LucasFilm Games has announced that Ubisoft’s Massive Entertainment will be working on a new open-world Star Wars game, breaking EA’s 7-year exclusive streak of publishing the franchise’s video game titles. The upcoming game isn’t the only space-set open-world game in development, however.
Bethesda is currently working on its first new IP in over two decades, Starfield. Not much is known about Starfield or the new Star Wars games beyond plans for both to be open-world, yet this means both of the upcoming titles share one big challenge.
An open-world game generally means one where the vast majority of the game’s content is accessible in a single, large, unbroken game world as opposed to being divided by level or story segmentation. This doesn’t mean that there are no loading screens in the world – Skyrim, for example, has a loading screen every time a player enters an interior. However, it does indicate that most of the world is accessible without being broken up into smaller chunks.
This begs a huge question for both Starfield and the new Massive Star Wars game: how can developers create a truly open-world game if that game takes place across multiple planets? There are a few routes each of these games could go down.
Though Starfield‘s rumored leaked images and the name of the game itself suggests that Starfield will take place across multiple solar systems, there has been no such confirmation for the new Star Wars game. It’s possible that an open-world Star Wars game could take place entirely on one planet, though the one-dimensionality of Star Wars planets and a presumed player interest in space travel could make that less likely.
Another possibility is that both games will adopt semi-open worlds divided into different areas. This is seen in games like Dragon Age: Inquisition, which provided players with multiple large zones to explore which still had loading screens between them. If these zones are still accessible in almost any order the games could still claim to be mostly open-world, in design philosophy if not literally.
Perhaps the most ambitious possible path is Starfield or the new Star Wars game attempting to create an open-world which allows players to seamlessly move between planets and the space around them. It’s easier to see how this might be accomplished in Starfield, giving players several planets to explore in a single area and allowing them to travel freely between them.
However, in Star Wars, most interplanetary travel takes place in Hyperspace. This itself could be used to mask loading screens between planets, but it’s hard to see how it could be integrated into a fully open-world as it necessarily breaks up travel. It’s likely therefore that both Starfield and the new Star Wars game will actually be semi-open world games where each planet, though large in and of itself, does not exist in a continuous space with the space around it or other visitable planets.
The real test for both games will be how truly accessible those individual planets feel. If players land on a planet and are only able to access a small and specific area like in The Outer Worlds, those planets will risk feeling more like levels and undermining the games’ claims to be open-world. For now, however, sci-fi fans will have to wait for more news from Bethesda and Ubisoft. One thing’s for certain: as gaming enters a new generation, fans who have been hope for more open-world space-set games are in luck.
Ubisoft Massive’s Star Wars game is in development.
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