The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition - Obsidian's first-person sci-fi RPG set in a corporate space colony

[Infinitron]

First patch on the way, thinking about the sequel: https://www.pcgamer.com/how-tim-cai...de-it-into-the-outer-worlds-as-an-easter-egg/

How Tim Cain's hatred of white chocolate made it into The Outer Worlds as an Easter egg
The dev team hid a white chocolate bar in the game—and 17 real ones in Tim Cain's office. He hasn't found them all yet.

The next time I tell someone I love chocolate, a voice in the back of my head will be calling me a liar. Love? It'll say. You only like chocolate. Tim Cain? Tim Cain loves chocolate. I talked to the co-director of The Outer Worlds a week after its successful launch, eager to ask what was next, but first we ended up talking about chocolate.

It ties back into The Outer Worlds, though. I promise.

"We usually have chocolate meetings now," he says as soon as we start talking. "Every day at 2:30, I send out on a chocolate Slack channel that I have new chocolate. We had enough bandwidth it deserved its own channel. I usually send out the [details]: If it's single origin, what country it's from, the cacao percentage, any flavoring agents. We all eat a piece and we talk about it and then I blog it, and so that way I have a list of everything chocolate I've eaten since 1993 and whether I liked it."

That's a cool 26 years of dedicated chocolate logging, which means that since well before he made Fallout, Tim Cain has been refining his cacoa palate. With development wrapped, The Outer Worlds may not need daily chocolate meetings anymore, but the team at Obsidian still managed to immortalize this particular idiosyncrasy in the game itself. Like the best Easter eggs, this one only means something when you learn a little bit about the people behind it.

"We have our own chocolate variant called CCN 76" in The Outer Worlds, Cain says. "Right before we certed the base game, I caught my lead designer—he tried to sneak in 'Tim Cain's White Chocolate Yummies' and I found it, because it was a piece of text."

Important Tim Cain fact: He loves chocolate, but white chocolate? Nah. Mostly trash, though he admits he's had a few good ones in 26 years. Back to the Easter Egg."So I found the thing and I deleted it all. Unbeknownst to me, and I discovered this after we certed, he went to an artist and had them write that into the art. So you can't search for it and it's on a character that you were highly unlikely to kill. But he didn't know I was playing a game where I was killing everybody, because I wanted to make sure you could do that and it's fun. I killed that person and [saw it] and then I went to his office but it was too late, we had already certed. So it's in the game."

They got him.

It doesn't seem like an exaggeration to say that chocolate played an important role in The Outer Worlds' development. In the town of Roseway, there's a bar called the 17th Bar, and it, too, is the result of a complex prank on Tim Cain.

"Somebody, about halfway through development, hid 17 white chocolate bars in my office," Cain says. "There was a note on my desk made of cutout letters. They put a lot of time into this. It looked like a ransom note and said, 'I've hidden 17 bars of white chocolate in your room. Have fun.' Knowing I hate it.

"I looked everywhere. The first day I could only find 13. Over the next week, week and a half, I found another three. I never found the 17th one. So then Tyson, the level designer, he was sitting next door. He put a bar in Roseway called The 17th Bar, that you can go and get drinks at. When you walk in, it's got that big flickering light and he says, "I just wanted you to remember the 17th bar." So talk about an Easter egg that doesn't mean anything, except to people who were here at Obsidian working on this project."

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."

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Emerald Vale quest is an allegory to the current state of the video game industry. Gamers are getting sick because they're subsisting on garbage packaged as fresh content. The only way to cure them is to take the corpses of older video games and grind them up into fertilizer for new ones.
Damn.
Deep.

 

[Infinitron]

Here's an interview from last week that we missed: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/what-makes-an-interesting-npc-the-outer-worlds-dev/1100-6471072/

What Makes An Interesting NPC? The Outer Worlds Devs Reveal Tricks Of The Trade
A look into Obsidian Entertainment's thoughtful approach to characters and dialogue.

Who doesn't love a good-old video game hero? The power, the glory, the gravitational pull that brings items, quests, and excitement your way--heroes make the game, right? Well, yes and no. In the case of The Outer Worlds, and plenty of other games from Obsidian Entertainment, you, AKA the hero, are rarely the most interesting person in the room. Obsidian is well known for crafting offbeat personalities and for writing clever dialogue that makes its RPGs almost endlessly entertaining, and the recent release of The Outer Worlds serves as a strong reminder why the team deserves that reputation.

We recently had the chance to sit down with narrative designer, Nitai Poddar, and co-game director, Leonard Boyarsky, to discuss what goes into the creation of an NPC at Obsidian. It's no accident that characters like the Moon Man in The Outer Worlds wind up stealing the show, and to hear the two creators discuss their process, it's evident that the people behind these memorable characters get just as much enjoyment out of them as we do.

If you're still on the fence about giving Obsidian's latest game a try, have a look at our Outer Worlds review by Edmond Tran, which goes into great detail describing what's in store for the curious explorer.

Editor's Note: The following interview has been lightly edited for better clarity and flow.

Where does the character creation process begin, and does Obsidian, as a whole, have a process for developing characters?

Boyarsky: I think it's different for every project as well as different parts of the same project. In general we come up with an outline of what we want to do in general for the entire game. And then, you know, the setting generates some characters, the story you want to tell generates some character ideas. It all has to do with the confluence of events that lead you to that character. Characters should feel like they existed before then, so you have to place them in the world. It's just kind of… we could start from any number of places for the actual character. You could start with a character you like from other media like a book or a movie, just a very basic idea. You know this is this character's reason for existence, and just go from there.

Poddar: I think there are a couple things that Obsidian tries to do, studio-wise, as it relates to designing characters. I don't know if other studios do this, but traditionally at Obsidian, not just for The Outer Worlds, but for previous games, a narrative designer usually has control of a companion. As the companions get written they are divvied among the narrative designers and we tend to pick one and take them in whatever direction we want. We also like to explore particular ideas in an area. If an area in The Outer Worlds, like the Groundbreaker, has a particular conflict, or Edgewater has a particular conflict, in order to explore that conflict we will craft a character who is deeply invested in that problem somehow. So there isn't really a separation between character and area or character and story. They go hand in hand.

Are there any traits or tropes that are off-limits?

Boyarsky: Stuff that feels overdone, but sometimes taking something that's overdone and doing it in a new way can be more interesting. You know, subverting player expectations. We always like to do things that feel a little different, that feel off-center, that you're not going to see anywhere else. I would think anyone trying to tell good stories or create good characters would avoid flat characters--characters that just exist to get you to the next plot point.

Poddar: Yah if there is, I haven't found it yet. The sign of a successful character is that people tend to like it or see the value in that character. Like you said, the characters we try to avoid are just RPG characters that have nothing to say and no real investment outside of their quest. I don't really think we tend to think of our characters as tropes. We are more interested in motivation and what they have to say, their dialogue, and their personality.

Spoiler

How does the framework for what a character can be change between projects? I imagine the technical side of things must have an impact.

Boyarsky: Some stuff is determined by the structure of the game, whether its an isometric game--Pillars [Of Eternity] had a lot of narration as well as dialogue--but I think in general you can say the same thing for any of our games. It's dictated by the needs of the story. You know: what would be a great character, what's a great way within the context of that game to develop the character and express that to the player?

Poddar: Yeah, Pillars was definitely much more literary. You had a narrator, and that narrator could provide storytelling context, like the characters expression, or tone of voice through narration. We can't really do that in our game, so we have to rely almost exclusively on what the character says, maybe sometimes what they look like or what gestures they give based on our animation. That's pretty much the extent of it. They are two very different styles of game, isometric versus something that feels much more immersive in a first-person way. They engender different ways of making a character.

How do you maintain a level of quality and consistency when it comes to the range of characters and stories you're trying to explore?

Poddar: We have a really experienced narrative design team. They've been doing this for a while. Some of that is just instinct at this point. They know how many options need to go into a particular conversation, what a well-fleshed-out NPC with lots of choices looks like.

I think we are also somewhat spoiled by our tools. The tools guys at Obsidian made just an incredible custom tool to manage conversations. It makes it so easy, relatively speaking, to put together this elaborate tree of choices, to block things off, to enable other options as they open up. Once you get used to it, it's very easy to write. We are, to an extent, as good as our tools are.

Boyarski: Yeah, in the past I had to use Excel to write dialogue, which is...you start kind of throwing everything at the wall and pull your hair out as you're trying to make the whole thing make sense and come together. This tool is a lot easier to use.



What are some of the unexpected ways you need to be creative in the face of technological constraints?

Poddar: I think our constraints are not so much limited by our tools, but self-imposed. For example: We have a budget for each character. Let's say you have a character that must give you a particular quest, we need to use that budget of lines in a way that gets the quest to the player but we also have to have reactivity. What if the player is playing a character with low intelligence? We have to spend some of that budget on dumb dialogue choices. What if the player has completed the quest already before speaking to the NPC? We have to account for that. It's very much a game of knowing exactly how much room you have to spend on an NPC and making the most of that.

What was the vision for Parvati, the first Outer Worlds companion, going into her development?

Boyarsky: She was written originally by Chris Latoi, and then taken over by Kate Dollarhyde. One of the things that I think is really great about Obsidian is that maybe we'll have a general archetype for a character, or a place we want them to fit in the story, but after that, the writer is free to develop the character as they work on them. That's the most organic way of creating interesting characters, you find stuff as you're writing the character. So I wouldn't want to put a lot of words in their mouths in terms of what they were trying to accomplish with her. As with all of our characters, we are trying to create interesting characters that are based off a specific archetype, but then they really become, hopefully, feeling like living and breathing characters that react to the situation you're in, that react to the other companions or NPCs in the world. Parvati, for instance, she has a job that's kind of demeaning to her--not the job itself, she loves the job of being a mechanic, but the boss she has is a little demeaning to her. She just wants to be able to experience the freedom of flying around the system. I thought she was a very well envisioned character.

Poddar: She was a favorite in the office. Now that the game is pretty much done and people are playing it all the way through, I get this comment a lot: hey, Parvati is awesome. People tend to love her and it's not surprising to me that she is a favorite. She is designed to be likeable, she's kind of the conscience of the party. She was inspired by a little bit by Kaylee of Firefly. The old line in describing Kaylee is that whatever Kaylee says, she is probably right. That is largely true to Parvati. It's a dystopian setting where people tend to buy and sell their morality, but Parvati has a very strong center. She's also the first companion you run into, so she's kind of doing double duty in that we want to introduce the player to the concept of companions, rather than get them used to how the companions system works in combat and conversation. So she's a good first companion to pick up because she's so likeable.

Boyarsky: She's really interesting in that we were looking at Firefly as one of our inspirations, but I feel like she kind of organically became a little bit like Kaylee. She actually has a similar job, she's the mechanic, but we didn't set out to make our companion who's pretty much like her. She just started becoming more like her as we were developing her. It was very interesting. I still feel she has her own voice and characterization.

Is the process of developing the first companion drastically different than the others?

Poddar: It's pretty different, because that companion now needs to be very closely tied with the first area that you explore, which is in and of itself a tutorial area. Everything in the Emerald Vale area is doing double duty. It has to function as a fun, complete area where you have a bunch of quests and content, that we're introducing you to the setting, but it's also the tutorial area. You get your first combat-related quest, we kind of slowly ramp you up. So, she has a lot more content that is closely tied to that area, more than say one of the other companions who would have in the areas that you find them.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

How the hell would they know?

 

[Dishonoredbr]

First patch on the way, thinking about the sequel: https://www.pcgamer.com/how-tim-cai...de-it-into-the-outer-worlds-as-an-easter-egg/

How Tim Cain's hatred of white chocolate made it into The Outer Worlds as an Easter egg

How Tim can be such evil guy?? Why White chocolate so good yet Tim hates such decline.. I think i gonna finally drop Obisidian, this is too much. I really thought Tim was a good guy

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Nothing about DLCs? Strange. Perhaps it's Private Division not wanting to support building up TOW brand since they have no rights for the sequel.

 

[Trashos]

Poddar: As the companions get written they are divvied among the narrative designers and we tend to pick one and take them in whatever direction we want.

That's the problem right there.

What was the vision for Parvati, the first Outer Worlds companion, going into her development?
Boyarsky: She was written originally by Chris Latoi, and then taken over by Kate Dollarhyde. One of the things that I think is really great about Obsidian is that maybe we'll have a general archetype for a character, or a place we want them to fit in the story, but after that, the writer is free to develop the character as they work on them. That's the most organic way of creating interesting characters, you find stuff as you're writing the character. So I wouldn't want to put a lot of words in their mouths in terms of what they were trying to accomplish with her.

 

[Sailor Woedica]

Perhaps.. DLC? hm

Josh is going to be there too!

 

[Nano]

Chris Latoi

lel

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

 

[Jimmious]

How did this sell? Do we have any indication?

 

[CyberModuled]

"Corporate mandate homosexuality"

 

[LizardWizard]

How did this sell? Do we have any indication?

Mainstreamy New Vegas (which sold like 12m) fans overwhelmingly love it. TOW reddit went from 30k to 100k in like a week

 

[rusty_shackleford]

"Corporate mandate homosexuality"

Jontron has had a rough few years

 

[Kaivokz]

Question about the last step of Max's quest:

Spoiler

What happens when you use the high intelligence/perception option after using the drugs? Does he stay committed to the Universal Equation?

 

[DalekFlay]

Hmm strange,i didn't had such problems. Must be the v sink,because that is the only different option between us, i always turn it off.

I have it off, I use a g-sync monitor.

I always cap my frame rate to whatever bottom minimum frame rate that I get. hypothetical example: say I'm playing a game and it chugs inside towns and drops to 48fps, but outside I can get 100fps, well then that means I cap it to 48fps and I play it at 48fps.

100+fps 95% of the time dropping to 70 in big cities is far less noticeably bad than running at 70 all the time.

Game has memory leak when you play it couple of hours so if your frame rate sinks and/or your game becoming choppy just restart it from windows. I am playing dumb character now its really funny at moments, missed that assistant can be saved guess this little game has a bit of hidden C&C after all but I am there for loot and bitches (and bitches prefer to hook with other bitches) so got there two hours or so after receiving the quest.

This isn't my experience, as it shoots right back up to 100-120fps when I leave said city. It's well known the game runs worse in those bigger cities, not sure why I'm getting pushback. It's pretty common in games of this type in general. I'm not complaining about getting 70-80fps in those areas, I'm saying if you are aiming for a solid 60fps on a 60hz monitor those areas will be your 1% lows.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I couldn't past the skill check to get him high on drugs, so I just shoot that monk.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

I wrote a short review in RK47's thread:

playing through it now too. I like some elements: quest design is pretty robust in that you can kill just about anyone and still continue the game.

but like most obsidian games, the writing just isn't very compelling. chose between hippies or the cannery because. choose to take indian woman or not because. choose to kill people or not because.

it all feels very random, but the overall gameplay is decent for shallow fun, which I'm sure is why many like it so much.

also, the world itself is pretty unlikable. a solar system filled with corporate hipsters and sjws. just nuke it for all I care.

rpg mechanics are equally uninspiring. pick X for more damage or pick Y for more zany dialog options.

also enemies often have their limbs all pop off at once from being shot. weird but ok.

basically it's a boring Fallout 3 in the future where you don't need aliens because none of the boring hipster characters are even close to a believable human.

pretty scenery though.

 

[Daidre]

Mainstreamy New Vegas (which sold like 12m) fans overwhelmingly love it. TOW reddit went from 30k to 100k in like a week

I would not say so. Reddit is very special in TOW's case - it is so alike to Instagram that I feel like I am leaking IQ just from looking at it.
But Steam is overwhelmingly negative (no surprise), Obsidian official forum is barely breathing and Resetera is somewhere between meh and nice.

Inevitable competition with PC version of RDR 2, Death Stranding and Fallen Order also does not improve its chances to stay in the center of attention for long.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Reddit basically rick and morty: the website. Why would anyone be surprised that they'd like this?

 

[Daidre]

Reddit basically rick and morty: the website. Why would anyone be surprised that they'd like this?

I do not visit it often, but P:K reddit had a lot of useful info and Anthem's was quite entertaining in their suffering.

 

[Steamboat Willie]

I do not visit it often, but P:K reddit had a lot of useful info and Anthem's was quite entertaining in their suffering.

Reddit is the apex of Normalfaggotry.

 

[DalekFlay]

It's definitely being treated as a "big hit" by the gaming media, but whether that actually results in Fallout style sales numbers who knows. I doubt it.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

Does anyone else find it somewhat of an ironic betrayal that it's Obsidian that's become the new, even more garbage Bethesda?

All those years of Kickstarters and getting you to buy their crappy Baldur's Gate knockoffs and then they turn around and poop out SJW Oblivion: The Shivering Isles In Space.

 

[LizardWizard]

But Steam is overwhelmingly negative

EPIC BAD

Reddit is the epitome of mainstream. TOW is now a significant Gamepass driver and console copies were still apparently selling out in the states. It's a monetary slam dunk for a new IP that filled the empty void Mass Effect 4 and 76 left. Microsoft is going to fund the shit out the sequels by the two dudes that now have birthed two successful mainstream IPs.