Star Wars Outlaws’ planets will all be handcrafted

Each planet in Star Wars Outlaw will be roughly the size of two zones in Assassin's Creed Odyssey

Ubisoft lifted the lid on its upcoming open-world Star Wars game earlier this year, revealing it as Star Wars Outlaws in an Xbox Games Showcase — Microsoft’s not-E3 conference. A subsequent presentation from Ubisoft itself showed off a good chunk of gameplay for Star Wars Outlaws, including a look at its open worlds.

Now we know a little bit more about the nature of those wide open spaces, and how they’ll compare to some other games, including Bethesda’s Starfield. In an interview with Edge magazine (and reported by PC Gamer, thanks!) Outlaws' creative director Julian Gerighty said that Ubisoft Massive is aiming to make sure every planet you visit in the game is a reasonable size, and all handcrafted rather than procedurally generated.

“It’s a crude analogy, but the size of one planet might be about [equivalent to] two of the zones in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey,” Gerighty told Edge, “It could be two or three zones. But it’s not, you know, this sort of epic ‘the whole of England recreated’ approach.”

Ubisoft's Star Wars Outlaws was rumored for many years before its reveal / Ubisoft

That stands in stark opposition to something like Starfield, which has over 1000 planets, many of which are procedurally generated. While we don’t know how many planets will feature in Star Wars Outlaw, we can probably safely assume it won’t have 100, let alone 1000, especially if all of them are being made by hand.

The comparison to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey – and the reference to Syndicate in the same sentence – comes at an interesting time, as Ubisoft recently revealed Assassin’s Creed would be returning to smaller map sizes with the next game in the series. The company says that Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s map size is roughly comparable to Revelations and Unity, rather than the country-spanning maps introduced in Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla.

No release date has been set for Star Wars Outlaws yet, but it’s expected that Ubisoft will release the game sometime in 2024.