The Outer Worlds Interviews, System Requirements Revealed

With Obsidian Entertainment's Fallout: New Vegas-inspired sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds launching in about a week, you might be interested in checking out a couple of fresh interviews with the game's developers. First, we have this WCCFTech interview with Brian Heins that covers a broad range of topics, including the game's engine, role-playing opportunities, inspirations, and more. A few sample questions:

You've said that it's a spiritual successor to Fallout New Vegas and other games, how do you think fans are going to react to the finished product?

Hopefully, they're gonna love it. That's always our goal. And from the reaction we've seen after the announcement, there's a lot of interest in the game. So if you're a fan of New Vegas, there's a lot you're going to love about The Outer Worlds. Even if you haven't played a game like this in a while or before, it's a great experience to jump into. The gameplay is fun and exciting. There's not just a good story being told, but moments of humor, and a lot of great characters you'll find as you're playing through the world, we've got some fantastic voice actors in the game. So there's a lot of characters that really have come to life over the past few months as we've gotten the voice actors in, whereas before we used auto-generated text to speech for placeholder VO, and it was so dry. Like, this is never going to work. Suddenly we get an actual voice actor performance and she's like, my favorite character in the game now.

How was it for the studio when you had the Microsoft buyout? Did that change anything, or were the attitudes in the studio influenced at all?

It didn't change much on The Outer Worlds because obviously, we're being published by Private Division. That is still intact. On the studio level, for me personally, one of the nice things is that now that we're part of Microsoft, we're focusing more on what the next games are going to be, rather than, how do we pitch the next games?

Then, there's Den of Geek and their interview with Obsidian's Charles Staples that focuses on the studio's attempt to create a game defined by player choice. An excerpt:

In a recent interview with Den of Geek, Staples walked us through parts of the intimidating process of creating a game where player agency rules the day. As it turns out, there are few shortcuts available for a task of that size.

“When developing our main quests, we tried to make sure that they all support things like ‘How does the combat player get through this?’ 'How does a dialogue player get through this?' 'How the stealth fighter gets through this,'” Staples says. “For instance, we had one of our own people go and play the game and not fire a gun...For the majority of our main quests, we made sure a player can get through it with any of the main play styles.”

As many fans of RPGs like The Outer Worlds know, main quests are only part of the experience. More often than not, the real fun lies in discovering the wonderful stories and characters available through side quests. So far as those go, the team afforded themselves some additional leeway.

“For the side quests, we were less rigid with those,” Staples says. “[We’d say] ‘Here’s a side quest specifically focused on this person who wants you to go clear out a whole bunch of monsters from this area.’ There is really not going to be a dialogue way out of there, because you can’t talk to the monsters. In certain circumstances, it's based on the narrative of the quest we’re doing. We sort of pulled back on the number of options there.”

Finally, this official forums post shares the game's system requirements. Here they are:

Minimum
  • OS: Windows 7 (SP1) 64bit
  • CPU: Intel Core i3-3225 or AMD Phenom II X6 1100T
  • RAM: 4GB
  • GPU: Nvidia GTX 650 Ti or AMD HD 7850
  • HDD Space: 40GB
Recommended
  • OS: Windows 10 64bit
  • CPU: Intel Core i7-7700K or Ryzen 5 1600
  • RAM: 8GB
  • GPU: GeForce GTX 1060 6GB or Radeon RX 470
  • HDD Space: 40GB