The Outer Worlds

The makers of Fallout return with a thrillingly reactive RPG

PC, PS4, Xbox One

They say the secret to good comedy is timing. Which might explain why we enjoyed a guilty chuckle at The Outer

Worlds’ grand unveiling. At a point when Bethesda couldn’t escape negative headlines for Fallout 76 – for issues ranging from its not-so-micro-transactions to the quality of its limited-edition bumf – here were the co-creators of the original Fallout re-teaming to create a singleplayer-focused RPG. The response, inevitably, was wildly enthusiastic. “Let’s be clear,” Obsidian’s Tim Cain says, straight-faced. “We had planned all this stuff months ago – years ago. That timing was not part of our plan.”

The game may be set in a futuristic space colony rather than on post-nuclear-war Earth, but Cain and co-director Leonard

Boyarsky accept the Fallout comparisons are inevitable, and they’re not about to distance themselves from them. “Even if we weren’t who we are I think people would still see similarities simply because of the basic things that you do in this style of game,” Boyarsky says. “It isn’t heavily based around cinematic cutscenes for your character or a voiced protagonist. It’s a hardcore RPG where you talk to people face to face.”

A high persuasion stat wasn’t required when Cain asked Boyarsky to join him at Obsidian in 2016. When Cain was asked to lead the studio’s new project, he knew he needed his old partner alongside him. “Tim’s always calling me up and asking me to bail him out,” Boyarsky quips. “Yeah, I was floundering,” Cain says. “It was the right time,” Boyarsky continues. “I’d been at Blizzard for ten years, which was a great experience but I was ready to do another singleplayer RPG.”

Cain laughs: “I convinced him that Blizzard was a dead end and wasn’t going anywhere.”

It’s clear the two are great friends, and so it’s no surprise to learn that the story outline fell into place quickly. “Tim came up with the idea of riffing off the mining towns of the late 19th and early 20th century, where corporations basically owned people from the day they were born to the time they died,” Boyarsky says. “That led us to thinking about robber barons in space and the frontier, and

all that. Combine those ideas with my love of chunky low-tech machinery, and out comes The Outer Worlds.”

Though these corporations engage in backstabbing and infighting, they all have a seat around the same table, and their goal is broadly the same: to exploit the colony for their own financial gain. Collectively, in other words, they’re a single faction – one of three, Boyarsky reveals. But if there’s no such thing as brand loyalty from the player’s standpoint, you may well find a favourite depending on your playstyle. Since weapons degrade over time, you might want to switch to a superior brand that’s less likely to break down; if you have strong engineering skills, however, you can break down common, cheap weapons into parts to keep your existing kit in good nick.

Which isn’t to say guns are a necessity. “We had the goal that you could get through the game with no combat,” Cain says. “But it’s very, very hard.” You’ll need a character with the ability to talk their way past human aggressors and a high stealth stat to sneak past robots and creatures, he says, “though we might have to take out a robot or two.”

From a mechanic that allows you to lean into susceptibilities (see ‘Flaw plan’) to companion characters you can call upon to compensate for your own shortcomings, it’s the game’s reactive systems that really tell its story. But all of it, Cain says, has to serve a purpose: he refers to the “kitchen-sink” approach the pair took with 2001 fantasy RPG

Arcanum, and says they’ve become much better at editing out anything that doesn’t serve the game. Hence the absence of NPC romances and lock-picking minigames, but the presence of outlandish weapons that don’t obey any real-world rules. “One of our basic pillars was ‘fun always takes precedence over realism’, so none of the science weapons are realistic in any way,” Cain says with a grin. “And we don’t care.”

“One of our basic pillars was ‘fun always takes precedence over realism’”