Ubisoft's next open-world adventure, Star Wars Outlaws, breaks at least one of the company's time-honored traditions: climbing towers to progress the map.
That's according to Game Informer's Brian Shea, who said on Twitter that Star Wars Outlaws creative director Julian Gerighty of Ubisoft's Massive Entertainment outright confirmed (in Shea's words) "there are not" any "towers you climb in the open world to unlock the map."
What will we be doing instead of using binoculars or eagles or whatever universe-appropriate MacGuffin to scour the surrounding lands? Shea says, "from what I understand, it's just through exploration," meaning the world map's obscuring fog naturally clears up as you explore new areas.
There's an argument to be made that climbing towers, or just tall things in general, is fun to do in video games. Fittingly, Ubisoft, specifically Ubisoft studio Reflections, has a whole game about climbing things – two, actually, in Grow Home and its unexpected sequel Grow Up, both of which are great fun. But there's also something to be said for how predictable and processed stamped-out towers can make a game world feel, to say nothing of how appropriate they may or may not feel for the setting.
Climbing towers can be fun, but doing it repeatedly as an explicit means to interact with a world that should be equipped to pull you forward in more natural ways can make things feel artificial. Let's imagine, for the sake of arguing, doing it in several open-world games with radically different settings released over a series of many years by the same unspecified giant publisher. That might get old. I couldn't really picture Star Wars Outlaws heroine Kay Vess climbing up a bunch of radio towers to scope out her surroundings, so it's good to know she won't be doing that.
This lines up with Massive and Gerighty's stance on Star Wars Outlaws as a whole. Last year, the director highlighted the dev team's focus on "what 'open world' means to the player," stressing "full freedom of approach." Similarly, when we spoke to him last year he noted that combat is more than "taking cover and taking headshots." Star Wars Outlaws has looked solid in trailers and seems to be thinking outside the box on many subtle but important details. Perhaps most importantly, it won't be an "unfinishable" Assassin's Creed-style RPG filled with 10 million collectibles across 300 hours of definitely necessary gameplay.
The Star Wars Outlaws release date is officially set for August. If you want a sense of what to expect, we've got all the revealed Star Wars Outlaws planets and what we know about them here.
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