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The Outer Worlds co-directors have revealed that the game is tightly focused and tightly packed with features and activities, allowing players to play their own way through the dark and cynical sci-fi RPG.
Speaking to games radar, co-directors Leonard Boyarsky and Tim Cain painted a picture of how The Outer Worlds came to be and what their ambitions and hopes for it are, once it releases on Friday. The game is the result of a small team spearheaded by these two developers who worked on the original Fallout made by Interplay Entertainment. As such, their experience informed the shape and size of The Outer Worlds, which they said would never have been a ‘100-hour epic’.
‘We are doing everything that we can to make sure that we can deliver a great, polished, and fun experience,’ Boyarsky said. ‘This is a space science-fiction game, where you're a space hero that needs to fly around space and go to all of these different places. If we had just one big continuous map, it wouldn't really have the space opera fantasy/pulp sci-fi fantasy feel that we were going for.’
In fact, The Outer Worlds was finished way before Microsoft began inquiries to bring Obsidian Entertainment into the fold of Xbox Game Studios. ‘The Outer Worlds has been playable from start to finish for about two years! I've played it at least 15 times,’ Cain remarked. The Outer Worlds needed to be a ‘polished experience’ in order for its ambitious choice and consequence systems to hit home for the player. The directors credited the time and budget available for the game as its motivating factors.
‘We didn't want a lot of randomised or quickly-slapped-together content, we wanted to really focus on making the content by hand and making sure it was really fun to play,’ Boyarsky explained. ‘And the flip side of having smaller areas [and] less overall game time is that, because we put so much player-driven choice and reactivity in this game that, when you're done with it, you'll be excited to get back into it and immediately try out some different paths through it – as opposed to some of the longer games where you're like, “Okay, I need to wait six months before I could even think about starting another playthrough of this game.”’
Once again, the original Fallout’s legacy popped up in their conversations on how The Outer Worlds will feel and unfold for its players. ‘The goal that we had on the original Fallout is the same goal that we had here,’ Cain said. ‘Players can play the game in any way that they want to, and the game will react accordingly.’
The Outer Worlds launches for PC, PS4, and Xbox One on October 25.
