The Outer Worlds Pre-Release Thread [GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Roguey]

Can someone explain to me why people responsible for creation of such cool characters as Magnus, Gar, Virgil etc, shit out whatever it is in this game? Did their brains dry up or smth?

Watching their Fallout LP will confirm this, yes.

 

[Delterius]

 

[LESS T_T]

Gamespot interview: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/why-the-outer-worlds-is-a-dream-project-for-fallou/1100-6463779/

Why The Outer Worlds Is A Dream Project For Fallout Creators Cain And Boyarsky
The time has come.

The reveal of Obsidian Entertainment's The Outer Worlds was a highlight of the The Game Awards 2018. The studio has built up a solid reputation over the years for crafting creative and engrossing narrative-heavy RPGs, and if nothing else, The Outer Worlds shows many signs of being directly inspired by recent entries in the Fallout series, one of which--New Vegas--was developed by Obsidian less than a decade ago. The Outer Worlds is also the brainchild of Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, two creatives with a storied history in PC gaming. Their most notable chapter by far? When they and a small band of collaborators created the original Fallout in the mid '90s. But after following up with Fallout 2, they've had to watch while Bethesda took the series in its own direction--despite being at Obsidian now, neither Cain nor Boyarsky were working there at the time of New Vegas' development.

We recently published a deeper dive into The Outer Worlds that speaks to a behind-closed-doors demo, covering aspects of the game's story, character progression, and combat. In the interview below, we get into the mindset of the two co-directors. It's obvious from the start that they have Fallout on the brain, lending credence to the suspicion that The Outer Worlds bears some striking similarities.

On the other hand, it also veers away from the grime and dirt of a post-apocalyptic Earth in favor a world with vitality. For as much as they are exploring ideas that likely, in some fashion, link back to their days making Fallout, Cain and Boyarsky are most excited about heading into uncharted territory.

Continue reading to hear their thoughts on reuniting after years and games apart, and where they hope to take their audience when The Outer Worlds releases on PC, PS4, and Xbox One in 2019.

What was the feeling in your gut leading up to this reveal?

Tim Cain: We just really wanted to show it. We have all these things that are funny or cool, but we couldn't talk about it.

Leonard Boyarsky: We are very happy with where it's at. We think it looks great, we think it plays great. It's what we wanted to make when we started it, but at the same time you never know how people are going to react. To be able to finally show it and see how people react is cathartic.

I think I've seen you [Boyarsky] quoted online as saying this is a "dream project." What aspect of this, would you say, is the dream?



Leonard Boyarsky

Boyarsky: Oh, it's definitely working with Tim! [laughter] No, but it is though; that is exactly what I meant. I worked on a couple games before Fallout, and Tim worked on a couple games before Fallout, but that was pretty much our start of working on games that we have creative control over. We created Fallout from scratch, we basically had complete creative control and did whatever we wanted to--same thing with Arcanum. It had been a really long time since we created an IP from scratch. We're really good friends, we complement each other's strengths and weaknesses really well. Not many people are fortunate enough to find that kind of person to work with in their careers, and we were lucky that it was very early in our careers and we have this really great synergy when we get together and start doing this stuff.

We've never really made a pure sci-fi game. Fallout was sci-fi, but it was more post-apocalyptic than sci-fi. So it was one of these things where we're really big fans of science fiction; I personally love fantasy, but I much prefer science fiction if I have to choose between them. So it was weird that we'd never gotten around to do one, and when this opportunity came up it was like, "Yes, I can work with Tim again and we can create an IP from scratch!" It was basically this laundry list of things that I thought...that the next game I wanted to work on would be if I could say "here's the stuff I want to do," and this was it.

If you can really put yourself back in your own shoes in the '90s, compared to today, what aspect of your current responsibilities do you love, and what do you miss from those times that you worked in an attic, and…

Boyarsky: Well for me I still love the things I loved then, creating a world from scratch, it's just the best part about this. I love creating unique worlds with a unique feel and a unique look. The thing I do have to say I miss is that when we made Fallout and Arcanum, it was a very small team. We got to do all the stuff we're doing now but we also got to do…Tim did programming, I did design, like a lot of art on Fallout. I was the lead artist and the art director, and I was also doing like havlf the animations in the game, modelling stuff, texture mapping. I didn't end up scripting on that one, but I scripted in Arcanum. Working on those small teams you end up having your hand in everything.

For [The Outer Worlds] we are much more directors. It's our vision, but we have a lot of very talented and wonderful people that we're working with who have done things that, especially from an art standpoint, I don't know that I would have brought it in that direction, but in a good way. We pointed them in a direction and they ran in directions that we never could have anticipated. In a way that's very rewarding because you feel like you gave people a germ of an idea and they got to make it their own and it comes back to you and you see what people have done. But on the other hand, I'm not in there doing that every day. I'm making sure people are heading to the right destination and fulfilling our vision of the game. I've been able to do some writing, some hands-on art direction, but for the most part a lot of people are doing the actual nuts-and-bolts work that we used to do on a day-to-day basis.


Tim Cain

Cain: Plus, one thing, in the '90s you could do things no one had ever done before because everything was so young and it was a bit of a Wild West of an industry. Now every time you think of something and you look, it's like, "Oh, this game did it. This indie game did it five years ago." It's hard to think of something that is completely original.

We managed to put some things in here that I've never seen done in a game. In that way, I kinda miss that…the sky was the limit back then. If you could think about it, you could do it.

Boyarsky: Well a perfect example of that is, when we made Arcanum, I didn't even really know what steampunk was. Now there is like every kind of punk there is. When we started talking about this game and the setting we had to be very careful not to fall into this pre-defined thing that has been done before. That's very important to us. We didn't want people to look at it and know exactly what this is, because people didn't do that with Fallout because nobody had seen something like that before. Between now and then, there's been every kind of mish mash of different styles. I mean, hopefully people took inspiration for Fallout for some of that stuff.

Cain: We didn't want to make Tolkien with machine guns. One thing I've done, every time I ship a game I write a postmortem, just for myself; it doesn't get published. I write a postmortem of everything I think went right and wrong, and I also keep notes whenever I have an idea. So I went through them for this game and found some ideas from a few years ago that I'd like to try out. And here's what I thought went wrong with Temple, or Vampire, or Fallout.

I even write, I probably shouldn't, but every time I play a Fallout game I write a postmortem for it. I have a postmortem for Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and New Vegas, even though I didn't work on them. So I read through all those notes, to recall what I thought they did right and what I thought they did wrong. And that influenced a lot of what I'm doing with this game.

How often, if ever, do industry trends or audience demands seep into your priorities?

Boyarsky: A lot less than we probably should. [laughter] We've always been really interested in making the games that we don't think are out there. Maybe there's a good reason why some of them aren't out there.

Cain: We always like to joke, "Let's just make the games we like, and hopefully people will play them." We have been trying to understand what people have been asking for. I know when we put our combat system together, it was really important that it be an RPG, but people really want…

Boyarsky: Yeah but it's less of a thing where we go, "Look at what people are looking for." We really don't want people to be saying, "Wow, this is a great RPG, you know the combat is just okay, but the RPG stuff is great."

One of our goals is that we want combat to be fun. Obviously our combat isn't going to be as good as Call of Duty because that's not what we are here to do. So, in that aspect when we set out to do something like that, well then what would people think is a fun combat system? What do people want from a combat system that they would consider fun? I think we've been in that mode for years, but I'm not sure that we've ever focused on those things as much as we have with this one.

I think it's much more a matter of, I don't want to say age, but just the length of time doing this. Earlier on Tim was saying that when we set out to make this thing that's a conglomeration of '50s and Road Warrior and pulp sci-fi, that wasn't something that people had done before, or the aspect of it where it's very gray morality and you could play anyway you wanted to play. With those things, because as Tim said that was a time when it was the Wild West where nobody had done that stuff before, now we have to look at what hasn't been served. We don't want to just rehash old ground. That's how we look at what people might want or what needs to be done in other games. Sometimes it might even inform, I don't want to say negative, but it might reinforce the opposite.

Like, a lot of games are going towards cinematic storytelling, but to do that you have to have a voiced protagonist. One of our main goals here, as with all of the games we made together, we want people to be able to play this game any way they want to play. We want the person who wants to play as the upstanding, righteous hero who would never do anything a little bit gray to have fun and role-play the way they want to, as much as the person who wants to play the psychopath that wants to kill everyone in their way. Both of those should be fun. But if we picked a voice for you or a character for you that was premade, then no matter how much we let you tweak it, it still feels like there's a part of it that wasn't decided by me. I think it's both things: What do we think is really cool that hasn't been done, but what are things that people are doing? Do we want to take that, or do we want to keep it more old-school because this is what we get from it?

 

[The Great ThunThun*]

Some general opinions:

> Gothic combat was good.

It was not. Stop deluding yourselves. Gothic Exploration and Quest/Faction design were good. COmbat was okayish. This is a common fanboy mistake, to think everything in a game that was good was also good. Don't do it.

> Combat in Outer worlds will be good/bad

We have no clue. It will most probably be bad considering Tim Cain/ Obsidian record. But that is not why we play Obsidian games. In fact, this game has some potential if it is designed for the strength of Obsidian/ Tim Cain. That latter of which is Setting design.

> Enemies are HP sponge

Color me surprised if they are not. Name one Single player FPS where they are not. Games like Hitman are an exception because they are not combat-focused games.

 

[SpoilVictor]

I don't know it is something odd with movement or it is 'cause they use controller (I've never used controller in FPS game so can someone confirm), but game looks like one of those old on-rail shooters.

 

[Paul_cz]

That hitler parody is fucking gold. Really sharp writing. The line about waypoint killed me.

I played the first new one, and it was really not that great, especially level design, character progression and story were not great, I am a settingfag and I love cyberpunk so I finished it but I couldn't even tell you what the game was about if you put a gun to my head. Is the second one an improvement, or is it just more of the same?

I enjoyed witcher 3, by the way.

Mankind Divided was good. I liked it more than HR. Prague is more interesting setting (even as butchered as it was language-wise) and it is a true urban RPG - it reminded me of Vampire Bloodlines a LOT, particularly in its emphasis on sidequests and some reactivity. I would even say it is its spiritual successor more than sequel to Deus Ex. It has some flaws but the atmosphere is awesome. And it took me some 60 hours to play through, which is substantial.

 

[Terenty]

Boyarsky: For [The Outer Worlds] we are much more directors. It's our vision, but we have a lot of very talented and wonderful people that we're working with who have done things that, especially from an art standpoint, I don't know that I would have brought it in that direction, but in a good way. We pointed them in a direction and they ran in directions that we never could have anticipated. In a way that's very rewarding because you feel like you gave people a germ of an idea and they got to make it their own and it comes back to you and you see what people have done. But on the other hand, I'm not in there doing that every day. I'm making sure people are heading to the right destination and fulfilling our vision of the game. I've been able to do some writing, some hands-on art direction, but for the most part a lot of people are doing the actual nuts-and-bolts work that we used to do on a day-to-day basis.

Pack it up guys, its officially gonna suck

 

[Butter]

Imagine Cain and Boyarsky not wanting to micro-manage a project of this scale.

 

[Roguey]

Imagine Cain and Boyarsky not wanting to micro-manage a project of this scale.

They're not Feargus.

 

[Father Foreskin]

"Project of this scale"

 

[toro]

List of Obsidian games with good combat:

List of Troika games with good combat:

List of Black Isle games with good combat:

It hurts !?

 

[Orma]

I warned you guys about Tim Cain when I posted his Steam account with all those hundreds of hours put in all the Boderlands games.

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197979050578/games/?tab=all

Tim "Borderlands and Skyrim" Cain.

Additionally, guess who's already spent more hours playing Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel than Wasteland 2? Here's a hint: There are some who call him Tim.

It was only up to you to listen.

On a similiar note, Josh is playing a LOT of skyrim these days.

Probably studying for an upcoming microsoft project.

 

[Crooked Bee]

lol

 

[Nano]

Jesus, I was shocked before I noticed it's a fan account.

 

[Quillon]

That shitty account has 14k followers already, powa of mainstream.

 

[Morgoth]

I warned you guys about Tim Cain when I posted his Steam account with all those hundreds of hours put in all the Boderlands games.

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197979050578/games/?tab=all

Tim "Borderlands and Skyrim" Cain.

Additionally, guess who's already spent more hours playing Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel than Wasteland 2? Here's a hint: There are some who call him Tim.

It was only up to you to listen.

On a similiar note, Josh is playing a LOT of skyrim these days.

Probably studying for an upcoming microsoft project.

So is Backspace getting made? Sure would piss off Todd even more than TOW.

 

[Roguey]

So is Backspace getting made? Sure would piss Todd off even more than TOW.

Backspace was a forced Jason Fader meme. https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...jects-at-eurogamer.118229/page-3#post-5305714

 

[Infinitron]

Yeah, I learned a little bit about Backspace a while back. It was never much more than a personal project of Jason Fader (who later left Obsidian and almost tanked the System Shock 1 remake). Somebody leaked word of it to Kotaku and they hyped it up to be a bigger deal than what it was.

 

[Nano]

So is Backspace getting made? Sure would piss off Todd even more than TOW.

Obsidian still has the rights for Backspace's story, but I doubt they'll do anything with it. See: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/93860-the-fate-of-obsidians-backspace/

 

[Fedora Master]

I'm preemptively laughing at anyone who thinks this might be a good game.

 

[Terenty]

Its not a Tim and Leo game, they are not even doing anything here hands on. Its a game made essentially by the same people that granted us such masterpieces as POE and POE 2 and whatever else they've been doing these past 10 years. Make of this what you want

 

[Fairfax]

That shitty account has 14k followers already, powa of mainstream.

That account used to be "Fallout 76 News HQ", managed by the bethdrone from sugarbombed who interviewed MCA a while ago. With F76 being a shitshow, it seems he tried to retcon the account's past, and stole the followers to get a head start within TOW fandom. The guy may be over being a bethdrone, but there's plenty of Bethesda in him.

 

[Sailor Woedica]

That shitty account has 14k followers already, powa of mainstream.

Running a pillars of eternity/brockhampton/outer worlds tumblr rn has been pretty good too :nail polish emoji:

 

[Delterius]

That shitty account has 14k followers already, powa of mainstream.

That account used to be "Fallout 76 News HQ", managed by the bethdrone from sugarbombed who interviewed MCA a while ago. With F76 being a shitshow, it seems he tried to retcon the account's past, and stole the followers to get a head start within TOW fandom. The guy may be over being a bethdrone, but there's plenty of Bethesda in him.

Hell hath no fury like a bethesderp scorned.

 

[Jarpie]

Have to say, the timing for The Outer Worlds couldn't be better, at least for the announcement. There haven't been really any good first-person action rpgs for a good while, Bethesda has lost a lot of goodwill from the potential customers, and even though I'm suspicious of the current writing staff in Obsidian, at least TOW looks (much) more fun than Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2. Also, it seems to be light-hearted and at least try to be fun and adventurous, which I think people are really graving nowadays. One type of game I'd love to play, written by very competent writers, would be The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. crpg...of course, with Bruce Campbell in the very prominent VA-role.