In an interview with VGC, Julian Gerighty answered a number of questions, including the fact that Massive Entertainment cut a feature from the game during development.
“Very, very early on we decided that this was going to be a 25, 30 hour Golden Path adventure, 50 hours, 60 hours for completionists, and that’s still a fair amount of time for a guy with a family and a job. But it’s not an Assassin’s Creed epic, 200 hours of gameplay, so it allows us to really focus on the details, it allows us to focus, maybe with a smaller team, on executing something that’s manageable. As a creator, I’m a big believer in setting an initial vision that’s exciting, ambitious, and achievable. It’s really important to make sure that everyone working on the game is working in the same direction towards the same goal.
With The Division, The Division 2 and Star Wars Outlaws, that vision was more or less respected, I mean 95% respected. Some things have been added, some things have been changed or removed, but very, very little. So, for example, removed – we wanted swimming, like the first few iterations of the pitch that we did, we would have loved to have had swimming. It’s not possible, the animation said, it’s not possible in terms of scope. So, OK, we can live without it, we’ll do without it, there’s a lot of other things we can explore. But all the mini-games that we have – I don’t know if you played Sabacc or the arcade games – none of those were originally planned, so they were added during development, so there’s a little bit of give and take,” Gerighty said.
At the Summer Game Fest, the press got a demo to try it out, and they compared the game to Uncharted. Gerighty also talked about this: “I mean, for me it wasn’t necessarily our reference point. But it’s such a wonderful game to be compared to, so if you’re going to be compared to someone, it might as well be the best in the industry. Naughty Dog and what they do is absolutely brilliant, so I’ll take it, but it wasn’t the starting point.
As for the demo, Gerighty said it was just a taste. He responded to the criticism this way: “I think when you come to a show like this, while you’re finishing a game in terms of production, you have to make a lot of decisions, and our producer said, you get one demo for all the shows we’re going to during the year, so Gamescom, ComiCon [etc]. And they’re focused on consumers plus journalists, so we had to pick something that was 20 minutes, bite-sized, lots of variety, lots of representative systems, but not the open world experience, because we’re going to show that during the studio tour, at the preview event over here. So we’re going to spend a lot more time on those things, so this is an amuse bouche, it’s an appetizer rather than the main course for the game. I think we have a very compelling overall game and this is just a part of it.
The question is whether that’s an appropriate response. Star Wars Outlaws will be released on August 30th for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and PC.
