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.
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.