Star Wars Outlaws is set to bring us a seamless open-world adventure that will not only let us explore planets but also fly through space. At the studio in Malmo, Sweden, technical director Stephen Hawes tells 12DOVE just how the transition between space flight and planetary surfaces works.
Despite faster loading times being available thanks to the advancements of the latest hardware, pulling off a "seamless" open world is no easy feat. But as we were shown during our time at the studio, when you fly from an orbital region in space to a planet, you'll go through clouds and still maintain control on a fixed path before a landing sequence begins.
"So the loading times are faster, but they will vary depending on where you're flying to and from," Hawkes begins. "We still need to unload everything and load everything because we need the memory back, so there's a few things we can do to try and speed that up. But generally what we also want to do is make sure that the thing you go to is loaded when you get there. So, the idea of flying through the clouds and then doing a little loop while we load is a way of safely making sure that we can unload everything behind you, load everything in front of you and not lose control [as the player]."
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"The whole point is that the player still has control at this point, you can still move the ship around. You can't fly off in a different path, but the game doesn't take control away and that was the whole point of this [approach]," Hawes continues. "And even when Kay's taking off from… I showed False Flag for the transition, it looks like a realization scene, it's actually a loading. So there's a point where Kay will start pressing buttons and she will loop if you haven't finished [loading], and as soon as it's finished, then we cut. So the idea is to make sure we have a fallback for how we can cover the fact that we're loading, and the trick is to make sure that we know roughly how long it will be, but we don't know, for example, if someone's SSD has got a bit of damage and is maybe taking a bit longer; there's a fallback to cover if that happens."
Programming technical director Roxana Tudor adds: "To piggyback a bit on that, you have to remember that the devil is in the details. So it's not necessarily the technology behind it, but it's all the small details that need to be in perfect sync. We need to make sure that all the cameras are in perfect sync, that all the atmospherics are in perfect sync, otherwise even one frame difference will just break the illusion."
Hawes adds that "a lot of work has gone into it" to keep players in control and to allow for us to feel like we're really exploring all sides of the galaxy. It'll be interesting to see just how in control we'll be - and how it compares to other games that also transition between planets and space, such as Starfield and No Man's Sky - when it arrives on August 30, 2024.
This is all part of the big "full spectrum" fantasy Massive is setting out to deliver, which we delved into in depth in our Star Wars Outlaws preview.
