Team Asobi director Nicholas Doucet has shared some new insights on Astro Bot.
As reported by PSU, Astro Bot will be 15 to 20 hours long to complete. Now, some gamers will say that that is far from the longest playtime for a game. But, if Astro Bot was intended for younger gamers, that is a lot of commitment for a single player title.
We know that Astro Bot will definitely have some amount of scale, as Sony revealed out of the gate that it would have 150 cameos from PlayStation characters, made out to be little Astros themselves. So we did already know that it could have been much longer than this.
Doucet explained that he did not think it was necessary for Astro Bot to last 20 to 30 hours, and thank bot for that. Team Asobi focused on keeping the game at a certain tempo for the duration of the playtime instead. So, he says that they strived to avoid repetition as much as possible.
These decisions come with certain consequences to the game design. We do know that in spite of the number of game worlds, Astro Bot is not going to be an open world game. That means it will be impressively long given how much focused level design they had to make for something that lasts 15 to 20 hours.
Doucet also shared that they are using the same engine from the PlayStation 4 pack-in demo Astro’s Playroom, but upgraded for this game and on the PlayStation 5. There’s no real surprise there, but we do wonder if that’s really going to matter. Neither Astro’s Playroom nor Astro Bot have high level realistic graphics, but maybe that engine upgrade is being utilized for the game design.
A lot of fans now expect Astro Bot to be GOTY material, but we would wager that they may want to roll back on that hype just a little bit. It’s not that we don’t have trust in Team Asobi’s abilities, but since this is going to be the first full length Astro game, we aren’t quite sure how this will play out. It’s also somewhat toxic to place those expectations on Team Asobi, and then later blame them for failing to meet them.
In any case, it’s been a while since Crash Bandicoot got ordained as the PlayStation’s mascot, and Sony has let those mascots come and go. Astro Bot just might clinch it to make Astro Sony’s Mario or Sonic.
Astro Bot is releasing exclusively on the PlayStation 5 on September 6, 2024.
