The Outer Worlds “Come to Halcyon” Trailer
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This year's PAX West brings us a new trailer for Obsidian Entertainment's sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds. Presented as a propaganda piece, the trailer gives us a taste of the game's corporate setting, its alien locales, and the characters that inhabit them. Have a look:
The Outer Worlds is an exciting new RPG with RPG elements, coming to Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on October 25, 2019!
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Do you dream of working on the frontier of space? Can you pass a basic aptitude test? Then Halcyon is the place for you! Prosperity and adventure awaits on Terra 2, Monarch, and other exciting locations across the Halcyon colony. The character you decide to become will determine how your story on the Halcyon colony unfolds in The Outer Worlds.
There's also this recent GamesIndustry.biz interview with Obsidian's senior designer Brian Heins where he talks about the importance of grey areas and player choice for The Outer Worlds, as well as the game's humorous nature. An excerpt:
As a result, Heins emphasises that there will be no good or bad choices, once again pointing to the efforts made in presenting both sides of each argument. He compares it to morality systems in past games where the bad option in any given choice might be to just slaughter everybody.
"It's hard to come up with a logic there that makes it sound like the right decision," he says. "We do have quests that are kill quests, but we try to give the reason why that character wants these people eliminated. It may be dark, but if you buy into their world view you'll understand why that's what they want to achieve.
"That's our goal -- to give the player enough grey. The good side isn't purely good, the dark side isn't purely dark. It's all different shades of the individual motivations of the characters."
The lack of binary good and evil is complemented by the humourous tone of the game, which also dissuades any reading of The Outer Worlds as a serious, anti-capitalist piece. The humour, Heins tells us, is the direct result of the pairing in charge: Boyarsky and his fellow co-director Tim Cain. While the former has a "dark, cynical look on life", the latter is "very goofy" so any title he works on is "never going to be a totally serious game."
"Our job as the team was working out where the line was on the humour," Heins says. "That's something every person on the team had to understand -- what's too far, and what's not far enough? Once we had that level of humour, we could do things like the cystypigs, which are an example of something that's both dark and also absurdly humourous."
