The Outer Worlds is Obsidian Entertainment’s next big RPG, and it deals with a touchy theme or two like corporate greed, power, and over-the-top capitalism. It’s not supposed to be a “politically-charged” experience though, according to the developers, and is intended to be a “humorous” game. Leonard Boyarsky, the co-director of The Outer Worlds, spoke about the topic and about what the team has set out to make in what’s been equated in the past to an in-space version of the Fallout series.
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Boyarsky spoke to VGC about the themes and the game and said that the game’s story isn’t wholly a critique of modern capitalism as some people might’ve suspected given what we’ve seen so far. The game’s world is built by corporations with advertisements and marketing campaigns running rampant, so there certainly is a lot of capitalism and consumerism to be had, but Boyarsky said the game was more about “power and how power is used against people who don’t have it.”
Whatever the game is actually supposed to be about, Boyarsky said it being politically-charged isn’t among those things.
“I don’t want people to think this is a really hard, politically-charged game: It’s supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to be humorous,” the co-director said.
Like any good RPG – especially one that comes from the original creators of the Fallout series – players will encounter a variety of NPCs in the game that will have their own array of believes and ways that they act on those types of thinking. Boyarsky said he’s taken steps to make sure characters that either reflect or oppose his own personal views didn’t present themselves one way or another in the game depending on how their ideologies align with his own.
“There are people in this game who have philosophies that I don’t agree with and I take pains to make those people very likeable, very sensible and very believable,” he told VGC. “Then there are people in the game who say things I agree with, who are perhaps not very nice to hang out with.”
The Outer Worlds is scheduled to release for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC platforms on October 25.
