You know what’s even better than all-stealth pacifist runs in games? Psychopathic mass murderer runs, where you just run around killing every single person you lay your eyes on. Obsidian Entertainment – a studio that has has always prided itself on the amount of freedom it offers to players in all its games – will be allowing players to do just that in the upcoming The Outer Worlds.
Speaking in an interview with Twinfinite, The Outer Worlds’ Senior Designer Brian Hines confirmed that every single character you see in the game – regardless of how important to the story they may or may not be – you can attack them, and you can kill them.
While speaking about the way The Outer Worlds conveys the morality of its characters and how players should be judging that to determine whether or not they want to side with them, Hines said, “So we’ve got a very different breadth, because you have the players who will just try and help out everybody to the best of their ability and then find out that maybe they’re helping the wrong people along the way.”
“There are a few characters that will ask you to do things that sound very beneficial, and then the more you help them the more you realize you’re going down a dark path,” he continued. “Then, of course, you have the choice of continuing along or fighting against them, that sort of thing.
“We also have the option, because players can attack and kill anybody they want to in this world, you can just go around slaughtering everybody. One of our designers, she loves doing a playthrough where she goes through, helps everyone, gets all the quest XP she can from them, and then kills them for maximum XP gain from everybody (laughs). Based on how you want to play the game, there’s a lot of options there.”
How exactly does that work within the game, especially since you could end up killing someone who’s crucial to the story, or someone on whom a quest’s progression might depend? “So we try to find, like look at, okay who is actually critical and what information do players actually have to know?” said Hines. “So if this person gets killed, how else can we convey that information to keep the quest moving forward?
“Whether that’s like in a terminal, or on a note on their body that would give you that information, and then if there’s just no elegant way to do it that’s when the quest fails, and that’s kind of the consequence of choosing to slaughter everyone.”
In fact, there might even be times in the game when you end up fighting against your own companion characters, because they may not agree with the choices you’re making. If that ever happens, you’ll be fighting against the very character you’ve been levelling up, who’ll be equipped with all the gear and abilities that you equipped them with.
“It can happen, yes,” said Hines. “There are some quests, I don’t want to give out too many details, but you could end up attacking someone that the companion cares about very deeply, at which point they would leave your party and start fighting against you. Which, of course, if you’ve leveled up that companion and given them great equipment, you’re now facing them in combat.”
It’s sounding like The Outer Worlds is going to offer a lot of freedom to players in terms of how you want to play, and how you want to see the narrative play out. That, of course, has always been a defining trait of games made by Obsidian, and it’s great to see that they’re going to keep following that philosophy with their upcoming RPG.
The Outer Worlds is out on October 25th for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC, while it was recently announced that the game will also be getting a Switch release shortly afterward. PC and Xbox One players can also enjoy the game for “free” thanks to it joining the Game Pass catalog on the day of release itself- those who want the game on Steam, though, will have to wait a year.
We also recently got nearly thirty minutes of gameplay footage from the game. Check it out through here.
