Obsidian Entertainment’s The Outer Worlds is scheduled for an October 25, 2019 release, which is now less than three months away. And if you’d like to learn as much as possible about this upcoming sci-fi action-RPG, then you’re in luck, because yesterday the video game-related parts of the Internet were absolutely bombarded with a staggering number of hands-on previews, impression articles, interviews, and even gameplay videos for The Outer Worlds.
Covering them all would make for a very long article, so instead let’s settle for a representative sample. To start things off, here’s The Outer Worlds’ E3 gameplay demo with some developer commentary on top of it:
Then, here’s roughly an hour of gameplay, courtesy of PC Gamer:
For a while, at least. With the disguise in effect, a meter appeared in my HUD, along with three pips (we’ll get to those pips in a minute) and the meter drained whenever I was moving, signifying the hologram was getting closer and closer to losing power. And it drains quickly.
If someone spots you when the meter is drained, they’ll challenge you with a speech check. As my meter was expiring I was close to a sentry bot, so I ducked through a door, which turned out to be a closet, which was then blocked by the bot (who was in turn blocked by my companions) meaning I was basically stuck. I had no choice but to explain myself as my meter died. Luckily, I was able to persuade the bot with the old robot paradox trick (“Everything I say is false”) and it left me alone.
When you pass a speech check, your disguise meter refills to the top. However, you use up one of the three speech pips. In other words, you can be caught and challenged only three times before the disguise runs out completely and you have to take a different approach to infiltration.
Within moments, I spied a couple of oversized moth-scorpions creatures called mantisaurs having a picnic on the road. Given players had been sceptical of The Outer Worlds’ combat from the trailers (the main concern being that the gunplay looked loose), this was going to be the first real test.
What can I say? The combat feels solid – even if it’s not going to win any prizes for originality. I guess this fits with what co-director Leonard Boyarsky told me at E3, when he explained combat isn’t the main focus of The Outer Worlds, and the open-world nature of the game means fighting isn’t as choreographed as an FPS. The shooting feels fairly tight, while the time-slowing function (tactical time dilation) creates some incredibly satisfying opportunities for multiple headshots with a sniper rifle. There’s a great deal of chaos involved in nearly all the battles (particularly when plasma’s being fired everywhere and you’re using a machine gun with massive amounts of recoil) – all of which gives it a fairly cartoony feeling. Expect silliness rather than serious combat.
All in all, while I found the scrapes I got into fun to try and sneak around or shoot my way out of, especially using some of the crazier weaponry, I can’t say I found The Outer Worlds’ action to be particularly challenging. Perhaps it’s because I was playing on the “Normal” difficulty setting – there are two higher ones, including a Supernova mode that incorporates survival mechanics and companion permadeath, so it would make sense that the lower difficulty levels are more focused on exploring the world and the choices you can make within it.
Regardless, that lack of extreme difficulty isn’t necessarily a bad thing (though I’ll admit I did get a cheap laugh or two seeing an enemy walk right up to and past one of my companions blatantly out in the open while they squatted next to me, stealthily concealed behind a control panel). For me, this draw of a game like The Outer Worlds isn’t the high I get from being “good” at shooting bad guys – it’s about figuring out whether or not I have to shoot them in the first place, and what might I gain for my trouble if I don’t. “Would I have had to shoot my way into that building if I’d brought along a companion who knew that gang?” or “How will Monarch’s balance of power shift if I don’t kill this baron and convince the factions to work together?” are far more interesting questions than “How fast can I kill all these guys?”
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. After a few hours of The Outer Worlds, it feels like a game from a slightly different era. It plays like a tightly focused single-player adventure with no game-as-a-service payments, in-app purchases, or tacked-on multiplayer. Even Bethesda has started to move away from that, with the still-somewhat-controversial online game Fallout 76.
And in a world where games try to suck players into an endless loop to squeeze every last dollar and minute of attention out of them, that kind of focus — even if it’s not the most original of conceits — feels like it might be enough.
The Outer Worlds looks like it’ll be filled with those spontaneous moments that make for fun water cooler conversation. The characters all seem to have a lot to say, there are many ways to interact with them and get to know them better, and the action so far has proven to be competent. But this does appear to be a small vertical slice of what the final game looks to offer, given that I was handed a pre-built character. The fun will be when I can craft one from scratch with my own personality quirks and my own methods for progression.
The build of the game that I played was running at 4K on a PC with a 2080 ti, an i7 7700k, a high-performance SSD, and 32GB of RAM. With maybe the exception of the rapidly aging 4 core/8 thread i7, the machine was definitely what you could call “top-of-the-line”, and at times the game absolutely struggled at the set resolution and graphics settings. In fairness, the game is in development, but the hitching that I experienced definitely felt very familiar to me – before my most recent PC upgrade I was also sporting a 4 core/8 thread CPU, and the sorts of stutter I felt during the demo definitely felt CPU related. If that’s the case, then even at 1080p those issues may have manifested. However, I wasn’t able to use any sort of overlay or have task manager open to directly check performance metrics, so these are just guesses. In all likelihood, the final product will run smoother, but at times the hitching was bad enough that it was really hard to ignore, and the game is only a few months away from release.
RPG Site also has an interview with the game’s lead designer Charles Staples:
RPG Site: I see – I think it would be interesting to have an option on save file creation to force players to take any flaws that appear. But I guess going from there—choice and consequence. I’m gonna stick on that because I feel like it really resonates with a lot of thoughts I’m having about the game. I noticed that a lot of the sidequests, a lot of them you really had to go out of your way to find, definitely had multiple ways for clearing them. Like, there was this C&P Factory sidequest where—like, they tell you that you could outright go in guns blazing and kill a guy, or you can go in the back way through the sewer, or sneak in using a false ID card. Then you can do something like poisoning pigs, messing with the machinery, falsifying records, or so on. I found it impressive just how much freedom I had with sidequests, not just this one, for how I wanted to finish them. Is that something that players can expect to see throughout the rest of the game?
Staples: That’s been a big focus for us. We wanted to make sure that the sidequests weren’t just throwaway fetch quests, we wanted to make sure that they all had an interesting narrative and characters that reinforced the setting and the world. Making sure you have choices along the way, and how the choices that you make have different outcomes—for example, in the sidequest you were talking about, there’s also the option to betray the original quest-giver too. That is just part of the—roleplaying the character that you want to do, and allowing you to have all the options and seeing what can happen based off of those decisions. I think that Tim is on his tenth or eleventh playthrough of the game? And, and he does a different build and playstyle each time, and there are still new things that he’s discovering. Stuff like “I did it this way this time, and because I did this, this other thing happened”. It’s a lot of work, but we made sure—that we started with “how does a combat character get through this, how does a stealth character get through this, how does a dialog character get through this?” and then once we got those basics, we go through like, well, how does a player that chose engineering or these other skills feel rewarded? How do we make them feel “hey, because I made this specific character, I get to do these things?” That’s been a big focus for us.
RPG Site: So are there unique rewards for doing it specific ways, for each type of character? Or is it just different ways to clear quests, and not specifically unique rewards?
Staples: Some quests can be completed certain ways that will give you different rewards, yes, but it’s not on every quest. So sometimes it’ll just be – this person wanted X done, there’s 3 ways to do it, but as long as it gets done – they’re happy. But there are also quests where it’s like—this person wanted this, this other person wanted the same thing, and you either help one or the other. Or, this person wants you to get something, but then you gave it to someone else. So there are all sorts of different permutations that can happen.
Metro had a chat with Obsidian’s Carrie Patel and Brian Heins:
‘Companions are wonderful because they give the player a connection to the world that as a newcomer you wouldn’t necessarily have. They’re characters who grow and journey with you and have their own arcs alongside yours’, senior narrative designer Carrie Patel told us.
This was a feature noticeable in even throwaway conversations, where they would chip in with pieces of local knowledge or indeed just to have their say. ‘All of them have joined you because for some reason or another they don’t really fit in the world, so they’re outsiders sort of like you are’, explains Patel.
As well as crewing your ship with a Firefly-esque band of misfits, companions also open up new ways of completing quests and objectives. Senior designer Brian Heins described how that works: ‘They have things like engineering, lock-picking, hacking, so all of those can contribute to your ability to explore areas… you’ll see some options where there’s a silhouette of a character next to a response. That’s showing that you wouldn’t have been able to meet that requirement yourself, but your companion is helping you to do that.’
Hayes: And how do you design around being able to kill any NPC in the game? How do you stop players from pushing themselves into a corner by killing everyone?
Brian Hines: So we try to find, like look at, okay who is actually critical and what information do players actually have to know? So if this person gets killed, how else can we convey that information to keep the quest moving forward?
Whether that’s like in a terminal, or on a note on their body that would give you that information, and then if there’s just no elegant way to do it that’s when the quest fails, and that’s kind of the consequence of choosing to slaughter everyone.
Hayes: I did notice in the save that I loaded into, in the journal, there was a failed quest section. How does failing quests affect your progress in the story? Are there any ramifications that will come later down the line?
Brian Hines: It can. So for example, in some areas you need to do a certain amount of quests in order to achieve maximum reputation with the group who’s running the area, in order to really get the most beneficial max reward, or the final quest for the faction line.
If you fail some of those quests, then you’re not going to be able to achieve that best result with that faction or that group.
Share this article:
Val Hull
Resident role-playing RPG game expert. Knows where trolls and paladins come from. You must fight for your right to gather your party before venturing forth.
Warcraft Tavern
Warcraft DB
Diablo Tavern