Two big factions, plus endings for siding with one, both, or neither was enough.
I really love The Outer Worlds 2—so much so that even after reviewing it, I’ve already started my second character. One thing that stood out to me, though, is that you can’t side with the Arcadia system’s resident collectivist surveillance state, the Protectorate—you can’t even earn or lose reputation points with them like the other factions, and Protectorate NPCs are almost uniformly hostile.
According to creative director Leonard Boyarsky, it was fairly late in development that Obsidian cut off this path.
„In this one, we’re like, Okay, now we’re going to do old school Obsidian, Troika, old Interplay“, Boyarsky said in an interview with PC Gamer. „We really wanted to harken back to that—which was what me and [Fallout 1 director Tim Cain] originally wanted to do with the first one.“
Before joining Obsidian, Boyarsky and Cain left Fallout developer Interplay to start their short-lived RPG studio Troika, where they made Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, The Temple of Elemental Evil, and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. In our interview, he mentioned that The Outer Worlds 2’s director, Brandon Adler—whose credits with Obsidian include New Vegas and Alpha Protocol—was focused on New Vegas-style faction interplay as a priority.
