Obsidian Entertainment, known for its work with a wide variety of RPGs, had not originally planned to allow a third-person mode for the upcoming The Outer Worlds 2. In an interview with Game Informer, director Brandon Adler confirmed that the title was originally going to be a first-person only experience, and that work on a third-person mode started only around two years ago.
“We didn’t intend to do third-person when we first started the game,” said Adler. “We actually didn’t start doing it until, really, maybe about two years ago or so.” He then revealed that the decision to add a third-person camera largely came about from the developers taking stock of the kinds of things players might want from the game.
“You’re like, ‘It’s too expensive for us to do some of these things; maybe on the next one,” he said. “But again, about halfway through, we were like, ‘I think people are really going to want this,’ so we did an evaluation of how difficult it was going to be to implement it.”
To develop the third-person camera, Obsidian Entertainment ended up teaming up with Disruptive. The features of the camera angle include options for FoV, as well as in-game animations and interactions with the game’s world.
The Outer Worlds 2 recently got a live-action trailer featuring actors Marc Evan Jackson and Ben Schwartz. The trailer was comedic in tone, celebrating the upcoming RPG’s “Big Sequel Energy”, and showing off some gameplay snippets like the combat, sneaking around, and the characters that players will get to meet and either befriend or fight.
Adler had previously noted that, while developing The Outer Worlds 2, the studio paid attention to the fact that RPG fans want deeper experiences from the genre. This led the studio to work on smoothing down some of the rougher edges from the upcoming game, while also making sure that more gameplay-focused players can get to the “crunchy number stuff” to experiment with different kinds of character builds.
“I would say that the biggest thing for me is that players want deeper RPGs,” said Adler. “I think a lot of time there’s the thought just being in this industry for so long, being in RPGs for so long, it seems like in many cases we’ve tried to smooth down the rough edges and streamline things a little bit. And that’s fine for some games, but also players just really want to be able to get in there.”
“They want to just be able to get the crunchy number stuff, but also just make all the different types of builds they can. They want all of the RPG options that a lot of times we’ve been kind of slowly removing or streamlining and slimming down. So I think, again, that the big lesson from the first game to the second is let’s give the players those options. Let’s give them that stuff to interact with, and I think that they’ll be appreciative of that.”
The Outer Worlds 2 is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on October 29.
