Obsidian's The Outer Worlds 2 looks to fix the problems it always knew the original had
Brandon Adler, The Outer Worlds 2’s director, tells me the team at Obsidian knew exactly what would and wouldn’t go down well with the original. “Before the first game even shipped, I did a full breakdown of: here’s what I think people are going to like and dislike about the game,” he says. “And here’s what I think the press is going to like and dislike. And I think we should address these things in the next one.”
The studio, then only freshly acquired by Microsoft and still publishing the original game via 2K’s Private Division, actually had plans for how a sequel might fix those issues from the off as well. “Before even The Outer Worlds one shipped, we knew we wanted to do a second one. We knew we wanted to plan for that. I knew I wanted to be a part of it,” Adler says, speaking during a roundtable chat at an Xbox event during Summer Game Fest.
He’s open about what those predicted issues were. “Just the worlds themselves were a little small. And some of that was the size of the map,” he explains, with the studio having now made the world – a new mining colony setting called Arcadia – approximately 50 percent larger. Some of it was more intricate: the way the game laid out its sight lines, for instance, or how it now doesn’t “hard load” when you go into buildings. Adler offers an example from The Outer Worlds: “In the very first area, there’s a volcano, and it looks really cool. And you’re like, ‘I’m gonna go to that volcano, it looks cool.’ And you go to the volcano, there’s nothing there.”
“We can’t do that,” he says. “If something looks awesome, the player needs to be rewarded for going there. And now the player feels like the world is bigger because they’re actually exploring.” Other anticipated complaints were more fundamental – the guns didn’t feel great, he and the team rightly identified, and so “gunfeel” has been heavily tinkered with here. (Having played a short mission out here at SGF I can say the guns – at least those available in this limited case – do feel at the very least perfectly fine.)
