Michael Higham
Guest
“One of the very first things we were targeting when we started The Outer Worlds 2 was to make these big, expansive areas. It's what players told us they wanted,” game director Brandon Adler told me when talking about how the team at Obsidian built the open regions for this sequel. But bigger doesn’t always mean better, and they seemed aware of that when creating the more expansive zones across the different planets and moons you’ll visit in The Outer Worlds 2. There appears to be a focus on rewarding exploration, creating dense environments, and designing areas that pull you in specific directions to investigate points of interest off in the distance. So, while it’s structurally similar to the original where you visit distinct open areas through the main quest, there’s a greater sense of scale this time around.
I was able to see some of these ideas in action with a gameplay tour of Golden Ridge, a new open region on the planet-moon Dorado that you’ll visit early on in The Outer Worlds 2. It’s an arid, desert-like region with trench lines from a war that broke out in the past, mining facilities run by a faction called The Protectorate, and a ton of hostile wildlife mutated from the polluted environment. Art director Daniel Alpert spoke about maintaining the first game’s decorative art nouveau and retrofuturistic inspirations, but going with something a bit more harsh for Golden Ridge. “We were able to pull from areas of the late old West to World War 1 and imbue the areas with little touches – you’ll notice a trench warfare line, and if you go a little further into a town, you'll still find that frontier colony vibe,” he said when working on Golden Ridge.
Adler spoke to how the art direction feeds into the stories they’re trying to tell, specifically on this planet: “Before we get into any area, we have deep conversations about the overall story, the factions and what they’re doing, and what's important to them. Asking things like, why was anybody in Golden Ridge?” He gave examples of collaborating with the art team to have a sort of synergy between aesthetics and the game’s purpose, saying “We’ll say like, we want the trench lines here, maybe for gameplay reasons, but talk about why it makes sense story-wise.”
As any good RPG does, these kinds of stories are woven into the regions themselves, and Adler teased some of that, saying “I won't get into what happens at the beginning of Golden Ridge, but there's a big state change in the area when you first get there. It’s going to blow people away and make them really want to investigate what's happening.” That’s said to be indicative of the rest of the game, as he continued telling me, “You’ll see that throughout a lot of our areas as well. We try to do those types of things - let the players see big events that are happening pretty early and get them hooked into the area.”
With that foundation, the team wanted to pack the region with interesting things along the way with the main quest. “We made sure of that with big open sightlines and we spent a lot of time and effort on making really cool looking points of interest out in the distance to really draw players and really bring them off the beaten path,” Adler said. He referenced filling these areas with side quests, supporting characters, and smaller stories to unravel, similar to the first game. There seems to be a concerted effort in rewarding players with collectibles (like a new collection of tossball cards) and gear, even for exploring parts of the region that don’t really have a specific story or quest purpose. It’s an important piece to this style of RPG, of course, and something they were conscious of when it came to improving things from the first game, making sure all parts of the development team were involved in making that happen.
I also got to see the Zyranium Lab, which is an interior level on Golden Ridge, and it was impressive not just for its scale, but the ways in which I can see gameplay possibilities for how I approach these kinds of games. In a similar vein as the exclusive gameplay demo I saw of the N-Ray Facility, I got the impression that levels like these are more intricately designed and drawing from immersive sims like Deus Ex and Dishonored. They’re larger and have multiple paths forward that look deliberate for a range of playstyles while still maintaining a focus on pulling the player in specific directions. “When we're building these more open spaces, we have a defined path that we want the player to go through. But in true Obsidian game style, we allow players to go everywhere and kind of experience whatever they want,” Adler said with regards to designing levels within the open regions.
“One of the very first things we were targeting when we started The Outer Worlds 2 was to make these big, expansive areas. It's what players told us they wanted.”
Golden Ridge was the only open region I was able to see, so I asked about what we can expect from the rest of the game’s worlds. Alpert told me, “We intentionally design each of our worlds to feel different from each other. It's a unique landscape every time you land on a new moon or new area. So it shouldn't be like, you go somewhere new and it's a little bit more of the same. These other areas are completely different from the last moonscape you just came from, and the next one you're going to be visiting is completely different as well.” While that may seem par for the course in a spacefaring journey like The Outer Worlds, the conscious effort to address the limitations of the first game and be more intentional about how its worlds are built makes me hopeful that the The Outer Worlds 2 can be an evolution of how Obsidian designs its games and worlds.
So, from what I’ve seen thus far, The Outer Worlds 2 looks promising on several fronts. The reworked RPG elements look like they’ve been made to be more distinct when it comes to the role-playing experience, and the small snippets of gameplay show better accommodation for specific playstyles. And taking a look at the open zone of Golden Ridge gave not just a better sense of scale, but a natural sense of exploration with greater density and purposeful points of interest along the way. Soon, we’ll be diving deeper into combat design and the evolution of the Flaws system as part of IGN First exclusive coverage on The Outer Worlds 2, which also includes a conversation with original Fallout developer and creative director Leonard Boyarsky on how the first game was about establishing a new foundation for Obsidian and this sequel being the idealized version of that initial vision.