The Outer Worlds Interview
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Dan McPhee, a narrative designer on Obsidian Entertainment's upcoming sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds, shared a few details about the game with the folks over at GAME.co.uk during this year's E3. The interview covers The Outer Worlds' corporate setting, narrative choices and branching paths, easy to miss content, companions, and more.
Here are a few sample questions and you take things from there:
GAME: Ha, that’s amazing! Now, Obsidian have a really rich history when it comes to role playing games. What sort of lessons you taken from those games and are bringing into The Outer Worlds?
Dan McPhee: We’re building on foundations that come from that core desire to give the player a way to tell their own story. For example, the player character is just dropped into this colony and you’re woken up on a colony ship. You can choose what you did in a past life. But it doesn’t have a huge ramification, you’re kind of like a blank slate. And that’s kind of one lesson that we learned from games where the more we try to define about the player character, the less you get to define.
So instead, we made the setting where this person is the only one with the freedom to do what they want. And that has allowed us to just provide all these different avenues for people to [get] the kind of story that they want. It’s less restricted than past games have been, as our games have been like, here’s the core story, you’re going to follow it no matter what, but there are some kind of side options to do. [For The Outer Worlds] we put much less emphasis on that core and more emphasis on the side stuff on the decisions you make while you’re following that.
GAME: In the gameplay demo, we saw the two companions who are in the game. How do they work and who is your favourite companion?
Dan McPhee: Okay, so for the first question, how they work is they automatically assist you in combat, you can kind of direct them if you want to. And you also have options to spend skills and stats to make them better instead of yourself. We have a number of players at the office actually who really enjoyed just beefing them up and giving them really powerful equipment so that they don’t have to do anything. You just sit back and let them wreck.
For your second question. I am admittedly biased because I wrote one of them. So she’s probably my favourite. I wrote, Nyoka the machine gun woman that you saw in the demo. Yeah, she was really fun.
