- [Nitai] The weird
thing about establishing an opening act is the
area that you design has to do double duty. Not only does it have to
function as the introduction to this world, it has to set the tone, it has to establish lore, it has to provide tutorialisation, teach the player how to play,
show them what the game is, but it also has to be a
cohesive and memorable narrative on its own. That's one of the reasons we
had a very big choice drop down to the player at
the end of Emerald Vale. We didn't necessarily want to
be a game where we're like, you're gonna role play for
20 hours before you get one big choice. We wanted players to feel
invested as early as possible. (soft music) - Hello, and welcome back to
our series on The Outer Worlds. In today's video, we're gonna take a look at two elements of game design that go hand in hand. World building and quest design. On The Outer Worlds, level designers and writers
collaborated together in small teams. These teams work to create
each planet, city, and town, along with the quests that
would bring the player from location to location. We'll dive into some notable
quests a little later on. But first, let's set the scene. The Outer Worlds takes place
in a solar system called Halcyon, featuring a dozen
or so celestial bodies. But most of the action
takes place on two planets and one asteroid. The first planet is called Terra 2. It contains three main areas. Emerald Vale, the opening
chapter of the game. Roseway, a lush environment
that follows soon after, and Byzantium, an affluent city that is reached about
halfway through the game. Originally these were set
to be connected via an open world hub, but that element
was cut from the final game due to time constraints. Then there's the other planet
Monarch, which does contain an open world hub that
connects its four main cities Cascadia, Fallbrook, Stellar
Bay, and Amber heights. As we covered in the first
video in this series, a third planet was cut from
the game, and some of the quest content from that area landed
on our third main location an asteroid called Scylla. And then there are a few
smaller areas you spend time on including your ship, a
spaceport called Groundbreaker, Phineas' lab, and a special
location for the end of the game. We don't have time to cover everything, but there's still a lot to cover. So to keep things simple, we're gonna tackle this in the order in which they appear in the game. So before we explore the far
reaches of this solar system, we're gonna take a look
at the opening chapter Emerald Vale, your first
trip to Groundbreaker, and the area that many
players turn to next, a level that was in fact
the original vertical slice for The Outer Worlds, Roseway. (slow music) - Let's say I'm a DM, and I'm sitting with the player and
we're playing, you know, D&D, or any kind of tabletop
RPG, and we have five hours. And I want to take you
through one full adventure, with a beginning, a middle and an end. That's how we approached Emerald Vale. It starts when you drop out
of your pod and you crash land on top of a guy. (laughs) And it ends when you leave with your ship and in the middle we had
to introduce tension, we had to introduce characters, we had to have some central
problem that the player could get involved in. So in that sense, yes, I think the entire
level that we worked on, does feel like a cohesive,
self-contained little game. The central conflict
extensively is that you have this town that is just working
its workers to the bone, and they can't take it any more. And one of the people in
that town, Adelaide, has left because she's had enough
that she lost her son and that was kind of the
breaking point for her. And when she left, it was kind
of the floodgates opening. People packed up and left with her. So you have this problem
where this town really needs its workers to survive. And the workers just wanna be left alone. And that's kind of central
conflict here is if you bring the town together, they'll actually prosper
and they'll do pretty well. And maybe the fellow who's
running the town will learn from his mistakes, and you'll have the opportunity for reform. But if you talk to Adelaide,
the person who left the town, she has a very convincing
argument about the kind of soullessness and crushing, destructive quality of
life in a corporate town. There are no trees or natural water. And the only tree you find is the one that feeds her
little camp that she's grown with her own hands. We wanted to create
this very clear tension between the natural and the artificial, between the nine to five, I mean, people in Edgewater would be happy to have the nine to five.
(laughs) And you know, just living
your life on your own terms. And that's the basic conflict,
that's kind of a universal conflict is do you go and
live your life the way you want to? Or do you follow the
obligations that society has oppressed on you? So we wanted to show
the kind of corporatism. We wanted to show factionalism,
you've got deserters, and you've got the town of Edgewater. We wanted some central
problem of the resource that the player has to get
involved in and we decided to settle for. Some of this was not just narrative, some of this was the
necessity of level design. We knew we needed a dungeon area, and we knew that dungeon
area was a geothermal plant. So as a narrative designer,
I had to go in and say, Okay, how can we take this
level that we know that exists and build a story around that? A question I often get
is what comes first? Is it game design or is it narrative? And I privately believe that game design usually comes first. And it is the task of a good
narrative designer to make it seem like the two are
seamlessly intertwined that they're interdependent. But all the pieces of a good
game still had to be there. You need a dungeon, you know, you needed two factions
at war with each other, you needed memorable characters, some kind of companion that
you can get attached to. So we put all that together. And then we build a story around that. - Just checking your ship's
manifest, standard procedure. Welcome to Groundbreaker by the by. - So Groundbreaker, when
I joined the project, it had already been blocked
out by another designer. It was actually three separate
levels when I first joined and one of the issues
we were running into was just a number of load times
and load screens, because, often when you added the
docking bay, that was a separate level from the main promenade
area, and we also had like, an entirely separate bridge
section of the Groundbreaker. So, a lot of your quests
that if you had to go report into the bridge meant you had
like go through two other load screens, just to talk to one
NPC just to leave the ship to go back again. So, one of the first things
I did was actually combine the levels down into one. And originally we basically took all three of those sections and
combined them into one level, and we're trying to see
how that would work. As we were developing the game,
and adding more side quests, and looking at the how
much we actually get done, we realized that was far too
much level for us to both finish on the art side,
and also wouldn't fit into the memory constraints on consoles. So we ended up cutting the bridge section of the Groundbreaker, and things like the
medical bay, and few other areas that were part of
that section got relocated onto the main central
area of the Groundbreaker. So, there's a lot of
grabbing different parts between different Unreal
files and moving them around and relocating them again. On the memory side, all the different, like
the character meshes, the different outfits they'd wear, the different, like the
hairstyles and different facial measures all get loaded into memory. That on top of all the assets
that were loaded in as part of Groundbreaker were just more than what
we could actually fit into the console memory budget. So, we had to do a lot of
work toward the end to get that all working. - When you go into the
Groundbreaker, you enter that main promenade room. We just wanted you to feel a little bit like almost overwhelmed. I'm now stepping into like, Times Square or something
along those lines where you see all these billboards,
all these advertisements, all this color, all this movement, and you're not quite sure
where to settle your eyes, and you're just trying to take it all in. - Groundbreaker's a really fun area. There's a lot of exploration
you can do there. That's credit to our area
designers for planning that out. The environment kind
of tells its own story. It has this nice mix of merchants, some of whom are more
keyed into the corporate environment than others. And then Junlei kind of
is the top of the pyramid of the anti-corporate mine hub. And then down below in the back bays area, there's Captain Macredd who's
just the full on most insane person in the colony, who kind of epitomizes just how outlawish Groundbreaker can get.
- Yum yum! Time to feed the flames. It's nothing personal, promise. - I did the writing for the Groundbreaker
public news announcer, so that has reactivity as
to certain quests you do whether you've been on Monarch,
or whether certain people have died by your hand, et cetera. So you kind of get to hear the news of your adventures in Halcyon. - It kind of breaks my heart
a little bit there's not a lot of people moving
around on Groundbreaker. And that was basically because
when we got like the art pass done and lighting pass, we had to actually pull
back on the number of actual characters on the Groundbreaker
to fit on consoles, because we didn't have
the the memory budget both for the number of different
character appearances, and also like the AI pathing. We started drawing performance
beyond what we wanted it to be so, we had to do a lot of
like just trimming out, and there's actually a lot
of work that you don't see on Groundbreaker for we
actually turn NPCs on and off. So when you walk in like
one of the side rooms like the tar, the Lost Hope Bar, all those NPCs get turned
on right before you open the door, and everything else
behind you gets turned off right as the door closes. So, one of our designers had
to spend a lot of time going through and timing all that,
and getting that working. - [Paul] We have this
ever-flowing use of neon lighting all over the place that's
kind of tracked along the bars as well as these hologram images
that kind of like flicker, and just like pop pop pop pop the color that help illuminate
the bars inside and stuff. So, when you go in you get that kind of Old West feeling, but
you also know that we're not definitely in Kansas,
we're somewhere else. (gentle music) - So usually we start out,
from any of their areas, we started with, like the high level like
the quick path requirements of the area, like what are the main quests
the players are gonna be doing while they're here? So for Roseway, we knew
this was actually the area of our vertical slice. It was like the first
area we made for the game. We knew that the player
be going there to do Anton's quest, the distress
signal trying to get information on his research,
and the diet toothpaste. That was the one of the
very first quest made for the game. So we knew that was going to be sending you to the The Covert Lab,
which would be like one of our bigger dungeon spaces for the area, so we wanted to make sure
that those were at different sides of the map. So the player would need to
travel across the overland in order to reach that. So, like you start off
looking like, okay, what is. Where does the player start? What is their main objective? And making sure those things
are spaced out so the player needs to travel through the
rest of the map and have opportunities to encounter
other POIs and find other quests as they're moving,
so when you first arrive in the landing pad, the first thing you see is
the town which is the first step of the quest, which naturally draws the
player in, although nothing forces them to. You could actually go to
the Covert Lab immediately when you land if you want to go exploring. But most players, because
that's the first thing they see, you're gonna move in that
direction and be drawn into the town which is where
you can find other quests and talk to other people
to learn the situation of what's going on in Roseway. And then from there when you exit, in order to reach the Covert
Lab, you have to walk past, one of the other major
POIs, the antibiotics lab, which is where you can find Jameson and a few other side quests. And then as you're just
wandering through the rest of the overland, there's
more opportunities for combat encounters, and
to go exploring to find some treasure and loot. - Roseway, which will not only was our original map, it was
our vertical slice map, it's got a lot of different
terrain, and vegetation, and buildings, and people,
and creatures, and robots, and everything in it. It was the perfect first map. But it did take us a long time to do. And so we learned what
was fast and what was not. And that's how we quickly
learned like some maps, Scylla went very quickly, because Scylla, even though
I think it's gorgeous, is mostly sky box. - I think out of the few directives that Tim and Leonard gave me, that was always one of the high ones. I want to look in the sky
box and see something like just magical and stuff. Like when I get off into Roseway, when we're making a vertical slice level, I want to see those two moons,
and I want to see the ring around the planet itself. Something that always reminded
the player like you are in a space frontier, you are not just on Earth, but you are
someplace completely different. And then we echoed that sentiment throughout the world as well. So you'll walk into a building,
and you're in the foyer, and you see these like
almost like star-like pattern lights in the world, or you
walk into the OSI church, and on the ground you see
like this floor plate of, and again, like a solar
system and with moons, and planets, and if you
looked up at the ceiling, you saw the starry sky. So, not only when you look out at the sky, but also when you're within
like buildings and stuff, you would always be
reminded you're in space. (gentle music) - [Danny] Roseway was the
team's vertical slice, but it wasn't necessarily the first level players would turn to. After Groundbreaker, the
player was given a quest that could shoot them off in a number of different directions. This quest passage to anywhere
is one of the most complex quests in the game, as it
can shoot the players off in a number of different directions, and it can be completed in
a number of different ways. - [Tim] What I know immediately
when we started talking, I said, look, I want at least
two planets because I want one to be lawless. Because you kind of need that Old West. You need someplace you can go
where you feel like as soon as you do one bad thing
everyone's gonna be chasing you forever. So we had you know, Terra 2 which was the lawful planet. Then we had Terra 1 which was the lawless planet,
and so then its name got changed to Monarch,
that's how lawless it was, they change their own name. So it gave the player a good sense of here's my complete fun area, and then here's an area
that's a lot more refined and gives me a sense of what being in a space colony would be like. - One of the main quick path
area, quests I worked on was the Passage to Anywhere quest. It's kind of a handoff between Emerald Vale and Monarch. Phineas Welles was telling
you to be the Monarch, and in order to travel to
Scylla Bay and Monarch, you need a NavKey. And the only place to get
one of these is by going to Gladys, a black market
vendor on the Groundbreaker. So you're sent there
to buy the the NavKey, but Gladys would only sell it to you for a decent amount of money
at that point in the game, and she offers you a few leads
on jobs you can take to go and earn the money in
order to purchase a NavKey. The easiest way obviously
is just having the money that you're earned in-game,
purchasing it from Gladys. You can also, if you want to just not work with Gladys at all, if you go talk to Lidom
Bedford on the Groundbreaker, he can actually put
you onto the Board path where rather than getting a NavKey from Gladys, if you basically betray Phineas Welles to the board, you can work with them and then go after you celebrate as
part of that quest line. And then at that point, you can betray the Board and go back to working with Phineas. So there's lots of options
for double dealing there. But some of the quests
Gladys will give you are like the Distress Signal quest which sends you to Roseway in one of the
areas on the planet of Terra 2. You can also get quests to work with Junlei
Tennyson, who's the Captain of the Groundbreaker, and
other side quests from various we can meet around the Groundbreaker. They can help you earn money. So one of the options from
the beginning of the game is that there's an area on Monarch called Cascadia that you can
just travel to directly which Phineas and other
people will warn you is a very dangerous option. And if you're underleveled,
is probably not the best way to go. But, if you choose, you can just land directly
in Cascadia and then fight your way overland to get to Stellar Bay. And that will actually be
a completion for that quest as well because you've
now reached Stellar Bay. That was actually one of
the biggest sources of bugs in the game was the sheer number of ways
you could complete this quest. For example, when you go to Groundbreaker, once you arrive and talk to the security, you find out your ship has been impounded. Well, because you could
land in Cascadia and travel overland to Stellar Bay,
all of the quest objectives for clearing the impound were on that Passage to Anywhere quest. But if you went to Stellar
Bay first and completed that quest, and then went
to Groundbreaker, your ship would still be impounded. But then you had no quests to
actually tell you how to get out of the impound. So we had to create an
entirely separate quest just for that section of it,
and share all the objectives of that quest, and duplicate
all the scripting logic for clearing that second quest out. The very first iteration
of that quest actually sent you directly to work
with Lilya Hagen, who is the Head of Sublight . The Sublight shipping and salvage, but we got a lot of feedback
from people they didn't like being forced to work directly with a criminal organization. They wanted the option of not doing that. It went through several iteration
at that point, including working instead of sending you to Lilya, sending you directly to Junlei Tennyson. And then one that sends you directly to Lidom Bedford before we finally settled on Gladys as a neutral third party. There's actually like a ton
of logic in the the quest file for all those different
permutations that we've kind of had to comment out and move on, because ripping it out
would create more bugs than just leaving it there and just like turning it off for the final game. (gentle music) - [Danny] Passage to Anywhere
is one of the most complex quests in The Outer Worlds,
but on a recent IGN video, the developers were shown a speed run. Where a player simply hid
behind the geometry of a safe located in one of the quest
giver's rooms and broke it open in front of everyone
to receive the NavKey. It's a pretty big exploit. So I asked Brian how the QA
team might have missed this. - That safe actually
got the model changed, like toward the end of production. So originally the collision on it, you could still be detected
by the people in the room when you were crouching there. But then the art changed, and
the collision on it changed. And we basically created a safe spot where you couldn't be seen. So at a certain point, like, okay, it was kind of hard to leave, except for this is an exploit
that players can can take, but it's not the worst thing in the world. - [Danny] The Outer Worlds is
full of interesting quests. In fact, we covered a bunch
of them in our previous video on character design. If you missed that one, make sure you Subscribe to get notified whenever we upload something. So we've talked about one of
the big critical path quests. So how about we dive into an area of quest design that often
gives level designers the most freedom, optional side quests. - There wasn't much world art when I was first looking at the area, it was just kind of gray boxed out. So we didn't really know
necessarily what we wanted to look like, the faction
had already been established. So we knew that Sublight was kind of a Criminal Organization,
they're doing a bunch of smuggling and illicit stuff. So I had that to go on. And then we thought it would
be nice if they had built it into these mountains
to kind of hide you know, so it's like a locked
off, the secret area. And I thought it'd be kind
of cool if it was like, sort of like a Las Vegas in
this world where you're not really allowed to take
vacations or have leisure time, or anything like that. So really, the only people
who would be able to do that would be super
wealthy Byzantium folks. And so basically you have
these like dandy wealthy types who are coming to this grubby spaceport to engage in a little bit
of gambling, and drinking, and leisure time. And there's also with the falls
we were kind of like okay, and they can pitch it as like, you know, rejuvenating waters, but
it's actually kinda gross. (laughs loudly) And so it's just, I don't know, I tried to play with that
and just have a little bit of fun there. - Sometimes the simplest
solution is the sweetest. I don't give a whit about
the method or the means. Just the end. - Also, I did know that
they wanted the quest to be, hey, she wants to send you
the CMP factory and take out the owner. And I think that was the
original premise that we had to go off of. So in Monarch, they pretty much only have Saltuna because it's,
the planet is blockaded and they don't have a lot of
resources coming in and out. So everybody lives off Saltuna. When all the company has left Monarch, this guy took over the factory. And so it was kind of like, all right, he has the monopoly on
worse and you know, meat, other meat products in the area, and I thought she would
be like, you know what, I'm tired of eating saltuna, I want this for myself,
or like it's a great cash cow basically. So she sends you out there. And I thought to make
him more interesting. Maybe he should have some
type of megalomania going on as you play through. I think each area that you
play through ideally should tell its own story in addition to tie into
the larger game story. So the story I was trying to
tell in the C&P factory was that actually this guy
is like serial killing his employees because
it's basically a situation where when you're working at the factory, if you get three infractions, then you're called up to
the boss's office and then you basically canned,
literally at that point. And then it tied into
going on in parallel, another writer was doing
our Cannibal House quest. And so I thought, oh, that'd be really fun if we
could tie those together as like a little Easter egg. And so Carrie has written
some lines where they're like, commenting about how forced, like the the cans from his
factory are like the only ones that they think are
really tasty, and it's like, well, because they have
people in them. (laughs) But yeah. - I worked on various ones like there is the the Captain Irion
side quest on Scylla. We have to basically. You're trying to get medical robots for the sick bay on Groundbreaker. And the delivery guy is Captain
Irion who's like been shot down, is now being held hostage by outlaws on Scylla, which was gonna
be a fun quest, but then the voice actor we got for
Captain Irion did this like, perfect Zapp Brannigan knockoff. (laughs) He's like, it was so perfect. - Tremendous work, friend. Here I was readying a daring maneuver, and you've
come and saved me the trouble! - It's the same voice actor
who did Vicar Max, I believe, and they're so completely
different deliveries like, he just did a fantastic job bringing those characters to life. So, that one became like,
way more entertaining because of that voice actors' delivery. And if you have Ellie in your
party when you meet Irion, they have a history. That's fun to see the
back and forth there. So that was always fun. - And farewell to you, dear Dr. Fenhill. I trust I'll see you next I find myself on the Groundbreaker. - You'd better hope not. - There's a woman you can find
in Stellar Bay who's telling you that her son has gone
missing and she wants you to go and like save her little boy. Which then as you're exploring
through the game and go over Monarch, you find out
that her little boy is actually a 40 year old man. I kind of want like, every RPG has this, like save my child quest. I wanted to do a turn
that was like, actually, this is like a supremely
overprotective mother who just needs to chill out, and her son's trying to live his own life. And then we got the voice
actress who did the acting for the mother. She did such a perfect
job of just going like the histrionics going so over the top. - I warned him. A raptidon would snap him
up first chance it got. I just know one's ripped his arm off and is gnawing on his
sweet little fingers! - One of our designers
Megan who actually was in the recording session for
that sent me a link to all the voice files. And I was just cracking up. Like that actress, she sure did a perfect job, she captured that over-protective mom
character, so well, it was great. - [Danny] I mean, she was
over-protective but he had joined the band of religious zealots. - Yes, but that versus
that mother who wouldn't go for that option. (laughs) So we actually had several
different ways she could do it. Obviously there's like the, the straight up way where
you go locate the guy, convince him to return back to his mom. If you have enough good dialogues, because you convinced him
to go back and like settle things himself, not run away
trying like to be be an actual adult and have a
conversation with his mother. Some other ways you can do
it is you could threaten him and say that he either goes
back and tells his mother that he's gonna come back
for good, or you'll kill her. So basically, you're
either going to, like, you're pulling his mother
hostage to him returning so you can get the reward you want. Which also if you do that, once you go back and get the reward, you can then tell him,
okay, you're free to go. I just wanted the reward. I didn't care if you
actually stayed or not. You can actually like, talk to him and he can
convince you like, oh, take this ring. It's like proof of identity, take it back. So like she thinks he actually died. So it's basically I hate
my mom so much I'd rather her think I'm dead rather
than go back and talk to her. Or you can just kill him outright, take the ring and go
back and get the money. So, a few options like
that for things you can do. - Here we go.
- Nice one. Like true professionals. - [Danny] With a team fewer than 70 people for most of development, Obsidian managed to craft a wide array of locations filled with Novel Quests. It may not be the grand
sprawling adventure that many open-world RPGs there promise, but it's a great example
of smart planning, creative problem solving,
and scope control. And we're not done yet. In the next episodes in our series, we'll take a look at how this
humble team tackled elements such as combat, stealth,
audio design, and music. Thanks so much for watching. See you then. (uplifting music) - Can you hear me? Is this thing working? Ah, there you are. Now, where were we? Oh, yes, a smuggler. His name is Hawthorne
and he should be waiting for you at the landing site. He's to be your chauffeur, so to speak, and not to worry, I'm
told he's a specialist, dashing gunslinger, one of a
kind ship that sort of thing. You'll like him, I'm sure. I've also outfitted you with
a simple wireless monitor so I can track your progress. I'll check in with you
as soon as you land. Good luck. I'm, all the colonists
are counting on you. Ah, you've landed. Good. Hawthorne should be close by. What in Law's name? Is that him? That idiot. I told him to plant the
beacon and move away, not stand there holding it. Oh well, no sense in letting
his ship go to waste. Hawthorne wouldn't mind
you taking your ship, better you than the Board, eh? Not sure I trusted the fellow. Might have gone after
the bounty on my head. Shame about the whole squashing thing. Nasty way to go.
These interviews are VERY honest from the folks at Oblivion and are worth watching not just for TOW fans, but for anyone interested in modern RPG design at scale.
The next one is about the sound design and is worth Subscribing & hitting the bell for (I don’t work with NoClip but it’s in the Spacer’s spirit to promote corporate partners), you can watch it early if you throw NoClip $10 on Patreon for supporting our favorite space game.