problems

Brandon Adler, The Outer Worlds 2’s director, tells me the team at Obsidian knew exactly what would and wouldn’t go down well with the original. “Before the first game even shipped, I did a full breakdown of: here’s what I think people are going to like and dislike about the game,” he says. “And here’s what I think the press is going to like and dislike. And I think we should address these things in the next one.”

The studio, then only freshly acquired by Microsoft and still publishing the original game via 2K’s Private Division, actually had plans for how a sequel might fix those issues from the off as well. “Before even The Outer Worlds one shipped, we knew we wanted to do a second one. We knew we wanted to plan for that. I knew I wanted to be a part of it,” Adler says, speaking during a roundtable chat at an Xbox event during Summer Game Fest.

He’s open about what those predicted issues were. “Just the worlds themselves were a little small. And some of that was the size of the map,” he explains, with the studio having now made the world – a new mining colony setting called Arcadia – approximately 50 percent larger. Some of it was more intricate: the way the game laid out its sight lines, for instance, or how it now doesn’t “hard load” when you go into buildings. Adler offers an example from The Outer Worlds: “In the very first area, there’s a volcano, and it looks really cool. And you’re like, ‘I’m gonna go to that volcano, it looks cool.’ And you go to the volcano, there’s nothing there.”

We got a good, long look at The Outer Worlds 2 after the Xbox stream the other evening. Jump to one-hour-forty to get to where it begins.Watch on YouTube

“We can’t do that,” he says. “If something looks awesome, the player needs to be rewarded for going there. And now the player feels like the world is bigger because they’re actually exploring.” Other anticipated complaints were more fundamental – the guns didn’t feel great, he and the team rightly identified, and so “gunfeel” has been heavily tinkered with here. (Having played a short mission out here at SGF I can say the guns – at least those available in this limited case – do feel at the very least perfectly fine.)

Adler’s also open about the studio’s relationship with Microsoft – who he calls a “great partner” – and its role in giving Obsidian more freedom with the sequel. The first reveal trailer’s joke, that The Outer Worlds 2 took about twice as long to make, is actually not far off the mark, according to him. Likewise the team had “more resources” this time, both in a blunt financial sense and in other ways. He cites the ability to go and speak to Microsoft’s user research team for easy playtesting as one example. “We were not hurting for resources and time,” as Adler put it when I asked if he could be a little more specific on the difference. “Any time we asked Microsoft for more, or we said we really want to do this thing, they’ve been great partners in being like, ‘Yeah, let’s do this, let’s figure out how to go do this.'”

“We were not hurting for resources and time,” says game director Brandon Adler about The Outer Worlds 2. | Image credit: Obsidian

Beyond the basics of scale, The Outer Worlds 2 also seems to just be generally more intricate, more thoughtfully assembled and more generally involved than its predecessor. There are more Perks – an idea Adler says he essentially took straight from Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas because the team liked it so much – with over 90 now available. The stealth is more elaborate and viable as a real option, with newly added distraction devices for lobbing at gormless foes, or disintegration gadgets that make enemy bodies disappear. There are more, and more silly, flaws this time, which are offered to you after certain playstyle thresholds are triggered. I was desperate to try out the Bad Knees one featured in the showcase, which lets you move much faster, a boon for stealth, but also means your knees loudly pop and crack whenever you stand up, alerting everyone nearby, though sadly it wasn’t triggered in my quick runthrough.

The other big push Obsidian has made, which Adler is also keen to emphasise during our conversation, is the attempt to make The Outer Worlds 2 more reactive to your decisions. During my playthrough – a mission where you and a companion shoot, blag, or sneak your way through a dodgy research facility – the main example was a conversation with a side character hanging out in some room slightly off the main path. With the right dialogue choices you could take on a side mission for her, digging into some workplace politics and eventually leading to a final showdown between her and her shady colleague. The sense I got from the conversations in-game, though I couldn’t confirm it at the time, was that she may or may not actually end up confronting her rival in person at all. It certainly seemed to be true that she died in doing so because I completely ignored her requests to stay hidden and instead just lobbed a grenade at him the first chance I had (whoops).

“We want to respect people’s time,” says Obsidian. | Image credit: Obsidian

Adler is keen to explain there are also much bigger consequences, of the kind Obsidian fans, raised on the likes of Fallout: New Vegas, might be familiar with. “Typically, with most Obsidian games, there are lots of story points where things change, but we tried to go a lot further on that,” he says. “Even things like: how do you treat your companions? Do you treat them poorly? Well, there are points in the story where that’s going to matter, and they will push back at you, or they won’t listen, or they’ll back you because you were there for them and you kind of helped them out when something went wrong, or something like that.”

Likewise, there are moments of major consequence for the wider world. Some decisions will lock out factions that you could otherwise work with (and bringing a companion from one faction into a rival’s HQ will probably lead to a fight, he adds). “Even in the very first region, there’s a decision towards the end that really kind of affects large portions of the map itself.”

My hands on itself was maybe a little too brief, especially with only time to play with one playstyle, to give a really clear idea of just how much these things have improved. The slightly grating corporate-motivational-poster humour is still there, for better or worse according to your tastes. But also the physical humour, the slightly more subtle or silly things like those popping knees, feel like they’ve been dialled up a little more too.

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The mission I played felt curiously like one of Starfield’s better quests: a branching path of larger rooms and smaller side vents, environmental hazards and locked doors. I mean that in a good way – some of Starfield’s better quests are genuinely good quests – and the hazards are another sign of all the little details, along with the many layers of submenues, seem to be adding up to genuine depth. A defeated mech spilled a load of toxic grease that almost did me in when I went to loot it; one of the rifts I needed to close also just killed me on the spot when I rather naively walked straight into it.

That sense of ever so slight prickliness – in a good way; dare I say it a kind of cheeky way – is also carried over into other decisions too. Admirably, Adler says he wasn’t interested in watering down the RPG experience to accommodate an influx of newcomers via Game Pass, for instance. “It’s probably not a popular thing for me to say, but like, that’s just not as important,” he says, of wanting to keep even more players on board. “That doesn’t come into the calculus of the cool fun game I want to make. Yeah, we want to make a game that people want to continue playing for a long time, obviously, but I’ll tell you: not every game is for every single person, and sometimes you just have to pick a lane and choose that.”

Not allowing players to “respec” is one example of that, and perhaps Adler and Obsidian’s approach in microcosm, which at least from this early impression and conversation seems to be one of genuine vision, and determination to have a proper crack at realising a fuller idea of the game with The Outer Worlds 2.

“We want to respect people’s time,” he says, “and for me, in a role-playing game, that is saying: your choices matter, so take that seriously, and we’re going to respect that by making sure that we give you cool reactivity for those choices that you’re making.” If that’s not for you, it’s understandable, he says, “and we hope that we can convince you that it is. But I’m also not going to make a game for literally everybody, because then I feel it waters down the experience.”

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