It looks like the last two episodes of Noclip's The Outer Worlds documentary are going to be shorter. For the fourth episode, they brought in Obsidian audio director Justin Bell to talk about the music, sound and voice acting. It includes details about the creation of the game's well-received main theme, the challenges of prioritizing sound effects to avoid overwhelming the Unreal Engine's audio thread, the process of "bucketing" voice acting to prevent players from noticing that the entire game is voiced by just forty voice actors, the implementation of the game's context-aware combat barks, and of course the recording of the various corporate jingles.


Justin considers The Outer Worlds to be the best-sounding game he's ever worked on at Obsidian during his tenure there, although here too there were things that had to be cut. Apparently they had some technical issues with certain creature sound effects.