The first ever open world Star Wars adventure Star Wars Outlaws has recently been compared to the Assassin's Creed franchise. The planet-spanning Star Wars Outlaws was first revealed at Xbox's Games Showcase last month and had a 10-minute gameplay walkthrough to cap off the Ubisoft Forward that followed.
Star Wars Outlaws follows the story of Kay Vess, a scoundrel swindling her way across the galaxy while facing several of Star Wars' most notorious crime families between the events of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Third-person blaster gameplay will be at the core of the combat and Kay's fuzzy companion Nix can help distract or attack enemies. Ship combat will be a big part of Outlaws as well, with the gameplay trailer boasting a nearly seamless transition from the surface of a planet into space.
With so much else going on in Star Wars Outlaws like a Grand Theft Auto-inspired wanted system and speeder bike chases, fans have been wondering what type of shape, structure, and size the game's open world will take. IGN pointed to an Edge Magazine interview with Outlaws' creative director Julian Gerighty who expressed that Kay Vess' journey won't span entire procedurally generated planets, rather each planet will have its own large open areas to explore. Gerighty likened each planet's expanse to the size of two regions or "zones" of Assassin's Creed Odyssey's massive world of Ancient Greece, which contains seven regions in total.
"It's a crude analogy, but the size of one planet might be [equivalent to] two of the zones in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey...It could be two to three zones. But it's not this sort of epic 'the whole of England recreated' approach." - Julian Gerighty, Star Wars Outlaws Creative Director via IGN
Star Wars Outlaws' creative director also made brief reference to Ubisoft's notoriously large Assassin's Creed Valhalla which effectively recreated the entire land mass of England. Valhalla's open world caught some criticism from fans for being too large for an Assassin's Creed title. Gerighty assured fans that in Outlaws, each planet's open areas won't be nearly as large as Valhalla's open world. The number of planets contained in Outlaws is currently unknown, however, it's possible that all of Star Wars Outlaws' regions could combine to turn out to be even larger than Assassin's Creed Odyssey or Valhalla.
Ever since the reveal of Star Wars Outlaws, the first ever open world Star Wars game has been the subject of comparison to Bethesda's imminent 1,000-planet-large Starfield. While Starfield is confirmed to be using some form of procedural generation to achieve such a colossal feat, it seems like Gerighty is setting the expectation that Outlaws' open world structure doesn't have that same goal of creating whole planets, systems or galaxies, thus forgoing the need to use procedural generation. Fans will need to wait until closer to 2024 to learn more about the first ever open world Star Wars game.
Star Wars Outlaws is coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S in 2024.
Source: Edge (via IGN)
