Obsidian’s designer Brian Hines talks about The Outer Worlds and the Microsoft acquisition

 

The Outer Worlds’ release date is around the corner, and every gamer is quite excited as the game looks quite beautiful and is full of picturesque landscape, intriguing dilemma and is an altogether new experience, jumping from world to world.

Brian Hines, the senior designer at Obsidian, was interviewed by Wccftech at Gamescom 2019 and he shed some needed insight on the game.

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Hines said the game could be thought of as a ‘spiritual successor to the Fallout New Vegas.’ when asked how does he thinks the player would react he replied “Hopefully, they’re gonna love it. That’s always our goal. And from the reaction we’ve seen after the announcement, there’s a lot of interest in the game. So if you’re a fan of New Vegas, there’s a lot you’re going to love about The Outer Worlds. Even if you haven’t played a game like this in a while or before, it’s a great experience to jump into.

The gameplay is fun and exciting. There’s not just a good story being told, but moments of humor, and a lot of great characters you’ll find as you’re playing through the world, we’ve got some fantastic voice actors in the game. So there’s a lot of characters that really have come to life over the past few months as we’ve gotten the voice actors in, whereas before we used auto-generated text to speech for placeholder VO, and it was so dry. Like, this is never going to work. Suddenly we get an actual voice actor performance and she’s like, my favorite character in the game now.”

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Hines even talked about the protagonist of the game and stated that he isn’t voiced saying “Basically you get to create your character, male, female, whatever personality you want. So the character isn’t voiced, you’ll be picking responses and you’ll have fully voiced responses within your campaigns and other NPCs, but we wanted to make sure you got to basically create whatever character you want to play, whatever power fantasy you wanted to have you get to experience that in the game. So we decided not to voice the main character just because it would suck to only have a limited number of dialogue options to choose from.”

The game has managed to attract a wide range of attention. A smaller and lesser-known studio developed the game, and the result is quite astounding; on par with big-time game developers. It also attracted competitors. And at last the tech titan, Microsoft bought out the studio. Hines also included the Microsoft buyout saying “It(attitude of the studio) didn’t change much on The Outer Worlds because obviously, we’re being published by Private Division. That is still intact. On the studio level, for me personally, one of the nice things is that now that we’re part of Microsoft, we’re focusing more on what the next games are going to be, rather than, how do we pitch the next games?”

The Microsoft buyout was a good thing for the studio as per Hines now all that’s left to see is how the game will compete and what it has in store for the players.