[TYPING SOUNDS] [MUSIC PLAYING] DANNY: There are many reasons
why we connect with the games we love.
The gameplay, the art the musical score.
But of all the things that bind us
to our favorite games, nothing has the endurance
of a good story. It's for this reason
that we're here in Orange County at
Obsidian Entertainment to talk to a team
about a game that was almost willed
into existence by its fans.
You see, our story focuses on the
collaboration of two industry veterans,
old friends who were responsible for giving
birth to one of the most beloved game franchises
of all time. How they honed their
craft, went their separate ways, and
eventually got the band back together.
But it's also a story about a new
generation of developers, many of whom were
inspired into the profession by playing
those old games. Today's story is the
first in this set of videos about how
Obsidian Entertainment created The Outer Worlds. Some videos will dive
into writing, others into areas of
world-building and combat. So fair warning, we're
not going to get into the endgame, but
there will be spoilers dotted throughout this
series. And like any good tale, this one has
an interesting backstory of a Los Angeles based
studio called Interplay, where a producer named
Tim was handed the keys to a post-apocalyptic
wasteland and asked his colleague
Leonard for help. [MUSIC PLAYING] - The best thing ever for
my career ever was that Tim, unlike a lot of
people when they're handed a project--
Like when he was handed Fallout, he was just the
lead programmer originally. And then the producer
had so many SKUs or games they were
working on, they kind of just handed
it off to Tim to be the lead on the whole game.
And most people when they get that opportunity are
just like, this whole game is my vision. Tim came
to me, and he was like, I don't know anything about
art, so you just do whatever you want.
So that was, you know, really nice to
have that kind of freedom, and we just
had a really good working relationship
from then. You know, when we started
talking about doing this here, it was just,
you know, there was no question that we--
Oh, yeah, we have the opportunity to do this again.
We should definitely go for it. It started out with six people.
Five, six people. And then for a long time
it was 12 people. And then at the end
it was 35? Yeah, for maybe the last
six months we had about 30 people. For most of the project,
it was a very small project. - What was fun is everybody
was kind of making the same game, and
the rest of the company was kind of ignoring us
because right after we started, they got the
D&D license. So most of the people were
concentrating on the D&D games. So we were kind of off
in a corner by ourselves. LEONARD: We felt like little
kids getting away with something. We were keep rubbing our
hands together, like, ooh what if we do this?
It was, we really kind of realized what a
unique opportunity it was at the time
to be given a small bag of money,
not a large bag, but a small bag of money,
and being told basically make whatever
game you want. - And it went through a
lot of iterations. - Yeah. - There was, it was
aliens, and then-- It was first started out
fantasy, and there was going to be, like, aliens.
We've talked about time travel. At one point it
was dinosaurs. LEONARD: I was really proud
of it. I felt like we had done a lot of the things
we set out to do. Obviously there's always
things you want to do better or put more
features in, but I was really proud
of it . - We got very little
press coverage. We had done, we were
anticipating, hey, maybe we're going to get a magazine
cover, so we'd made some art for it. Nobody wanted
a magazine cover. And then we'd actually
started working on another game, and Fallout
just kind of took off a few months
after it shipped. I think Fallout 2
because it was bigger and had a lot
more features than the base Fallout
was that one that a lot of people remember as
the big game. - Yeah, we left after
doing the initial design for the main story
arc and a lot of the design changes for
that game to start our own company.
Interplay was a fantastic place to
work when we first started. and it was
still pretty good when we left. It's just
we kind of saw the writing on the wall.
They ended up having a hit with Baldur's Gate
after we left, so they hung on a little bit
longer than we thought. But we just, you know,
in our naive youth we thought that we,
you know, knew better. Like, oh, they're making
all these wrong decisions. And we just kind of
wanted to go back to making a game
by ourselves. Once Fallout came out
and it became obvious that people liked it and
it was going to be a thing, all of a sudden all these
people were interested in it, whereas before
no one cared. And so people who
we'd never seen before were telling us, you know,
what we should do. And we're just like, we don't
want to do this anymore. So we just wanted to
kind of get back to square one and start over,
and plus we felt like the culture of Interplay was
changing, so we wanted to kind of recreate that
at Troika. TIM: I think we made three
really good games. We made Arcanum, Temple of
Elemental Evil, and Bloodlines.
Lot of work, though. Didn't realize how much
work the business side was so we kept
losing time to the business side, and then
we worked late. - Yeah, the biggest thing I
learned was I don't want to run a company again. - Yeah, me too. LEONARD: Making Arcanum
was fantastic. There started to be
more issues when we got into Temple
and Vampire. But Arcanum was pretty much
what we wanted. But it was a really,
really small team, and everybody was kind of
a very flat hierarchy. There was no producers,
no managers. It was just all of us,
15, 16 people developing the game. [MUSIC] DANNY: Before Troika games
folded, they'd been working on a pitch for
a third Fallout game but were ultimately
outbid by Bethesda. The two went their separate
ways but stayed local. Tim ended up working
at Carbine Studios on the MMO WildStar
while Leonard spent a decade at Blizzard as
lead world designer on Diablo III and
its expansion. Fast forward to 2011,
and the news breaks that Tim Cain has
left Carbine to join Obsidian Entertainment,
and our spaghetti of games industry personalities
and famous franchises is about to get a
little bit more complicated. You see, Obsidian was founded
by a number of developers who worked
at Black Isle, a subsidiary of Interplay
that was created after the success of Fallout.
This team, many of whom had worked with
Tim and Leonard on the first Fallout, would go
on to make a sequel and a bunch of
other great games. Planescape: Torment,
Icewind Dale, and they even helped Bioware
on Baldur's Gate. After founding Obsidian,
they continued to created beloved RPGS,
taking the reigns over two Bioware franchises
in Neverwinter Nights 2 and Knights of the Old
Republic 2. Eventually they'd be hired
by Bethesda to make their own
first person Fallout game. And while New Vegas had
a rocky launch, it's regarded by many
as the strongest first person Fallout,
especially to those who were fans of the factions
and reputation system from Fallout 2.
But there would be no fond reunion for Tim.
He joined Obsidian two years after the
release of New Vegas, while the studio was working
South Park: The Stick of Truth and Pillars of Eternity.
It would be a number of years before he'd get
the chance to make his first person
roleplaying game. but when he did, he did
what he always did. He called his friend
Leonard. [MUSIC PLAYING] TIM: I came here in 2011,
and I worked on South Park and Pillars
of Eternity. and then in 2016,
they were asking to start a new project,
and they wanted it to be a new IP, and I
didn't think I could do that without Leonard
because he's much better at, well,
he's great at character, and I'm not.
We work on story together, but he pretty much does all
the heavy lifting on that. So I basically told
them if they wanted me to be a game director,
I'd like them to hire Leonard, and they did. What was great too was
we were actually locked in a room across
the hall here for, like, three months. Just-- - Yeah, they didn't let
us out. - Yep. - Kept us in there. - Slid pizza under the door.
And we just worked on the IP, and
it was great. It was like, all of a
sudden it was like the early 90s again
and we were just having fun and putting
together IP ideas. LEONARD: Yeah, it just started
clicking immediately. We just, there was never any
searching for what we were going to do,
or, like, wondering about our direction.
It was just like we hit the ground running.
We immediately started talking about it.
And within the first couple days we had
some of the basics of what the game
ended up being. Basically it was a
first person RPG, you know, with a
Fallout New Vegas kind of feel I think
was the main thing. The Fallout meets Firefly was
floated around as well. And then me and
Tim immediately started talking about
things we wanted to have. Phineas,
the main scientist, came almost immediately.
The fact that you were a frozen colonist, we loved
the fact in Fallout you came from a place
where you didn't know anything. And we love when
the character, the player character and
the player are really close in terms of
what they know. Especially in an RPG,
it just, it really works well. Tim had
already started putting together ideas
for corporations. He played a lot--
Around a lot with those, and the
silliness of them, and the humor there.
We knew immediately we wanted to have a
good dose of humor 'cause that's, our dark
humor is what's kind of, like, been the
signature of our games all the way through. And then once we had
a couple of those then it start to become
more obvious, at least to me, about
the dystopia, and if the corporations
actually were in control, and
all that stuff just kind of snowballed
from there. TIM: So we put together
a prototype six months in.
This prototype could demonstrate the three
main ways of playing the game--
the combat, the stealth, and the dialogue. We had the cover
grass working early on. We had the
stealth awareness states working early on, inside and outside
with doors, and line of sight,
and sound. Most of you probably
remember Nigel who guarded the door
to this facility. Most of you killed him. Remember when we used
to have the circular called shot device, where
we, you could select what combat effect you
wanted to do? DANIEL ALPERT: Well, we just
started with the idea of almost this westward expansion.
We kind of mirrored that aesthetic. So we
knew, like, OK, spaceships would take
the supplies to the planets. How would they then
build their landscape? And it was always an echo
of the old west. DANNY: At what stage
do you think the art team sort of
knew what the look was? DANIEL: Oh, well, I
do remember it was this great
art meeting we had actually in this room,
and it was this concept piece done by
Bobby Hernandez. And it was just this
fantastic image of our old west style
street in the future. People saw that, and
it just clicked. It was like, I understand
now what we're building. LEONARD: That was very
much suggested by the fact that we had the
corporations, and when that snowballed
into them running everything.
And then we started talking about how that really
kind of started to feel like the turn
of the century, turn of the 19th to the 20th
century, mining towns where the mining
companies owned owned everything.
You know, they paid their workers
in scrip, and they could only use
it at the company store kind of thing. - That fit in perfectly
with the idea we had of all these
corporations that kind of owned chunks
of consumer goods. So like, you know, there was
a company that made weapons and another company
that made armor. And then Spacer's Choice made
a little bit of everything, but they
were all bad. And it just, it fit in
really well with this, the political side of things
that Leonard looks at. DANIEL: Auntie Cleo, our
big pharmaceutical food brand corporation,
they will do anything they can to
make their next product, including, like, capturing
wild beasts, raptidons, experimenting
on them, and being able to make
diet toothpaste. Spacer's Choice is the
brand that will make the product.
They know it's a little shaky at the end,
and wanted to make things always rickety
and not quite fit right with each other. - The thing that we
knew we had to have, you know, before
anything else was that we had to really
nail the tone. You know, because that's--
We called it the Fallout special sauce,
which was you know, my darkness,
my dark humor and silliness, we kind of
merged those together. A lot of other-- - We don't want
too dark. - Yeah, and not
too silly. - Because the game
shouldn't make you sad as you play them, but
don't make it too silly 'cause then it's
like there's really no gravitas to this game. - But in the case of
this game, it was really important because
the subject matter was so dark and so, it
could be so depressing to play
this game and play around in this world,
where like, we really want it to be fun.
We really want it to be humorous but have this
biting edge to it. That was something that we
were really adamant about. We worked really a
long time with the writers on to get
the tone right in terms of
OK, this kind of joke is forcing it.
We want to underplay it. The people
in this world need to feel like
if they were real people in this
bizarre situation, how would they
react, not cardboard cutouts
pointing you to your next objective,
things like that. And, you know, you can
get away with a lot if the people
who are delivering the lines feel like
they really mean it. They're not, like, winking at
the player or the viewer or whoever it is. DANNY: Much of the
success of games like The Outer Worlds
rests on the details. Compelling quests, well-
written characters, evocative artwork, and
stirring music. We went so deep into
conversations on that we've decided
to dedicate entire videos
to writing, world design, game
design, and music. So make sure you
subscribe to Noclip to get notified when
they go live. But in this video, we're
going to keep the perspective broad and
focus on how a team which at its biggest
point was only 75 people produced
a game as long and wide as The Outer
Worlds. In fact, the length of The
Outer Worlds was of particular interest to me.
You can sink 100 plus hours into
many modern RPGs, but The Outer Worlds
doesn't offer that type of expansive
playthrough. I wanted to know whether
this was a reflection of the modest size
of the team or a deliberate
design choice. The answer, as you've
probably come to expect on Noclip, was a little bit
of everything. - So I started on The
Outer Worlds when it was in, like, early
in production. We were working on what
we called the horizontal slice of the game.
Basically we'd done the vertical slice, which
was creating one area with all the content and all
the features we wanted in the game. And
at that point we were doing block outs, like basically
just grayscale rough layouts for
the crit path of the game, just so we can
get a beginning to end playthrough of
the entire experience to see how that felt. Actually I did block outs
for an entire planet that was cut
before the game released. So there's probably about
six months of work that I did that didn't
actually release with the game. After
blocking out the horizontal slice
to the original spec, we realized
we had way more game than we had any chance
of actually finishing. So that was, like,
with the first round of cuts. LEONARD: We had to
cut some chunks out of the main story, but we did it
early enough so it so it didn't feel
disjointed. But we felt we could have
built to the end a little bit better. I know that's
one thing I've seen people feel
like, the end kind of amps up all of a sudden
without much warning, and I feel we could have
built a little bit towards that, and that was
one of the things that kind of cut back on. TIM: We originally had an
overland map for Terra 2 that was as big as
the one on Monarch. So that kind of hurt to
cut that because it makes all the areas
on Terra 2 you know, Roseway, and
Byzantium, and Edgewater kind of
feel disjointed. It's just hard figuring out,
'cause we-- This was also the first game
here we mading using Unreal 4. Like Scylla went
together really quickly. It went a lot faster
than our other maps, and we didn't
have a feel for when something
was on paper how long it was
going to take until we actually did it. - This was the first project
we've made using Unreal 4, so a lot
of our, the tools and pipelines we were
trying to get up to the speed that we need to,
and certain things we just assumed we'd be able to
do more quickly than we could. We had to make a
lot of cuts. TIM: Monarch was
particularly difficult because there were so many
teams working on on one map, that
they would often get in their way or
somebody would, like-- We couldn't do lighting
until all the area designers were done
so a lot of things got pushed off. BRIAN: And then we
realized, well, the game's actually a bit smaller
than we want it to be. So we looked at things
like Scylla as an example. This was a new
environment that was actually fairly quick and
easy for art to generate, that we could actually build
out very quickly, that would give us more
play space but wouldn't be, have a high cost
on the art end. Yeah, basically there was
a lot of things that were on areas that were
cut from the game. And Scylla was a place
that had no crit path content going through.
It was just side quests so a lot of the
companion quests just managed to be
relocated there, 'cause nothing really required
you to go other than the
companion quests, so-- DANNY: Where else would a
hermit drug lady be? - Exactly.
[LAUGHING] Although that was
actually the only quest that was already
in design for Scylla. DANNY: Oh, really? BRIAN: Was the Vicar Max
hermit quest. The pirate area for
Felix's quest was actually on
another planet. Then it got relocated
there, and then the other side quests
like for Nyoka got relocated there
as well. - Luckily we've got a lot of
failures under our belt because one of the things
we talked about was the original Fallout only
had three of those we called them hard
points, but they're story choke points,
where Arcanum had 27? We said somewhere between
that and those numbers are the correct number.
Because three wasn't long enough and 27 was
much, much, much, much too long.
So when we looked at the we kind of thought of what
the logical acts were. And we started out immediately
going the first act has to be getting your ship.
That defined all of Edgewater, and all the
different things that happened there was all,
like, I need to get that part. And then after that, we're like,
well, they can go anywhere they want
in the system. So then we had to think
of like, how we wanted the story to unfold and what those
choke points would be. - We kind of hit the big
beats of the story and then were like, OK, what if
the player does this and try to think of all the
different things they could do. So it's almost like
we start with one path and then add all the others.
Sometimes they all come together at once.
Sometimes we really have to kind of wrack our
brains for how this one major point is going to
be different for different players who make
different choices. In the past, we've kind of
just winged it. With this game we tried
to have more restraint, and our strike teams
and our area designers were working with the
narrative designers. Had a really good feel for
how to control those things. BRIAN: So usually for area
designers at Obsidian, we're responsible for both
the, like, layout of areas and also a lot
of the quest design. For quests we work with
our narrative team to figure out the overall
objectives and, like, the stories we're trying to tell
through those quests. But we're responsible for
actually implementing in design and the layout and
the flow of quest in areas. We start with a paper design,
like a top-down design to iterate, to make sure
that overall, relative spacing of things
makes sense. And then we do a quick
basic texturing, basic layout, and then
just start running through and making sure,
like, OK, from this point can you see the
objective we're trying to reach, or is it hidden?
If it's hidden, is there another POI that
draws you in that direction so that
players have at least have a goal in
front of them as often as possible. And then
usually trying to get as much feedback
as possible, which is always hard on
a gray block map because it's so basic.
There isn't really any good textures or any
interesting detail there. There's a lot of, like,
feedback you get that you kind of listen to
and understand that it's coming from, like, OK,
that will be addressed when we get the art pass in,
or that'll be addressed when we get VFX to draw the
player in that direction. DANNY: While the critical
path of the game may have been shorter
than intended, RPGs are labored with
the responsibility of allowing players to
play through them in many different ways. We covered the design
of combat, stealth, and dialogue in an
upcoming video. But expectations also
change the complexity of these
systems, so I asked Tim and Leonard
whether it's possible to make a game
accessible to less experienced players
without disappointing hardcore RPG fans. TIM: Back then the
only people into RPGs were people who
were hardcore. They knew the system
backwards and forwards. You know you didn't have to
explain anything worth knowing. They'd just
know it already. But new RPG players,
they don't necessarily want to have to
be taught all these systems ahead
of time. I try to explain to them this way,
because people were worried we weren't going to
try to get complex people. I imagine RPGS as
being a big mountain. Forty years ago you had to
rock climb up the mountain. Now we've paved
a really nice road with switchbacks
and scenic overlooks. The view from the top
of the mountain is still as nice, but it's easier
to get there. But some of the people who
are rock climbing are like, in my day I had to
rock climb to get that view. And it's like, that's great,
and now you can just take a, you can drive up
there in 15 minutes. That doesn't mean the
view isn't as good. So I wanted to come up
with an RPG that if you wanted to rock
climb up it, fine. But if you wanted
to take the drive up, it was easy to learn things,
and you didn't have to know how everything worked
when you started. LEONARD: One of
our pillars for the game as a whole, was that it was kind of
very easy or very accessible on
the top layer. And then you could dig
down as far as you want. Same thing with the story.
We tried to make sure that even if you try
to get through the dialogue as quickly as possible, you had
enough of an understanding about what was going on
and what you were supposed to be doing to get
you through the game. Then of course if you
wanted to dig down deep and pick every
option you could, then hopefully that would be
entertaining as well. But you didn't need to do
all that. We wanted people to be able to
opt in not only in deciding what character
they're playing but how they're going to play
the game as well. TIM: Our producer Eric just
liked to shoot people as soon as he saw them.
So now that he was, like, missing out on all the
dialogue, he made it challenging for us to
figure out how to advance storylines when
no one could talk to you. 'Cause he didn't talk to
anybody the whole game. I mean, he had no idea
what the VO was, what the character dialogues
were like. If he saw someone, he shot them. - Yeah, but you make it sound
like that's a new thing. Eric was working with us
at Interplay, and he went, he played Fallout
by punching everybody. And found a body that
way, 'cause he played the whole game by
punching everybody. - Yeah. - Yeah, so even from
way back then, we've known if you decide
you're going to have to be able to kill everybody
in the game, you need alternate ways of
getting this information. So that's part of it, like,
you know, 'cause we always said you have to be
able to fight, sneak, or steal your way
through the game. Part of fighting is like,
I'm just going to kill everybody. So that's part
of, like, when we're going down the list of what
we need to make sure happens at every point
or options the play has at every point,
account for those things. TIM: If you didn't want to
tinker with items you didn't have to.
If you didn't want to do anything with the mods
on weapons you didn't have to. If you didn't
want to play around with science weapons, if you
just wanted to use them as a basic weapon,
you could. But then if you upped
your science skill, they got better and better.
And we just liked things like that that were
good enough basically but then fun to extend. DANNY: On this project,
scope control seemed to be
given priority. While cutting features,
companion, an open world hub,
and even a planet must have been
painful, it was more important that the
team weren't spreading too thin creatively.
But I wanted to know how Tim and
Leonard felt about where the game
ended up. TIM: When we, when
we were talking to the game, and I remember we had team
meetings about this, I said, look, if the
biggest complaint about our game is that it's
too small and people want more from it,
that's good. Because if you make a
really good game, of course people get to the end,
and they're like, I want more. Hey, it was only 20 hours,
or it was only 30 hours, or 40 hours. People kept
asking us how long the game was, and it was so
hard to answer because you can finish it really
quickly and with certain type of characters,
and other type of characters take a lot longer.
But in this particular one I think we were
really happy with we told our story,
we had lots of side quests, we had
lots of interesting companion characters, and we
were really happy with the scope. LEONARD: From the very
beginning we wanted to make a shorter game so
that we could focus more on the replayability
and the choices. 'Cause the more choices
and branching you give the player, the more
content you actually have to create, so
that's a limiting factor in itself.
But I think that's one area where
I'm a little less happy 'cause I feel
like we had to make one cut
too many. All through the project
we were making cuts. We started out with a
smaller scope in mind, and then we found out
that that was too big as we went.
And we made cuts, several rounds of cuts.
And I think our last cut, for me, was
the painful one because I feel like I
would have liked to have a little bit more depth in
some of our characters. I wish you kind of could have
dug a little bit deeper into who our companions were
and had little bit more reactivity there.
But at the end of the day, you know, as Tim said,
if somebody says the biggest problem with
your game is it was too short, that means they liked it.
And we've all played games where they were
an awesome game for the first two thirds,
and you're like, OK, I'm ready to, like,
play the end game. Oh, I have 20 more hours?
Yeah. And then it just starts to
become a slog, and it kind of colors your perception
of what the game was originally. That's one
of the pluses of having it be a shorter
game too, is that people won't
feel like they're you know, by the end
of it they're just so burned out they don't
want to do it again. So they could easily jump
back in and check some of these things out. [MUSIC PLAYING] DANNY: The Outer Worlds is
just one game that was being developed at
Obsidian at that time. It was published by
Take-Two Interactive's subsidiary, Private Division. But during production,
Obsidian was bought out by Microsoft. From our time at the
studio, the fallout seems to have been
handled well. During production of this
series, we were talking to Private Division
PR throughout. And it seemed like there
was an amicable relationship between the
two, even if their working relationship is
coming to a close. But before we wrapped this
one up, I wanted to know what effect,
if any, the Microsoft buyout had
had on the development of The Outer Worlds. TIM: What was interesting
was even though Obsidian was being purchased
the last year we were making this, we
were making this for Private Division. So we
were kind of in our own bubble.
It's super cool that it did this well and
that Microsoft liked it. That was a side effect.
That was, like, not on our initial list
of things to do. It's a happy side effect. LEONARD: Yeah, and
I mean it's great that it seems that way,
and it's great that it now looks like we're
going to have a fantastic future. But, you know, we approached it the way we
have always approached games. It was always about the
game. It was always about the game that we wanted
to make, that we thought the fan would want to play.
You can't worry about the other stuff,
because that's out of your control. We decided to concentrate
on that stuff that we could control and
deal with. DANNY: And creatively
you're satisfied? - Never.
[LAUGHING] There's a lot of stuff
I'm really proud of in it. I think that we
did a lot of things we set out
to do, but, like, with the cuts, and I've always
been, you know-- You're always looking
at the game you wanted to make as opposed to the
game you ended up making. - I'm happy. - Yeah. [DANNY LAUGHING] - But however I have
to say, and this is where me and Tim
differ on Fallout, I think Fallout was the only
game where we shipped it, and I was like,
that was exactly the game I wanted to make.
It was perfect. And Tim was like, well,
you know. - I had this laundry list of
other things I wanted to do. - Yeah, so I think
that was just my youthful naivety
at the time. - He was like Felix. - Yeah. - Now he's more like Max. - But I'm really proud of it.
I mean, I'm really happy I think it was--
did most if not all of what we
set out to do. But I'm always dissatisfied.
I was-- I was an artist my
whole life, so I'm never going to be happy
with what we create. DANNY: So you guys aren't
done making games together? - Hopefully not. - No reason to be not. [LAUGHING] DANNY: The last documentary
we filmed was actually just north of here with the
folks at Mobius who made Outer Wilds. [LAUGHING] We've asked them
this question. When did you name
the game, and did you know about them
when it happened, or? - We went through a
lot of names. - Yeah. - We went through a lot of
different names. We couldn't find
one we liked. And once we did find
one we liked had already were trademarked
for other games or something else.
And we came up with The Outer Worlds,
and we started circulating that around.
And then I found out that there was
an Outer Wilds, and everybody else
seemed to be like, well, we're not sure that
that's a concern. It's a small game.
It's an indie game. I'm like, I don't know.
But I didn't have anything better, and
we couldn't-- We had gone--
This was a process. This wasn't, like, an easy,
like, ah we'll just name it this. So this was something that
we finally were all able to get on board with,
and I think that was why even after we found out
that there was crossover that we
still went forward. I regret that now, but-- - That's something people
don't know, though. It is agonizingly difficult
to name a game. - Yeah. - You know what your
game is. You have a really good feel for it. But then
you're asked, put it in a word or two, and
you're like-- - And one of the push
backs that I heard was that, well, they're
coming out like six to eight months before you guys.
So it won't be a problem. And of course, yeah, it's like,
what, have none of us made games before? We know
these things aren't like, set in stone.
They aren't guaranteed. So, yeah. I sat
next to them at-- We just did a, I just did
New York game awards thing the other day. And I ended
up sitting next to one of the guys from
Outer Wilds, and we laughed about it.
But I felt bad because, you know,
I'm glad that not only was it a
fantastic game, but they got a lot
of press, and that they weren't, you know, lost in the shuffle
because, you know, we obviously were part
of a bigger company with a bigger
marketing push. And I was concerned about
that. I didn't want somebody who'd had
this labor of love small indie game to,
you know, be sidelined by us, and they just did
a fantastic job and got a lot of
recognition. So that made me happy. - Yeah. [TYPING SOUNDS]
I feel so weird about this game. It's like...
Imagine going to your favorite restaurant, which employs a chef you love. Ordering a dish based on a recipe you've greatly enjoyed before. All the individual ingredients are things you really like to eat. Then getting the dish, eating it and feeling "Meh"...
That's how I feel about this game and I'm still baffled about it.
I love this game. Any news on the DLC?
Is this the video that accidentally lead to The Outer Wilds doc? Either way, I look forward to having the time to watch it
It's so depressing to read outer world discussions on r/games . I really want to talk about the game legitimately because it was my GOTY 2019, but it always a bunch of people saying it's bad or overrated.
My main issue with the game is how the world has gone to hell and how the player experiences this environment. There are huge creatures that eat you, wealth inequality, and corporations that have too much control and power. Food issues. But you never really feel any of this. You quickly become a god way too fast. And even before you level up, you can out run most enemy encounters.
The lack of vulnerability is the main weakness. Prey does this better (first person) or Kenshi (third person RTS/RPG hybrid).
(Slight spoilers): I was playing on the hardest difficulty and the only time I felt truly endangered was when my ship was locked out on the Groundbreaker. I was thinking "oh shoot, I cannot sleep, I forgot to save, some of my companions might permanently die so that I can fix this issue." Nope, it took less than 10 minutes and zero fights before I was able to get back my ship. Disappointing.
This game was probably overhyped, but the end result was still so...mediocre. The characters, story, combat was so flat. Each individual piece was "OK", but OK for an established studio with a history of amazing story driven games is a bad start. Greedfall is a good counter example - average game but a huge step up for a small European studio that shows there's great things to come. Outer Worlds...was a step to the side and down.
Maybe they exist, but I've never played a game that allows you THIS much freedom in how you approach each mission. I really tried to be as non-violent as possible, and I commend this game for not only letting me do it, but also making it a really fun experience. Super fun game, could not recommend enough.