As Obsidian Entertainment gets ready for the October 29 release of The Outer Worlds 2 on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, the company has revealed some of the key lessons it had learned from making the first game, and how these lessons affected the upcoming sequel. In an interview with Game Informer, director Brandon Adler spoke about these lessons, with the primary one being the fact that players wanted a bigger game.
Bigger doesn’t just mean making larger worlds to explore, however. Adler explained that the studio did quite a bit of user research to figure out where it could bring in improvements over The Outer Worlds. This includes more content in general, as well as a longer run time.
“The cool part about the reaction [to the first game] was people were really kind of enthusiastic about the world and the IP itself [and] that naturally lends itself to people wanting a sequel,” said Adler. “When they’re talking about it, they want more. When we did user research, when we talked to people, what came back was the biggest – I wouldn’t call it a complaint – but the biggest things they wanted from future products were to make bigger areas, ‘make more stuff for us. We want to experience more of this, we want a little more gameplay length.’ And so those were easy things for us to target as we were kind of going through it all.”
Adler also spoke about bringing in more reactivity from the world towards the player’s actions, both in terms of their involvement in the game’s story, or even just their character’s builds. This, he noted, tied into the greater emphasis on role-playing in The Outer Worlds 2, which starts right from character creation and builds up from there.
“We wanted to allow for more reactivity towards either the player builds or things that were going on, in terms of role-playing things,” he explained. “And so for me personally, it was very important that we have very detailed, not only character creation, but character progression, as you’re going through the game. That goes for our perks, our flaws, everything else you can build around your characters, and that’s really important to find those cool and fun combinations and ways to role-play your character.”
Creative director Leonard Boyarsky also offered some insight about how Obsidian Entertainment made The Outer Worlds 2 a bigger game than the original. He noted that part of this was the general lack of restrictions that the upcoming RPG will put on players. This means that, during the course of play, you won’t accidentally end up making a decision that permanently blocks off 10 percent of the game’s contents from your character.
“I keep going back to, unfortunately, on the base game, we were very restricted in what we could do,” said Boyarsky. “We can’t have a decision you make cut off 10% of the game when the game’s 20 to 30 hours long. That’s just not going to happen, but we couldn’t make a much bigger game because of where we’re at. We were like, ‘If we do a sequel, we know it needs to be bigger. We know we need to go back to our roots in terms of deeper RPG reactivity.’ So we had all these things we couldn’t do in the base game that we were just waiting to tackle in this next one.”
For more details about The Outer Worlds 2, check out why we think it might be this year’s biggest sci-fi RPG. Also checkout the strange weapons that were showcased with a recent trailer, as well as how it won’t be following up on the events of the first game.
