In some circles of videogameland it’s common wisdom that more is better—I remember a quaint time when 30 hours was a “long” game, but today’s big budget releases have been pushing that boundary well into the triple digits. In a recent interview with IGN, though, two Star Wars Outlaws devs promise to buck that trend with a “dense” and “rich” game that doesn’t wear out its welcome.
Julian Gerighty and Navid Khaveri, the game’s creative and narrative director respectively, told IGN that they don’t want Outlaws to be “too big,” with Gerighty clarifying that the kind of game he’s referring to is one that “people don’t manage to play, enjoy, and finish.”
Gerighty went on to describe Outlaws as “a very dense, rich, open world adventure that [players] can explore at their own rhythm,” and asserted that the game “is absolutely not a 200 or 300 hour epic unfinishable RPG.” So it’s pretty clear that Ubisoft’s argument is that less can still very much be more.
Instead they’ll make an UNFINISHED 30 hour open world action game with light RPG elements.
What do you mean unfinished? They finished it in 2007, called it Assassin’s Creed, and since then they’ve done nothing but re-release it with a new skin every year.
“Unfinishable” is more of a problem with Ubi’s style, and not the length necessarily.
Their games are so boring and samey now that what is exciting five hours in is monotonous after 20 hours, and yet there’s still 60 hours to go.
The fact their stories aren’t exactly that great doesn’t help either.
Clear a checkpoint, climb a tower. Repeat 200 times. If this manages to avoid some version of that, hallelujah
Fuck Ubisoft
Thirty collectable quests with 100 collectibles each may take 300 hours to complete, but it’s not a 300 hour game
The problem is that it’s an ubisoft game. That means we’re gonna have to use the crappy usibsoft launcher.
Thank you so much for including the text in the post! I hate opening websites on mobile…
I just really, really wish I could’ve made my own character. Their main character is just not at all compelling to me. I would’ve liked something more along the lines of Bounty Hunter.
Great! I like games that I can actually complete in a reasonable amount of time. Padding a game just to make it longer makes it a chore to play.
You act like there isn’t a difference between quality content and 100s of hours of gathering collectables…
The only game I’ve played that actually has 100+ hours of quality content is Persona 5.
Every other single player game trying to give me more than ~30 hours of stuff to do ended up being a chore.
I think part of it is that there is an ideal time commitment for story driven games and it is between 5 and 30 hours. It’s similar for movies, where the ideal range is 90 t o150 minutes. There can be exceptions, made by particularly skilled people, but just because I enjoy the 4-hour cut of Return of the King does not mean I want the next Marvel or DC movie to be that long.
Probably because 90% of the games I’ve played, even the really good ones, would have been much better with some editing. But instead they tend to pad them out with unnecessary rubbish so they can put “100s of hours of gameplay” in the adverts.
