Obsidian’s new RPG The Outer Worlds is not just sci-fi: it is exuberantly sci-fi. Blood red trees pepper valleys of strange cylindrical rocks and alien shrubs. A spaceship rumbles overhead, coming in for a landing at the nearest spaceport. Rings grander than Saturn’s carve an arc across the horizon, and a field of stars shine impossibly bright in the afternoon sky. It’s a world I
Obsidian’s new RPG The Outer Worlds is not just sci-fi: it is exuberantly sci-fi. Blood red trees pepper valleys of strange cylindrical rocks and alien shrubs. A spaceship rumbles overhead, coming in for a landing at the nearest spaceport. Rings grander than Saturn’s carve an arc across the horizon, and a field of stars shine impossibly bright in the afternoon sky. It’s a world I already know I want to explore: the colorful vistas of No Man’s Sky, but in an RPG that looks and feels very Fallout, just a million miles away and pre-nuclear armageddon.
The Outer Worlds looks like exactly the game anyone disappointed in Fallout 76’s multiplayer focus will want to play.
It’s an incredibly good time to be the creators of Fallout. Not Bethesda, the studio behind Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 and now the disappointing Fallout 76: It’s a bad time to be Bethesda, with new Fallout 76 problems seemingly popping up every day. But it’s a great time to be Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, who designed the original Fallout and Fallout 2 in 1997/1998. From the hour of gameplay I saw in a recent demo at Obsidian’s offices, The Outer Worlds looks like exactly the game anyone disappointed in Fallout 76’s multiplayer focus will want to play: a first-person RPG shooter, with a focus on roleplaying above all else. Call me the space cowboy
There are telltale signs all over that you’re playing a game designed by Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, if you know what to look for. One: there’s never just a single path through a mission, but always the golden trifecta: fighting, talking, and sneaking. Two: a unique vibe stemming from what Boyarsky calls “the combination of my dark morbidity and Tim’s silliness.” Three: Bending over backwards to prioritize player choice in a world that’s often silly, despite being all shades of gray.
“We can’t seem to get away from it, not that we want to. That’s what appeals to us,” Boyarsky says. “The ability to not only make your own decisions, but also not having a clear-cut ‘what is the best choice, here?’ That’s where players have to start really thinking, ‘what do I want to do as a character, as opposed to ‘I always play the good guy, so I’m always going to pick helping people.'”
After two years of secrecy, the leads were eager to show off their game. The demo started on the player’s personal spaceship, which you’ll acquire in the first act and then use to hop between locations on a pair of planets at the edge of humanity’s settled systems. You’re a bit out of place: you’ve been pulled out of cryosleep after what should’ve been a fatal amount of time on ice, and from there you’ll be thrust into the midst of a bunch of corporations and outlaws vying for power.
“You were part of a ship that got lost,” Boyarsky says. “You’ve been frozen for 70 years. If you’re frozen for more than 10 years, it’s a really bad thing. This guy figured out a way to save you, and he needs you to help him get more chemicals to help save the rest of the colonists. But you don’t have to help him do that. You can go to the ‘evil board,’ the Halcyon corporate board, and turn this guy in and see what happens if you do that.”
“You get a lot of money,” Cain adds.
One of the two main planets has been terraformed and is kinder to human life, while the other hasn’t, making it home to more (and more dangerous) alien predators.
