The Outer Worlds - Tim Cain Interview and Patch Preview
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Tim Cain, one of the creators of Fallout, a chocolate connoisseur, and a co-director on Obsidian Entertainment's sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds, recently had a fairly lengthy chat with PC Gamer. The resulting interview starts by covering the importance of chocolate for The Outer Worlds and some sneaky easter eggs, and then shifts its focus towards the game's relatively bug-free launch and its hub-based nature. A few sample paragraphs:
It doesn't seem like an exaggeration to say that chocolate played an important role in The Outer Worlds' development. In the town of Roseway, there's a bar called the 17th Bar, and it, too, is the result of a complex prank on Tim Cain.
"Somebody, about halfway through development, hid 17 white chocolate bars in my office," Cain says. "There was a note on my desk made of cutout letters. They put a lot of time into this. It looked like a ransom note and said, 'I've hidden 17 bars of white chocolate in your room. Have fun.' Knowing I hate it.
"I looked everywhere. The first day I could only find 13. Over the next week, week and a half, I found another three. I never found the 17th one. So then Tyson, the level designer, he was sitting next door. He put a bar in Roseway called The 17th Bar, that you can go and get drinks at. When you walk in, it's got that big flickering light and he says, "I just wanted you to remember the 17th bar." So talk about an Easter egg that doesn't mean anything, except to people who were here at Obsidian working on this project."
Cain and his co-director Leonard Boyarsky knew what they had to live up to with The Outer Worlds, shipping an Obsidian RPG—especially since they created Fallout, and Obsidian hadn't made a game in this style since 2010's New Vegas. Before they even had concept artists, they'd written more than 100 pages of worldbuilding material, defining voice and technology and corporations down to specific word choices: Robots have circuit boards, but they don't have chips.
"We got really picky like that. For me, I want to know that 10 years from now, when I'm probably not working on this, that it's still the game I imagined," he says. "Plus, I saw Fallout going in a different direction. No fault of their own—we didn't leave a lot of notes around. So as people started working on it, they had to play the game and go, 'I think this is what they meant...'"
Then, you should direct your attention to the official forums where you can find the preliminary patch notes for the game's upcoming 1.1.1.0 update. Have a look:
Resolved Issues:
- The crashing issue in Tartarus
- Increase Font Size - Conversations/Subtitles
- Muffled sound effects occur at random times for players on the PS4
- Companions dying and failing companion quests on modes other than Supernova
- Unable to finish "Radio Free Monarch"
- Trophy "Not the Best Choice" fails to unlock properly
Finally, if you're curious about the future of The Outer Worlds, you'll be pleased to know that according to this WCCFTech article that quotes a recent Take-Two Interactive financial earnings call, the game is outperforming expectations and a Nintendo Switch version should be going live in early 2020.
