The Outer Worlds Gameplay Footage, Interviews, Previews

According to an earlier E3 2019 announcement, Obsidian Entertainment’s open world sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds should be going live on October 25, 2019. And if ahead of that date, or maybe some unspecified date a year later when the game finally comes to Steam, you would like to see it in action, then you should check out this IGN video featuring roughly 11 minutes of The Outer Worlds gameplay narrated by Leonard Boyarsky, one of the game’s co-directors:

Then, you may also be interested in this Shacknews video interview with the man:

As well as this Gamereactor interview with Dan McPhee, one of Obsidian’s narrative designers (the video refuses to embed right, so you’ll have to click the link for that one).

Moving on to some previews, Fextralife offers some less than stellar impressions:

Then, there’s IGN’s written preview:

Attention to detail, the genre itself, and the team’s previous work on Fallout: New Vegas made me assume we’re in for a lengthy campaign. But that’s not the case here. Rather than putting hundreds of hours into a single save file, The Outer Worlds invites us to live hundreds of lives across multiple playthroughs.

“The game is just long enough to be really fun and feel like you have like a nice meaty experience,” says Starks, “but it’s not so long that you won’t finish it [or feel like] you can only do one play through.” It’s about balance, and so far the team feels they’ve been successful in creating replayability. “We’re seeing this in focus testing,” reflected Starks, “as soon as someone finishes the game, they’re like, ‘Oh, I want to make a completely different character and make all different choices and see [how the game reacts].’”

You won’t have to worry about customizing yourself into a corner. “You will be better if you want to specialize, but we do allow you to respect your characters,” said Starks, “so you can always rebuild your character.” It’s not perfect, since some attributes are picked up as you play, but your base stats build can be reconfigured.

A few paragraphs from GameCrate’s preview:

Striking Environments

The Outer Worlds is visually rich and colorful. The environments will remind a lot of players of No Man’s Sky, with deep saturated shades and oversized flora and fauna which are the result of terraforming gone wrong. In keeping with the combination of sci-fi and frontier themes, cities feel both futuristic and archaic, with holographic advertisements sporting fonts and logos that feel like they came straight from the early 1900s.

We also had a chance to see some visually impressive weather at work in the E3 demo, as the player left town and walked out into a windstorm before confronting some bandits. It didn’t look like the weather had any particular impact on the gameplay, but it looked and felt very natural, and added to the alien, untamed feeling of the world.

And finally, here’s what PCWorld has to say about The Outer Worlds:

The biggest surprise though is that Outer Worlds looks like it’ll be fun to play, not just well-written. Obsidian’s often struggled with the mechanics and systems in its games, but it’s borrowing quite a bit from Fallout: New Vegas and then melding it with interesting ideas of its own.

There’s no V.A.T.S., per se, but there is “Tactical Time Dilation.” So…yeah, there’s V.A.T.S., which should make shooting fairly bearable. The weapons seem unique and interesting as well, with chainguns filled with shock ammo, plasma weapons that can be charged like Halo’s, and what looked like a shrink ray in Sunday’s trailer. I hope there are a lot of weird weapons to break me out of the usual sniper-rifle and submachine gun rut.

And Obsidian’s stealth system seems genius. You can wear a disguise into the factory, which then lets you walk straight through—except a meter’s constantly ticking down when you move. The meter resets in each new area, so the challenge is to make it to the next door without running out. Even if you do, you can try and lie your way past the next set of guards as well—three times, with each check getting progressively harder.