like bloat. They have designed the world to favor variety over size: “So we don’t want things to be just big for big sake. We need it to be contained, always fun, always proposing different activities,” Gerighty said.
If the studio can live up to these promises, Outlaws could truly be the Star Wars scoundrel story we’ve longed for. It releases on August 30, so there won’t be too long til we find out for sure.
