The Outer Worlds released four years ago, and was Obsidian's last game released as an independent studio before being acquired by Microsoft. While it was ambitious in its branching narrative, it felt like a smaller-scale spiritual successor to Fallout: New Vegas. A game that was developed by Obsidian and, somewhat ironically, published by the now Microsoft-owned Bethesda.

The Outer Worlds is set to receive a next-gen update in the coming weeks, and to celebrate I sat down with The Outer Worlds’ game director Tim Cain, narrative design lead Leonard Boyasky, and production director Eric DeMilt to discuss their work on the game and the legacy it’s left behind. After all, the three of them have careers spanning games from throughout the Black Isle and Troika back-catalogue, working on the likes of Fallout: New Vegas, Diablo 3, and ClayFighter.

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Something that you will quickly notice as you go back and look at these storied developers’ credits is the recurring theme that they were released to mixed reception only to gain massive followings and deep respect as the years passed. DeMilt, who was a producer on Fallout 2, brings up that it always seemed to be the case even in the early days. “Fallout 1 and 2 [had a lot of] sales come very later in their life cycle in a dual case.” So much so that this bundle outsold both games' individual sales in their first couple of years.

Similarly, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines reviewed pretty well in 2004 but was massively criticised for its plethora of performance problems. Fast forward to 2023, and while the long-awaited sequel Bloodlines 2 remains in development hell, DeMilt says, “[The first game] still gets mods. That’s crazy.”

Tim Cain, who was a lead Programmer on the first Fallout, has a theory. “People can't get this all in one playthrough,” he says. “It takes multiple playthroughs, or even just some distance from it to see that.” This was especially apparent in what many would view as Obsidian’s - and Fallout’s - best game, New Vegas.

Fallout New Vegas - Fighting Atonotons in the wasteland and the New Vegas Strip

By the time it released, its tech was already considered outdated. Bethesda’s Gamebryo engine received much of the blame for Fallout 3’s poor performance in 2008. When 2010 came around, Obsidian only had about 18 months to ship a game on another studio’s tech having never used it before. On top of the game's infamous stability issues, most reviewers only had the time to play through the game once before launch and didn’t get to see just how varied the paths were. It’s no surprise that while everyone seemed to love the writing of New Vegas at the time, reviews often centered around dated animations and outdated visuals. All of this came to head with a scandal when reportedly Obsidian missed out on bonuses promised to them by Bethesda because the game missed its 85 score target on Metacritic by a single point.

As the dust settles on the Mojave Wasteland a decade later, many consider New Vegas to be one of the greatest games of its generation, if not all time. Boyarsky explains that after years of patching and fan mods, “people are able to go back to that game, because [of] those characters and the stories. That setting is just rich, and people want to be there.”

The creators seem well aware of this growing reverence. Cain raises the question “not that it's up to me, but wouldn’t a graphic remaster of Fallout: New Vegas be awesome?” This seems like a smart idea considering it would allow people to go back and appreciate what the team was trying to do without the burdens of tech shackling the timeless story and characters.

Now that that updated version of The Outer Worlds is releasing, it’s hard not to wonder if the team hopes that this trend continues, and that it might leave more of an impression in 2023 than it did in 2019. It hasn't quite left a mark like other games in the storied multi-studio history of these creators.

The Outer Worlds - Ellie giving finger guns and Parvarti looking at the camera

While Boyasky jokes he hopes it hasn’t aged much in four years he also brings up the perspective that time gives its creators. He talks about how when a game first ships it can be hard to evaluate if you managed to obtain the goals you set for yourself and your team. “You’re comparing it in your mind to the game you wanted to make when you started,” which, as he says, “is never the game you ship, just because of the reality of cost and time”. He also brought up that, for him, sometimes after a games release it’s cathartic to watch playthroughs online, and seeing reactions to these games years later he can think to himself “I guess we did kind of succeed at what we’re trying to do.”

That’s why DeMilt feels it's important not to change too much in a re-release like this. “We’re making visual upgrades, but these games; Fallout 1 and 2, Vampire, Arcaneum, and The Outer Worlds, they’re not tech-driven.” He says, “Tim, Leonard, and Obsidian, they make these rich worlds and settings that are character driven and that stuff doesn't age in the same way [tech does]”.

Something that sticks out upon revisiting The Outer Worlds is that it is a much more hopeful world than Fallout. In those games, while the story plays out things rarely get better, they simply change, and the world is still burned to a crisp. As cynical and satirical as The Outer Worlds is, it focuses on humans managing to survive in the face of overwhelming odds and unending corporate greed.

Both Boyarsky and Cain bring up how many of the characters you meet are just “people trapped in the system,” as Boyarsky puts it. He goes on to explain that maybe the darkness of the Fallout games is down to “the naivete of us in our early 30s,” in his words this was a time when “everything seemed to be going good on the surface”. At that time the games industry was growing, and there was a tech bubble that seems like it will never burst, “It just seemed like a hopeful time”. As a result, the team leaned into making the Fallout universe grim because, according to Cain, “it’s funny to go dark when everything’s great.”

But when it came time for a spiritual successor to these games, Cain mentions that The Outer World started development in April of 2016, and that “reality intruded a little bit… the world changed greatly,” and it seems like Obsidian needed to focus on the possibility of better futures in the face of a grim reality. Boyaskary explains that he thinks their games will always be dark and cynical to a point, “but when the world gets really dark,” he says “I think you take on trying to find that hope.”

Next: The Importance Of Parvati's Asexuality In The Outer Worlds