The Outer Worlds Interviews

Obsidian Entertainment’s Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky had a chat with Eurogamer during this year’s E3, talking about their upcoming sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds and how it can be seen as a successor of sorts to Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas. The game’s combat, animations, and reactivity also got a mention. An excerpt:

I then asked Boyarsky if he thought jank was part of the Obsidian charm, and whether The Outer Worlds would avoid the publisher deadline issues the studio has experienced in the past.

“I don’t know if it’s part of the charm, but it comes with the territory,” Boyarsky explained. “I think if you look at any game – not just ours – that has so much reactivity I think there’s a little bit of that in there because, like I was saying before, it’s really not possible to test every permutation. We’re leaving it so wide open for what you choose to do.

“No matter how many people we have playtesting it, the day it goes out, ten or twenty times that many are going to be playing the game immediately, and they’re inevitably going to find stuff we’ve missed.

“[The Outer Worlds] has been going really good, obviously when we’re making a game it’s smaller budget than some other games that are like this, and with a more restricted timetable, so that is a concern, but we’ve very much tried to keep our scope in mind with an eye towards being able to finish it and polish it. It’s very difficult.

“We’re doing our best to polish those rough edges, so I hope if there is some jankiness left that people do find it charming!”

Then, there’s also this WCCFTech interview with Obsidian’s senior narrative designer Megan Starks where she talks about The Outer Worlds’ factions, dialogues, and difficulty modes. For example:

Okay. How’s the character creation tool going to be?

We’re not going into detail about character creation right now. But I mean, it’s pretty…if you liked previous Obsidian games for it, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed anyway. By the way, since you’ve asked some systems questions, we do have a Supernova mode. The game has different difficulties, basically what you would expect, like Normal, Hard, et cetera. We also have the Story mode, which is for people who really don’t want to deal with combat and just want to experience the story. And then we also have Supernova, which is our hardest difficulty mode. You do have permadeath there with your companions. And there are some restrictions, I think you have to go back to your ship to use consumables. And then also, if you’re offered a flaw, you have to take it. Everything in the game is checking what’s going on, and reacting to it.

In one of my playthroughs, I wanted to check out the dumb dialogue. But when I was in character creation I forgot to lower my intelligence stat and then I was like, oh, I forgot to make myself dumb. But I took so much damage to my head that they offered me a permanent concussion flaw, which made me a dumb character. So I took the flaw, and immediately got a perk point, which was really nice. But in our normal modes, you don’t have to accept flaws. They’re totally optional. But in Supernova mode, I think you have to take any that comes up, and you can get more of them. They can stack in really interesting ways. So for example, if you have a fear of like heights and the dark and robots and then you’re fighting robots on a cliffside at night, it can get pretty challenging for you.