As we get closer to the October 29 release date for The Outer Worlds 2, creative lead Leonard Boyarsky has revealed the role played by Fallout creator Tim Cain in the development of the game. In an interview with Edge Magazine (via GamesRadar), Boyarsky has revealed that Cain shared his own ambitions for The Outer Worlds as a series, and that both of them had plans for a potential sequel to “go much bigger and deeper”.
“We established the world, but we had a much smaller slice of it,” said Boyarsky about the original The Outer Worlds. “That was always my plan, if we were fortunate to make a sequel: go much bigger and deeper. Because it was so much smaller and our time and resources were so much more restricted, we had to make a lot of decisions where we were making things shorter and easier to digest. In a lot of ways, The Outer Worlds 2 delivers on the fantasy we had when we started the first game.”
Boyarsky also spoke about needing to keep the story compelling by maintaining its pacing, but at the same time making sure that it doesn’t get get in the way of the experience that players will have as they spend time with the game. Despite technology marching onwards since the release of the first game, he stated his belief that players should end up having fun with their character without the story getting in the way.
“The heart of it, always, for me, has been the story, the world, and the narrative – and it’s very important that the story doesn’t get in the way of the player having a great experience with their character,” he explained. “I don’t think that changes with the technology.”
Staying in line with this, creative director Brandon Adler had spoken about giving players a lot of freedom when it came to making choices for their characters’ builds and play style. Noting that “you’re going to have crazy complex systems,” in an RPG of this scale, Adler said that players will be able to fine tune their characters to their liking.
“If you love stealth, you can really dig into that,” Adler explained, while going on to point out that “if you’re a combat person, you just want to blow stuff up, you never have to worry about stealth. “We like to give players lots of different ways to tackle content, but to do that I think you need to make sure that it’s simple early and gets complex,” he said.
Adler had also previously noted that The Outer Worlds 2 will not give players a way to respec their builds. This, he noted, was to make sure that players felt that their decisions when it came to character builds matters.
“There’s a lot of times where you’ll see games where they allow infinite respec, and at that point, I’m not really role-playing a character, because I’m jumping between – well, my guy is a really great assassin that snipes from long range, and then oh, y’know, now I’m going to be a speech person, then respec again, and it’s like… for me, it’s not wrong that people like to play like that,” said Adler.
The Outer Worlds 2 is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions’ physical release might even include game data in the disc itself.
