Zeriel
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2012
- Messages
- 13,490
GOG interviewed Tim and Leonard https://af.gog.com/news/the_outer_w...r_take_themselves_too_seriously?as=1649904300
Selections:
Tim Cain: I think the visual look of the game was the hardest element to nail down.
Leonard Boyarsky: As soon as we started talking about what we wanted to do things started to fall into place pretty quickly, and, even though we hadn’t worked together for a while, we fell back into our old creative roles immediately, with Tim bringing the silly and me bringing the dark, and both of us riffing off each other to find the offbeat humor we both love. I think the visual look was the hardest because, besides having a lot of ideas we wanted to explore, we also needed to define our own distinctive look.
In the past, when we were doing the original Fallout and Arcanum, it was much more organic because the team was so small and we were just following our ideas wherever they led, and there weren’t a lot of games doing retro or alt future type worlds at the time. Now, there’s a ‘punk’ for everything – steampunk, atom punk, etc., so it’s harder to find your own original lane. Fortunately, we had a great art team led by Daniel Alpert who took our ideas and ran with them.
"great"
Of course they both value reactivity over all things in RPGs:
Tim Cain: I think gamers like our games’ reactivity to what kind of character they make and how they act in the game world. It’s the best feeling when the game reacts to something the player does because it’s like the developers are sitting there with them, nodding and saying “we saw what you did there”. Also, our games never take themselves too seriously, so gamers know they can have fun with them
.Leonard Boyarsky: I can’t speak to ‘the perfect modern RPG’, just the RPGs we like to make. And, for us, the most important things are creating compelling worlds for players to explore with any character they can conceive of, and, perhaps most importantly, having the world react to those character’s choices.
No regrets with regards to being Safesidian:
Looking back from the day of the game’s premiere, which one of its elements makes you most proud today?
Leonard Boyarsky: For me, the fact that we were able to ship a finished, polished game that has its own unique identity, on time and on budget, is a proud accomplishment. There were of course things I wish we’d done differently, and parts of the game I wish we’d been able to push further, but, even after all this time, shipping a game with a new IP that was only a figment of our imagination 3 years before still amazes me.
Tim Cain: Three of the biggest sources of inspiration for this game were Firefly, Fallout, and Futurama (The Three F’s, so to speak). But there were so many other sources too, including early 20th-century science fiction stories. In many ways, Hugo Gernsback inspired elements of this game, probably unknowingly.
Leonard Boyarsky: Unless he was much more forward-thinking than we thought, Tim. Besides the Three F’s, we also were heavily influenced by both Deadwood and True Grit for their use of language. Tonally, it seems like our games have always been influenced in some way by Brazil and the early Simpsons, but for TOW we also added the work of the Coen Bros and Wes Anderson into the mix.
Deadwood and True Grit? That's new to me. Isn't Deadwood known for its absurd amount of cursing? Is that true for TOW?
Weirdest thing is I don't feel that much reactivity in Outer Worlds. Or maybe it's the quality of the reactivity? Either way, I feel like my choices were more satisfying in fucking Mass Effect of all games. Outer Worlds has basically two paths through the game, neither of which is that interesting, and then some basic logic to let you kill whoever you want, but there's nothing really fun that happens in response to that stuff, it's just very cardboard and shallow. Reminds me of my gripe with Larian's n+1 quest design philosophy to be honest: sure it's great that you can do certain things you can't do in other games, but if doing those things doesn't give a result that is more fun than if you hadn't provided the option in the first place, maybe you shouldn't waste time implementing it.
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