Assassin’s Creed Odyssey helped shape Star Wars Outlaws because its director “could pick up the phone and talk to” Ubisoft’s other devs about the technicalities of shaping their open world
Star Wars Outlaws’ open-world planets are about the same size as three Assassin’s Creed Odyssey zones stitched together – and that peculiar measurement tool was established because Outlaws’ director could pick up the phone and ask the Odyssey team for advice.
Star Wars Outlaws creative director Julian Gerighty has made no secret of the impact that Assassin’s Creed’s ancient Greek outing has had on his game. In an interview with GamesRadar+, he expanded on that influence, as well as the relationship that he was able to have with the team that crafted Kassandra and Alexios’ adventure.
“I think it was this freedom of approach in a very large environment – with traversal [and] curiosity at its heart, with RPG light mechanics,” Gerighty explains when asked about the inspiration that Odyssey offered Outlaws. Odyssey, he says, is “one of my favorite Assassin’s Creed games without a doubt,” so perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s had such an impact on his own open-world effort. What’s perhaps a little more surprising is how directly that impact has been felt.
Gerighty says that for all of the development ideas mentioned above, there were “people that I could pick up the phone, talk to, and say ‘okay, how did you do this? What was too big for you? What was too long a distance for traversal?'” Cribbing directly from the people who made one of his favorite games proved an invaluable resource – and Gerighty says it was “super practical having people [who] have made it being my peers in the same company.”
While it was useful to crib from fellow Ubisoft devs, however, Gerighty says that another open-world game helped act as his “biggest reference” when making Star Wars Outlaws – Ghost of Tsushima. Elsewhere in our interview, he praised Sucker Punch’s game for “really leaning into” the “purity of having a player fantasy.”