Astro Bot almost went open-world, but opted for 80 planets instead because that led to "the most control over the game's variety"
Jul. 13, 2024Team Asobi “did consider, at first: should this be an open-world game?”
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Astro Botserves as a kind of"new beginning"for the platforming mascot that won everyone over while pat-patting around our controllers in PS5 pack-in game Astro’s Playroom. But while trying to reintroduce the loveable hero in a much-larger, full-priced adventure, the developers at Team Asobi almost went down an open-world route.
Speaking toEdge Magazinein its 400th Issue, which features a whoppingten unique covers with different cosplaying Astro Botson each, creative director Nicholas Doucet said the team “did consider, at first: should this be an open-world game?” The only reason that Astro Bot eventually “went for a level-based approach” was “because that was the one that gave us the most control over the game’s variety.”
Astro Bot, as it is now, looks to be more like a Super Mario Odyssey type of situation. Our Astro Bot gets into a nasty crash and needs to travel between 80 different planets to fix his ship, and along the way he’ll besaving around 150 “VIP bots”- the bots cosplaying as PlayStation game characters, from Sly Cooper and Bloodborne’s hatted cover guy, to my favorite good boy in games, The Last Guardian’s Trico.
For a while during development, the game’s galaxy-spanning structure was still up in the air, though. “The way we work at Team Asobi is that we do a lot of prototyping of gameplay mechanics, without necessarily knowing what game we’re making yet,” Doucet continued. “So we created a lot of these demos, trying to come up with new, expressive ways to use the DualSense, and [then asked] how these could translate into power-ups.”
While Astro’s previous romp had us twisting our controllers side to side to climb up mountains in a monkey suit or hop horizontally as a spring, Astro Bot’s announcement trailer showed off all-new power-ups like a doggy-jetpack, boxing gloves that double as a grappling hook, and a contraption that pauses time. “With platforming, getting good gameplay, good controls, precision while still being accessible, it’s always a difficult thing,” Doucet notes, though the team seems to have scored big time if our glowingAstro Bot previewis any indication.
Astro Bot was the most-wishlisted game from Summer Game Fest, beating Doom: The Dark Ages and Gears of War: E-Day.
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Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that’s vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he’ll soon forget.
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