Julian Gerighty, the film's creative director, and Navid Khaveri, its narrative director, told IGN that they do not want "Outlaws" to be "too big" a game.
Gerighty further described "Outlaws" as "a very dense and rich open-world adventure that [players] can explore at their own rhythm," and assured that the game is "definitely not a 200- or 300-hour epic, uncompletable RPG." In other words, Ubisoft's claim is clearly that less is more.
Longer games can be great, offering a world that keeps you hooked for weeks or months and never lets you go afterwards. But done poorly, it can be an endless grind and a repetition of to-do lists, and the marketing promise of a huge, epic game with endless entertainment and triple-digit runtimes feels more like a threat than a promise.
As for whether the rebellion against too-long games will become a trend, some players are increasingly cringing at the bloated game sizes, and now developers are stepping back from the game-length race: with "The Outer Worlds," "Pentiment," and With the upcoming "Avowed," RPG studio Obsidian is deliberately targeting medium-length games, promising depth and replayability rather than scale.
It is particularly interesting that the team at Ubisoft has taken this stance. The publisher's Tennozan titles "Far Cry" and "Assassin's Creed" have become synonymous with ever-expanding checklists and sprawling, dot-picture open worlds. The switch to "Outlaw" appears to be a deliberate response to criticism of such games.
While I wish most games were more focused and streamlined, most games are not "Starfield" or "Baldur's Gate 3." that Fall 2023's monster RPG double punch has enough to live up to its bold play time promise. In my opinion, if you want to make a 300-hour RPG, you better have more than five years and hundreds of developers all over the world.
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