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Cain and his co-director Leonard Boyarsky knew what they had to live up to with The Outer Worlds, shipping an Obsidian RPG—especially since they created Fallout, and Obsidian hadn't made a game in this style since 2010's New Vegas. Before they even had concept artists, they'd written more than 100 pages of worldbuilding material, defining voice and technology and corporations down to specific word choices: Robots have circuit boards, but they don't have chips.

"We got really picky like that. For me, I want to know that 10 years from now, when I'm probably not working on this, that it's still the game I imagined," he says. "Plus, I saw Fallout going in a different direction. No fault of their own—we didn't leave a lot of notes around. So as people started working on it, they had to play the game and go, 'I think this is what they meant...'"​

They did their best to cross every T and dot every I, but what ended up being most surprising about The Outer Worlds was its painless launch. That's the other thing Obsidian's games in this style, like New Vegas and Knights of the Old Republic 2, are known for: Being a bit buggy.

Cain says they were prepared to crunch after release, fixing crashes and issues players ran into. But it was so smooth, they've been able to take a breather and take some time before the first patch, which should be out soon, and respond to some more substantial feedback.

"Somebody found a place that it consistently crashed, but just on one platform, and then there's been another bug where sometimes companions get in a bad state in your ship," Cain says. "But for the most part the things we're fixing are things people have asked for, like larger fonts."

Another quality of life issue he intends to fix is that vending machines don't show how much you're carrying, which makes selling items while over-encumbered a tedious process. There's also difficulty, which came as a surprise: Many players have asked for a harder setting that doesn't come with the restrictions of the Supernova difficulty. He's got a list of UI things to address, and hopes to put out a second update around Christmas, once more player feedback comes in. But when we spoke, it was definitely time for a well-earned victory lap.

I asked Cain about the creation of one of our favorite characters in The Outer Worlds, the robot SAM. The idea for SAM, a no-personality no-illusions-of-humanity plain' ol robot, was to build a companion for players who wanted to play without the "peskiness" of companions having their own sidequests, but with some of their advantages.

Writer Megan Starks took on Sam, and Cain told her: "It's not sentient. But it's programmed to be upbeat, trying to be helpful. It seems everything through the lens of its programming, which is, 'I clean things."

"She wrote some really awesome stuff, Cain says. It says things sometimes that you're like, is it being meta? It's saying something just about cleaning but it's actually sometimes social commentary, too. We had originally thought he was going to be more robotic and it was Megan who said, 'I think it should sound like they recorded a salesman at the factory, who was super excited like, 'Oh my God, I get to be the voice of a robot.'"

So far The Outer Worlds seems to be the kind of success story that makes you wonder why Obsidian hadn't made a game in this style for so long. According to Cain, it wasn't for lack of wanting—it's just been hard to get them made.

"This is the form of a game I love to play," he says. "It's not necessarily open world, because we get tighter control over what kind of narrative we tell. Hub and spoke, is what a lot of people call it. First-person gives us a cool immersion. I know Leonard mentioned once years ago that we had already planned to take Fallout first person after Fallout 2.

"I don't know why a lot of publishers think nobody wants to play this. Part of the reason Obsidian hasn't done it, is because publishers didn't want them. Now Microsoft, I think, is going to keep making stuff in this vein, because this looks so popular. But I can tell you three years ago, not a lot of people were interested in this style of game and Private Division took a chance, and they were really good."

For now, he's got a few months of work ahead to take feedback on The Outer Worlds and prepare that second patch. After that? Well, nothing's official, but it sounds like there's more Space Capitalism ahead.

"I want people to play for awhile and then see what the friction points are and see if there are bugs we missed, put out something before or after Christmas and then think about sequel," says Cain with perhaps just a bit of a twinkle in his eye. "I don't think we're probably going to talk about that. But I'm thinking about it."
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Instead of giving us the usual freedom to become a soon-heroic, god-chosen nobody, Disco Elysium puts the player in the tear-and-alcohol-soaked shoes of a particular *somebody*. That somebody has a name, a face (sort of), a semblance of life, and a long history of destructive self-abuse, all of which slowly resurface during the course of the game.

While it may seem somewhat restrictive to disallow self-insertion in a cRPG, it helps the story to focus on the inner turmoil of our character as much as on the people and events that surround him. After all, the game’s original title used to be No Truce With The Furies, and that alone illustrates pretty well how important it must have been for the authors to have a singular ruined soul at the epicenter of the narrative. Since one obviously cannot construct effective personal drama for all possible player avatars (the only guaranteed common trait being player agency), the authors made the furies torment our hero through his prior life. It’s one of the instances where Disco Elysium’s PC-centric pen-and-paper origins shine through and affect the standard cRPG conventions. The scope is narrower but more focused, intimate, intense. A bit like that other text-heavy RPG with a set protagonist.

To dial it back a little and return us to the dimension of *computer* role-playing games and their freedom to play as whomever thou wilt, ZA/UM employs an obscure literary trope known as “total retrograde amnesia.” Or was it a selective memory wipe? A mere pretense fueled by shame? Repressed memories? Something more supra-natural? The reason for blanking out is up to the player to establish later down the line. Whatever the cause, only our past is set in stone, and it is for us to decide what kind of person we will become by the time all hell inevitably breaks loose.

The first step on the path of self-discovery is to distribute 8 points between the four main attributes: intelligence, psyche, physique, and motorics. Each attribute governs 6 thematically appropriate skills that may range from something as simple as Logic or Endurance to the more esoteric Inland Empire and Shivers. I highly recommend everyone to read their full descriptions, even if you don’t plan on investing in some of the skills. Besides providing clues and tips on what attributes to pick for certain archetypes, they’re simply a joy to read.

What really stands out when you start familiarizing yourself with the skills is how difficult it may be to fit some of them into the existing RPG categories. It takes a bit of time with the game to truly get what Esprit de Corps is really about, for example. What do Shivers actually do? What’s the difference between Drama and Suggestion? The skill selection might be the player’s first encounter with the experimental side of Disco Elysium, a sign of things to come. It only gets weirder - and sadder.

After a binge of world-ending proportions, our nameless, featureless, and pantsless hero wakes up on the floor, in a room, in a city, on a continent; all of them totally unknown and mysterious (except maybe the floor). How does one proceed under such arcane circumstances? By initiating an inner monologue of course! But who does the talking? Your skills, my liege. Depending on your choices during character creation, it may be Inland Empire lamenting that we didn’t get to see what was on the other side of the killer debauch, or Logic trying to piece something together from what little information about our current situation we have, or Pain Threshold welcoming the anguish that comes with being alive. They start talking when you regain some of your higher cognitive faculties and don’t shut up until the credits roll.

The easiest way to understand how you interact with your skills is to imagine the bicameral mind and-- that’s it, actually. That is exactly how it’s done. The player is in control of what the cop (ah, that’s one mystery solved) says and does, and your skills do most of the background thinking, guiding you to failure and regret (and an occasional triumph).

Oddly enough, each of them has a distinct personality and a... portrait. In a lesser RPG, these could have been templates for the player’s potential party members. They’re chatty, opinionated, and, most importantly, often fallible. Half Light, the mix of a psychotic barbarian and a scaredy-cat which is supposed to represent your fight-or-flight response and vigilance in the face of danger, will misjudge the gravity of a situation as often as assess one correctly. Despite its strong-willed facade, Authority often acts as a feeble sleazeball that tries to exploit its position in the warrior caste and use it as a lever to subjugate other people and get RESPECT. Conceptualization is just a third year humanities student always looking for opportunities to turn life into a living canvas. Fair enough. 24 almost-people to see you through this week-long hangover.​

Due to some pesky life stuff, we haven’t been able to finalize what we needed to for the beta — primarily driving enemies and some visual anomalies that need updating like mesh-swapping armor pieces working and some effects that will make gameplay more clear. Our newest alpha build featuring the start of those will be up in the next few days, followed by a video showcasing the beta, and releasing it on the 15th of November. A thousand apologies for the delay — we're very excited to finally get it in your hands, and will be on track for a 2020 release.

Beta testers, you’ll be getting an email when that’s available regarding what help we’re looking for with the start of the game. It'll explain what we can focus on tweaking with your suggestions while adding more of those maps in as we continue to finish stitching them together.

Dialogue

The new dialogue layout is pretty slick, using the power of multiple cameras! The characters are all animating 3d models from the game-world who gesture with their chat bubbles. Keywords are thought bubbles, and you get a little report card for people you meet with any known info you've obtained that's important. Aptitudes also use this and show their roll info in their own panels nearby. This was a social roll to get this drunk to follow you around.

Ruleset

The last update we talked about the RISK meter and segmenting turns to different party members. Shortly after we tested and discussed this companion-combat with some of our Alpha backers, we decided to roll back to single-player turn-based combat. Companions will remain auxiliary and the player can direct general commands to (move/attack/talk) as originally planned. Defend is now a normal action you can roll for while playing. Companions are both other agents, hires, and anyone on the street if you can charm/bio-hack them.

Map Stitching

A big part of 2019 activities involved revising some code to get more enemies on screen, better performance with the line of sight transparency and black, as well as stitching together the map. Map loading is so 1999 [insert plethora of games that already got around it], and 20 years later I think we can dismiss it as lazy. And disruptive! I think back to a game like Dungeon Siege, and it was really neat that the whole game was just one enormous map you wade through — it really pits you in the world, rather than seeing it as a small art piece or tactical map.

For a more modern city, having interiors, rooftops, and underground all webbed together gives a much more organic feel, and a lot more tactical variance. This is also effective for the combat and NPC sensory mechanics — with a wide open and expansive the map, not having the safety of a loaded room also makes you vulnerable. Climb a roof and jump into a 3rd story window to escape some gang members, and they could follow, or be welcomed by a bunch of winos with broken bottles inside to surround you.

The Mega-Map is also a very organic way of going from block-to-block in the wilds of Calitana, and it's fun to just rage-drive your way out of a block if you need to get outside quickly. Prior to this map to map points always bottle-necked into large gates to transition scenes, but now there can be multiple streets that exit.

Between more populated towns (city blocks) there lies the urban wilderness, or more appropriately, urban wasteland. With grids down, civilians abandon these areas, and the streets are held by the gang and the gun, and a good taxi or a Treader with a turret attached are your best bets to get through.
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It’s been a couple of months since we released the backer Alpha, and while game development continues, we’ve been incorporating bug reports and feedback. While most of the results are being kept in-house so we can work on them, determine best steps forward, etc. we have a few fun highlights to share with you further down this update.

Alongside the Alpha, Wasteland 3 was at gamescom, where we debuted a new trailer, had hands-on with the game both behind closed doors with press and in the Deep Silver and Xbox booths, and were ecstatic to have been awarded “Best RPG” at the show.

X019
We’re happy to announce that we will be attending X019! Tickets are still available to purchase. If you’re going, be sure to stop by and say hello, and of course don’t miss the Inside Xbox livestream at 12pm PDT on November 14 for plenty of Xbox Game Studios news and announcements.

More info on the X019 page here: https://www.xbox.com/x019

Steel Horse
The Kodiak is your vehicle in Wasteland 3, and as you can customize and outfit your team of Rangers, so too can you upgrade and outfit your vehicle to get around Colorado. We think of the Kodiak as a full-fledged member of the team, and it’s a big part of your play experience. It gets you around the world map, but even more important are its capabilities in combat. Changing paint schemes and visual appearances is awesome (and will offer a ton of customization), but making it tougher and more formidable against your enemies will be what transforms it from a junker to a high-end war machine.

We’re going to give you a little sneak peek of some concepts for the turrets you can attach to the Kodiak in Wasteland 3—which is the most powerful weapon slot type you can equip. The Railgun you’ve likely already seen from the Alpha, but there are a few new ones below.



More from Cologne
There was also a ton of coverage from gamescom from Brian Fargo and Game Director Tim Campbell, as well as interviews from Lead Level Designer Jeremy Kopman who we sent out to San Francisco to get the game in front of US press sites.

Here’s just a small smattering of the coverage that came out of it:

• COGConnected
• GamesRadar+
• Hardcore Gamer
• IGN
• PC World
• Polygon
• VentureBeat
• WCCFTech

Thanks for reading, and we’re looking forward to seeing you at X019!​