After years of Star Wars games published exclusively by EA, and the new wave of games being developed in the wake of The Mandalorian’s Disney+ success, finally some new development studios and publishers are entering the fold. Lucasfilm Games and Ubisoft have announced that a new open-world game is in development at Ubisoft Massive; the studio responsible for The Division, The Division 2, as well as collaborating on Ubisoft titles like Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and Far Cry 3.
Many fans are hopeful that Ubisoft Massive’s open-world Star Wars game could bring the open world design of titles like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla to the franchise, giving players a large seamless in-game world to explore. However, there’s one key reason that Ubisoft Massive’s Star Wars game is unlikely to be fully open world.
It seems unlikely that Ubisoft Massive’s Star Wars game will take place on a single planet. Any open-world Star Wars game which limits players to just one planet could be constricting in the context of the series. Not only does almost all Star Wars media include multiple planets, but those planets tend not to have much environmental diversity. Tatooine is a desert planet, Hoth is a snow planet, and worlds from Coruscant to Taris are “ecumenopolises” – planets entirely covered by cities. If Ubisoft Massive’s Star Wars game tries to focus on creating a seamless open world, the developers could run into a few problems.
If the new Star Wars game takes place on a single planet, the game’s setting could risk feeling repetitive if it sticks to the classic “one planet, one biome” Star Wars formula. On the other hand, if Ubisoft Massive breaks that formula, the game could equally risk not staying true to Star Wars movies and TV shows, which will be vital to bringing the game’s galaxy to life.
Star Wars‘ single biome planets may seem silly, but they’re also a well-known part of the franchise’s aesthetic. Single biome planets help simplify a galaxy full of possibilities into far more understandable, bite-size chunks. Star Wars’ simple planets complement its storytelling and prevent the immense universe from feeling too complicated or unwieldy. However, this series staple also has big implications for the possible design of Ubisoft Massive’s new game.
The fact that Ubisoft Massive’s open-world Star Wars game will likely take place across multiple planets makes it unlikely that players will get the same kind of open world seen in games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla or Red Dead Redemption 2. Players can explore the vast majority of the world without encountering a loading screen, which becomes much harder to implement with different, varied environments. Instead, there are a few likely outcomes.
It’s likely that references to the new game being “open world” actually mean fans can expect Ubisoft Massive’s Star Wars to allow players to access most areas in the game at any time, perhaps after the prologue. If the game takes place across multiple planets, players may have access to a large area to explore on each planet, but they will have to travel through space – and some form of loading screen – to get to those different areas.
This isn’t unprecedented in open-world games. Titles like Dragon Age: Inquisition were marketed as open world despite only having a semi-open world structure. Inquisition players are given access to most of the world after the game’s introduction, while that world itself is broken up into 13 distinct zones. Transition between these zones isn’t particularly immersion-breaking in Inquisition, though it remains to be seen how Ubisoft Massive handles its travel between worlds. Exploring distinct and separate planets is also the game’s main opportunity for space exploration and combat.
However, there’s one additional layer to the problem that arises trying to create an open-world Star Wars game. The more environmental diversity Ubisoft Massive wants to bring to its in-game galaxy, the more that galaxy will likely have to be broken into chunks. On the one hand, the studio will likely want to make each planet’s explorable area quite large, but the more planets the developer wants to include the more likely it is that the game will be segmented and that those individual segments will be smaller.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some areas of Dragon Age: Inquisition’s world like the Hinterlands were huge in-game, but many fans found them lacking in depth as a result. It’s possible that Ubisoft Massive’s new Star Wars game could take place across a huge swath of planets, each with their own relatively small area developed in-depth. The risk here, however, is that fans hoping for a seamless Ubisoft open-world game would be disappointed. As the first studio to tackle a Star Wars game outside of EA in years, Ubisoft Massive has a huge task ahead of it, and bringing the recognizable Star Wars formula to an open-world format doesn’t make that any easier.
It remains possible that the game will in fact focus on a single planet to create a single unbroken game world. This might be risky, but it could also help tell a Star Wars story with the kind of focus on a single location rarely seen in the series. With huge amounts of new Star Wars media on the way, from the Obi-Wan Kenobi TV show to Rangers of the New Republic, a Star Wars game which focuses on developing one planet in the franchise’s galaxy could be a refreshing change of pace.
Ironically, that could also mean that the open-world Star Wars games’ best hope of creating a huge unbroken world is to focus on a far smaller area than most Star Wars stories. How Ubisoft Massive ultimately plans to tackle the unique challenges of developing an open world game in the Star Wars universe remains to be seen.
Ubisoft Massive’s Star Wars game is currently in development.
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