In a special episode of their podcast, yesterday Game Informer published their concluding interview with Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky about The Outer Worlds. The interview was a massive 70 minutes long and featured dozens of questions solicited from the community over the past half-week. Rather than attempt to summarize all of it, I figured I'd share my two main takeaways from the interview. First of all, the game is an advanced stage of development - more-or-less content-complete and playable from start to finish. Tim and Leonard have moved on to tasks such as polishing the user interface and overseeing voice-over production. I don't know if the August release date that was accidentally leaked by Steam last week is accurate, but the game is definitely coming out this year, and maybe sooner than you think.

That brings us to my second takeaway, which is that Tim and Leonard have had to make some tough choices to meet that release window. Over the course of the interview, they speak several times of features and content that they were forced to cut, ranging from unarmed combat to background-based choice & consequence to a questline involving corporate intrigue. The game has a day-night cycle, but no NPC schedules. Modding weapons is in, but crafting them from scratch is out (although that's actually good). Beyond that, there are the expected sacrifices to the gods of the mass market, most notably the fact that the game has not been designed with disabled quest markers in mind (and in fact, there currently is no option to disable them, although Tim and Leonard promise they'll look into that). For better or worse, it's an extraordinarily honest interview, and I recommend listening if you have the time:


So that's the end of Game Informer's month-long Outer Worlds bonanza. We won't have to wait long to see the game again though, because Tim and Leonard are giving a talk about it at PAX East in a few weeks, on March 30th.