Star Wars Outlaws having AC Odyssey-sized planets sounds exhausting

In a recent interview, it was revealed that Star Wars Outlaws' planets would be comparable in scale to Assassin's Creed Odyssey — a game that was way too big.

Opinion by Lee Brady

Published 20 Jul 2023

According to Ubisoft Massive's creative director Julian Gerighty, you can expect Star Wars Outlaws' planets to be "equivalent to two to three of the zones in the Assassin's Creed Odyssey." So, if you plan on unlocking all those Star Wars Outlaws trophies, you best prepare to do a lot of in-game trekking. For me, he might as well have said Outlaws' PS5 platinum trophy will be unobtainable because, at that scale, there's absolutely no way I'll ever unlock it.

Ubisoft, please — Star Wars Outlaws sounds way too big

The interview, which comes via Edge Magazine #387 and was transcribed online by MP1ST, actually does have a lot of interesting details about Star Wars Outlaws. For one, the game will have a "reputation" system, which sounds a little like the one found in the Fallout series — pretty neat.

For another, the game will give the player "full freedom of approach" when it comes to "encounters." Cards on the table, I'm not 100% clear on what that actually means. I'm guessing this refers to the ability to choose either to stealth attack foes or blaster-fire them to death, as we saw in Star Wars Outlaws' PS5 gameplay reveal. If so, then once again, sure — pretty neat.

However, I'll just be honest — after I read that bit about Star Wars Outlaws' planets being the size of multiple Assassin's Creed Odyssey zones put together, Gerighty could have said the game dispenses free real-world money to players and I'd still be dubious about picking it up. The only way I could have soured quicker on the game is if Gerighty had compared its planets to Assassin's Creed Valhalla instead.

I can't emphasise how big these areas actually were.

What TrueTrophies Editor Kes says about the scale of the world in his Assassin's Creed Valhalla review is exactly how I felt playing Odyssey: "The world may be gorgeous, but it's also so big that doing the same things over and over ceases to be interesting after only three of the more than 15 regions." I understand the want for your game to have a sense of genuine scale, to feel massive in some way, but the impact it has on gameplay has never been anything but negative in my eyes.

With a map as wide as Odyssey's — which is 90 square miles long — inevitably the player finds themselves just mindlessly pointing forward, maybe sometimes pressing a second button to pick up mundane resources. My first hope was that maybe Outlaws would at least put that scale to use by letting us fly quickly over it in our little spaceship, but sadly no. As this interview points out: "Players will not have 'total free rein' in terms of travel, you won’t be able to freely fly above the planet, and there will be set landing and take-off areas."

Nope, keep it.

Here I was thinking Ubisoft had finally got the message about needlessly large worlds, given the upcoming Assassin's Creed Mirage is apparently comparable in scale to AC Unity's Paris. That's still a chunky world size, but not so big as to lack consideration for the player's actions. That Ubisoft could once more be thinking about making anything as big as Odyssey or Valhalla again blows my mind — especially now that we all live in a post-Elden Ring world.

The map in 2022's Elden Ring might feel utterly massive to the player, but it's actually only 30.5 miles long — roughly a third of the size of Odyssey. At that size, the player's engagement can still be firmly taken into account, and players will find it hard to go more than a minute or two in Elden Ring's world without running into some actual content — be that a monster battle, some treasure, a landmark worthy of inspection, or some more memorable mysteries.

The reason I find myself so hung up about the world size detail is simply because I think Star Wars Outlaws looks fun and I would like the game to actually be fun. I dread thinking it takes any cues from Odyssey because that was the Assassin's Creed game that broke me. That was the game that wasted so much of my time and bored me so severely that I eventually just quit playing it.

Let me be clear: I purchased Assassin's Creed Odyssey at launch. My quitting that game was an admission of defeat — I can't think of a single other game I bought at launch that I just gave up on out of boredom. There's a reason it's so low in our Assassin's Creed series ranking; such is the mediocrity afforded by its wasteful scale.

Uno reverse this whole interview.

My only hope for Star Wars Outlaws to overcome Odyssey's problem comes from one of the other notes in this interview: "Locations are all “handcrafted” and there are no procedurally generated entire planets." Handcrafted level design does not necessarily make a game's level design "good," but at least it's a step in the right direction. It buys me just enough hope for Outlaws to wait to see more of the game.

Who knows, maybe Ubisoft Massive has quietly cracked the problems that plagued Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and so we'll actually get an enormous game that's just filled with small pockets of memorable player-engaging moments. Personally, I have my doubts, but I'd love to see it. What do you think about the news of Star Wars Outlaws' massive maps? Based on what you've seen so far, are you hopeful this one makes the best PS5 games list? Let us know down in the comments.

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Written by Lee Brady

Staff Writer Lee keeps one eye on the future (Astro Bot), one eye on the past (PS1, PS2, and PS3 games), and his secret third eye on junk he really likes (Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Sonic). A PlayStation fan for over 25 years, he loves replaying classic games via PS Plus.