The Outer Worlds 2 - Interview - Brandon Adler and Leonard Boyarsky
The Outer Worlds 2 is out for everyone today, and while a few have had access via the premium edition, now is the time that most people will get their first chance to dive into this wild, corporate-controlled future and discover just what Obsidian has done to improve on the last entry in the franchise. I, for one, loved it (you can read my review here), and I was lucky enough to get a chance to chat to both Game Director Brandon Adler and Creative Director Leonard Boyarsky from Obsidian in the lead-up to the launch to try and discover what sort of magic went into creating this genuinely funny, yet strangely moving, RPG adventure.
As a long-time fan of Obsidian, I had to know about how important the satire and dark humour were to the team, after all, it feels like these elements have always been a part of Obsidian’s DNA. Brandon, having been at Obsidian for quite a long time, jumped in to answer that question for me. “I think a lot of that comes from when Chris Avalone was here”, he explained. “That was always his natural style and tone, a little more introspective, satirical and a bit of dark humour sprinkled in there. I think that kind of permeates a lot of what Obsidian has done over the years. There is a legacy of that down the line, looking at our older works, there is a through line there in terms of how we present our IPs in general.”
I imagine one of the hardest aspects when writing humour is to walk the balance between mean and stupid. Finding that line where these two elements almost meet is where the best comedy comes from. I had to know if this was a consideration for the team. “It’s weird, because it comes naturally to me.” Said Leonard. “I was very fortunate because Fallout became such a thing because that was literally just us being ourselves. So that mixture has always been there. The interesting thing for The Outer Worlds was figuring out how to guide other people there. My early games only had two or three writers, and one of which was me, and now we have teams of five or six writers who have never worked on this kind of thing before. That said, this time around, we had new writers, but they were all fans of The Outer Worlds, so they were all applying to be a part of it. They wanted to be part of that kind of tone. So it’s an iterative process, working with people and dialling the humour in.”
There is no doubt that The Outer Worlds franchise is taking shots at Capitalism. The idea of the ultimate version of late-stage capitalism as the setting and a religion really lets some funny-but-sad-if-you-think-about-it moments come about. I had to know if the team were really taking aim at where current society is heading or if it just felt like a good setting for the game. “I would say a little bit of both”, laughed Leonard. “I would say Aunties (Choice) does treat late-stage capitalism as a religion, but then we have The Order, and they are about the ascendancy of humankind, but I think that has more to do with control. So we are left with Aunties representing capitalism, The Order with religion and The Protectorate which is trying to control people with authoritarianism. We are trying to show these different methods of control.”
Brandon jumped in with more info. “We try to do these things that are timeless. It’s not like we are trying to be topical about any particular things that are coming up. The imbalance of power is always a thing, and each of these different factions shows that imbalance in different ways.”
Lenord continued, “I agree, the games I’ve always worked on in the past have always been about the imbalance of power. People who have power are always going to exploit people who don’t, and how people react to living in these systems. So even though we are silly and dark, there is an absurdist bent as well, but we still wanted it to feel like these are real people reacting to being raised in these systems that basically chew them up and spit them out.”
This then flowed naturally into my next question. Humour is a concept that can date quite easily, so I wondered if that was a consideration coming into the Outer Worlds 2. “We are very careful about references and making sure that we’re not using language that’s too contemporary,” explained Brandon “We don’t include any references to memes or things like that because those are the types of things that, unless you are very intentional about it, and that is what your game is about it can date your game very quickly. “
Leonard went on to say, “The rule that we always had for these games is that if we are putting in easter eggs it still needs to be funny or it shouldn’t feel like you’ve missed a joke. So if you go past something that feels like part of a conversation and you don’t catch that it was an easter egg, that’s fine. But we do. But we do love the insider humour where people are like Oh, I get that. But at the same time, if people don’t get it, they shouldn’t even notice that something was missed.”
The big question that I guess feels like it is hanging over every Microsoft studio at the moment, and one that feels particularly poignant considering the themes of The Outer Worlds 2, I had to ask: Did the team step on the wrong side of management with their anti-capitalist themes? “It is easy to get caught up in all that,” said Brandon, “but honestly, I think we’re kind of just being true to ourselves in a lot of ways. It came down to what kind of game we are trying to make, what do we find interesting about these different factions, and how do we relate to these things. But to your point, we are not blind, yes, we are owned by a very large corporation. Honestly, there is very little communication from Microsoft to us in terms of what we can and can’t do in terms of content. They trust us pretty implicitly with being about to do that stuff. So in general, there is certainly a parallel there, but it’s not like we drew from that much, and we didn’t reference much. It was more than these were the types of factions we wanted to put together and tell the most interesting story possible.”
For my last question, I wanted to know about the Perks and the Flaws, perhaps my favourite gameplay element of the title. It seems like they were a lot of fun to make, and I had to know if that was the case. “RPG builds and how you can make your character, along with the player fantasies that you allow them to play out in the world, is extremely important to me,” explained Brandon. “So when we were talking about this from the very beginning, it was all about making cool, fun builds for people. What I want to see, once this is in the hands of all the players, is all the crazy, weird builds that they can make. I want to see them mix and match all of that stuff. So to your point, we had a ton of fun when we were coming up with all of these because we were just thinking about how we want to play this thing. With the flaws, it goes even further, we are seeing, even among ourselves, people playing the game in very specific ways, so we would tag that and say Hey, let’s make a flaw out of that. So we would then talk about how to make a perk or flaw out of that and what it would mean for the game.”
I asked if the team is excited to see what players can do with this system and how they can even possibly break the game with all these options. “We are truly just waiting for them to break it,” Leonard laughed.
So there you have it, a fantastic chat with two fantastic developers that clearly care about writing, games and, of course, The Outer Worlds. The game is available now on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series, and you can read my full review right here.
