The Outer Worlds will take 40 hours or less to complete

The Outer Worlds, Obsidian's RPG that's due out later this year, will take somewhere between 15 and 40 hours to complete, the developer has confirmed.

In an interview with Game Informer, co-director Leonard Boyarsky said the size of the game was comparable to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2, or "maybe a little bit smaller". It took around 30-40 hours to complete KOTOR 2, and asked whether players could expect to finish The Outer Worlds in between 15 and 40 hours, both Boyarsky and fellow co-director Tim Cain said that would be a reasonable assumption.

Cain said that The Outer Worlds, contrary to some players' expectations, wouldn't be a giant open-world game where players could explore wherever they want. "People are speculating, like, hundreds of hours of gameplay...and no," he said. The time it takes to complete will vary based on playstyle—people that enjoy stealth will take longer than those aiming for more combat, he said.

Boyarsky said the team have focused on making the game "reactive and replayable", which means it'll be shorter than some players expect. "We've decided to put our effort into the reactivity and replayability—because of our size and budget, those necessitate a smaller, more tightly-controlled game than a giant sandbox open world where you can run everywhere."

For everything we know about The Outer Worlds, click here.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.