Star Wars Outlaws: Handcrafted Planets
With Star Wars Outlaws just over a year away, we’re finally starting to learn more about what we can expect from the upcoming Ubisoft open-world game. With developer Red Fly Studio now helming the project following the departure of Amy Hennig and her team at EA, the Star Wars Outlaws release date is still uncertain. However, we now know that the game will feature handcrafted planets, rather than procedurally generated worlds, as revealed by Ubisoft creative director Julian Gerighty in an interview with Edge magazine.
Gerighty’s comments come in the wake of Starfield’s announcement, Bethesda’s open-world space game boasting over 1,000 procedurally generated planets for players to explore. While Starfield’s astronomical number of planets will undoubtedly be an incredible spectacle, the decision to opt for a more hands-off approach to planet creation in Outlaws strikes me as the right move.
“We want to create a lot of planets,” Gerighty tells Edge, “but we don’t want it to be this endless barrage of planets; it’s very important to us that each planet has its own identity and feeling.”
While we don’t know exactly how many planets we’ll be able to explore in Outlaws just yet, Gerighty mentions that each planet’s size will be roughly equivalent to two zones in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which offers a good sense of the scale of the explorable areas.
While Odyssey’s recreated country of ancient Greece is absolutely massive, the explorable areas in Outlaws will be more substantial, but not as massive as the entire country. This is a good way to strike a balance between exploration and content density; there’s nothing more frustrating than stumbling across vast expanses of empty space or repetitive gameplay loops.
Gerighty also reveals that players won’t be able to fly in space above planets, instead offering “close-orbit areas” where you can encounter asteroids and derelict space stations. This is similar to how planets were handled in Star Wars: The Old Republic, with each planet having a set of space areas to explore.
“Our focus really is to give you full freedom of approach in the open world,” Gerighty explains. “You can go and explore, you can go and engage with whatever activities you find, but the game is not so open that you can just walk up to an objective and say, ‘that’s not the way I want to do it’.”
While Starfield boasts an enormous number of planets, it’s clear that Outlaws’ approach to planet creation strikes a different balance. Gerighty’s comments suggest a more curated selection of locales that seek to captivate players with a carefully designed selection that offers entertainment and engagement.
Even if Outlaws only has a few dozen planets, the fact that they won’t be procedurally generated suggests a more deliberate and considered experience, with each planet brimming with unique content and exploration opportunities. On the other hand, Starfield’s vast array of planets is sure to appeal to players who enjoy the freedom to roam and explore in their space games, with multiple approaches to gameplay ensuring that there’s something for everyone.
The size of each planet in Star Wars Outlaws is also pretty sizable, with a size approximately equal to two zones in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Of course, while this gives us a good impression of the scale of the explorable areas, we still don’t know exactly how big each planet is in Outlaws.
