Astro Bot almost went open-world, but opted for 80 planets instead because that led to "the most control over the game's variety"

Astro Bot serves 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 to Edge Magazine in its 400th Issue, which features a whopping ten unique covers with different cosplaying Astro Bots on 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 be saving 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 glowing Astro Bot preview is any indication.

Astro Bot was the most-wishlisted game from Summer Game Fest, beating Doom: The Dark Ages and Gears of War: E-Day.

* This article was originally published here