How The Outer Worlds 2 fixed a 30-year old development problem

Obsidian's The Outer Worlds 2 been out for about a week. You've probably played a good few hours already, which means you will have seen — without knowing it — the answer to a 30-year problem that the developers have finally solved.

On the eve of the game's launch, I caught up with The Outer Worlds 2 creative director, Leonard Boyarsky, to find out how far the franchise has come since its debut entry. You can watch the whole interview in the video player above.

We get into all sorts of varied topics in the chat. Starting again in a new colony means new planets and new companions, but has the idea of what exactly The Outer Worlds is calcified since the first game? Boyarsky had a lot to say on that.

And with missable companions to look for and killable NPCs to contend with, does Boyarsky have any tips to help guide players through? Check out the full video to find out (it's also available on our YouTube channel).

S0, what about that 30-year problem? Well, I'd seen on Rock Paper Shotgun that Fallout legend Tim Cain had been praising the Outer Worlds 2 developers for having "figured out" something he'd been struggling with as far back as 1995.

Cain was quoted as saying: "I not only told him how impressed I was, I found my notes from 28 years before. I said, 'Let me read you a few lines from a production meeting in July of '95…'"

So, sitting down over Zoom with Boyarsky — who also worked on Fallout back in the day, as far back as the first game in the franchise — I couldn't help but ask. What was the problem that you guys solved in The Outer Worlds 2? Do you know what Cain had been referring to?

Boyarsky told us: "I would guess it has to do with the fact that we are, and of course my focus is, you know, story and tone and that stuff. So, I might be looking at it through that lens...

"But I feel like one of the things we did here, that we've struggled with in the past a lot, is, like, when choices come up, for instance, if you've done something earlier in the game that has limited your choices, if we don't find a way to telegraph to you that that is what's happening, it feels like that's just how the game plays out.

"So what we did in this one [is] you can see the lines you can't pick, you could see what you haven't done. And that also gives us the ability to give you a hint.

"Like, 'Oh, I'm missing a speech line here, and I'm really close. 'cause I could see, I just need to put another point or two in there. I'm going to exit this conversation and go level up before I come back here and try to have this conversation.'

"Or if you don't have any chance in hell of making it, you still know that, like, 'Oh, there was a speech thing I could have done here.'

"And a lot of times it has to do with like, 'Oh, I didn't find the information I needed to, I didn't do this other quest, or I did this other quest in a way that is not allowing me to progress in the way that I would've maybe wanted to in this quest'.

"So for me, I think that that's a step forward in terms of how we're handling showing players that, and showing players why they're getting certain lines and why they're not getting other lines."

I mentioned at this point in the conversation that it does feel very satisfying in the game when you can see that, because you've done legwork and found the right information log, you've unlocked specific voice lines in a conversation.

Boyarsky told us: "That was it was really tricky."

He added: "We had a dossier system and we did a we did a prototype of it, and it took me a good two or three months to write a dialogue for it. And we're talking one or two dialogues.

"Because we were like, 'Oh, everything you find is going to be tracked in this codex and you're gonna have this dossier system where you're able to kind of figure this stuff out.'

"And so, it was almost like a meta game. And the problem we found with that... besides the fact that it just took too long, because it's like, okay, on top of everything else... you know, we have skills, we have different things you can get if you've done other things.. and now we have this, each conversation is kind of like a puzzle on top of that."

Boyarsky continued: "That was really, really just a daunting task.

"But even more than that, the big thing that I think really made us go, like, 'Okay, we need to streamline this just a little bit', is that it became a game of, like, 'I just need the information.'

"This character needs to give me specific pieces of information, which are going to ding or whatever. I think they were in different colour or different font, like, it's going to ding...

"And I'm like, 'Oh I know I got the information I need from this character'. So, it really changed your focus, to, like, away from the storytelling, away from the characters you were talking to, and it turned into this hunt for like that, like, 'I got what I needed out of this conversation'.

"So, I feel like this, reducing it down to what we have now, I feel like was was the right move, because it still keeps you involved in the story. It still keeps you, hopefully, engaging with it.

"Like, 'Yes, there's information I needed, but it's really about, you know, what's going on story-wise and what's going on with each of these characters."

The Outer Worlds 2 is out now on Xbox Game Pass, Xbox Series X/S, PC and PS5. You can check out the rest of this interview below.

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