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.
