Starlink: Battle for Atlas looks to be a refreshingly different game from Ubisoft. The company usually dabbles in high end AAA games with realistic graphics that are all open world, and have RPG elements, and some form of GaaS or multiplayer functionality involved. Starlink is a space adventure game with highly stylized graphics, and the integration of toys to life (though those don’t appear to be mandatory).
That said, just because it doesn’t aim for photorealism doesn’t mean that you should assume it’s on a smaller scale than other Ubisoft games. In fact, speaking to Gadgets 360, Jesse Knapp, Lead Designer for Starlink: Battle for Atlas, noted that the game’s world is in fact bigger than most of the open world games that Ubisoft puts out.
“In terms of the size of Starlink, the square footage is bigger than most open-world games that Ubisoft makes. Space is really, really, really, really, really, really big!” he said. “That was one of the things we learned early on. One of the things we always looked at with Starlink was, ‘How do we balance authenticity and realism with what needs to be a fun game to play, in a reasonable session time?’”
One of the ways the developers did that, he revealed, was by trying to maintain a sense of scale, while also giving players something interesting to keep them engaged at frequent intervals.
“We looked a lot at scale, the distance between planets, the size of those planets, and we really tried to find the right balance for this game,” he said. “To keep things feeling big enough that you can lose yourself in that experience, and not worry too much about the scale, but small enough that you don’t have to worry about the scale because there’s always something to do and interesting things to interact with.”
Which sounds good to me. The game in general looks cool to me, although I’m not sure exactly how well it might do given how crowded its release window is. Starlink: Battle for Atlas launches on October 16 for Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Xbox One. If you haven’t already, make sure to check out the newest story trailer for the game.