As we get closer to the October 29 release date for The Outer Worlds 2, the developers behind the upcoming RPG have been revealing more details about it. In a new interview with Danny Peña, game director Brandon Adler has spoken about how the design of The Outer Worlds 2 revolves around fulfilling a desire in the market for “deeper RPGs”. To achieve this, Adler noted that Obsidian looked to at its own history of critically-acclaimed RPGs.
“I would say that the biggest thing for me is that players want deeper RPGs,” said Adler. “I think a lot of time there’s the thought just being in this industry for so long, being in RPGs for so long, it seems like in many cases we’ve tried to smooth down the rough edges and streamline things a little bit. And that’s fine for some games, but also players just really want to be able to get in there.”
“They want to just be able to get the crunchy number stuff, but also just make all the different types of builds they can. They want all of the RPG options that a lot of times we’ve been kind of slowly removing or streamlining and slimming down. So I think, again, that the big lesson from the first game to the second is let’s give the players those options. Let’s give them that stuff to interact with, and I think that they’ll be appreciative of that.”
As for how the studio wants to achieve this, Adler spoke about having previously worked on DLC for Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, and how looking back to Obsidian’s own history of working on RPGs helped the studio develop The Outer Worlds 2. He said that the studio wants to bring back Obsidian’s classic style of games, while also modernising the game but still maintaining “those sensibilities of a really strong RPG”.
“The Outer Worlds 2 is the first time I’ve been a game director on a major project,” he explained. “I’ve done game direction before on DLCs, in particular for Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire. I was working on those, but this is the first time I’ve had a larger project to work on.”
“For me, it’s been, again, I think looking back toward old Obsidian games and the style of game we used to do a lot and kind of just, all right, well, how can we bring that back to the forefront, modernize a little bit, but really get back to those sensibilities of a really strong RPG that really focuses on player agency and player choice and the consequences of those things and just making sure that all of our content really leans into that like that. That’s been the thing that’s been a lot of fun for me.”
Creative lead Leonard Boyarsky had previously spoken about The Outer Worlds 2 being a more ambitious title than its predecessor, noting that it would be both bigger as well as deeper than what The Outer Worlds had to offer.
“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.”
The Outer Worlds 2 is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. PC and Xbox players can also start pre-loading the title.
