The Outer Worlds - Tim Cain on Breaking Linear Character Progression
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Obsidian Entertainment’s recently released sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds features a rather unorthodox flaw system that allows you to make your character worse in a particular area, be it dealing with heights or fighting robots, and be rewarded for that with an extra perk point. But according to Tim Cain’s recent chat with Gamasutra, initially the system was supposed to be much more interesting and feature unique playstyle-defining combat abilities and flaws that changed the way your character acted during dialogues.
Here are a few sample paragraphs:
The flaw system wasn't originally designed to have to pay out perk points if a player accepted negative attributes. Cain and co-director Leonard Boyarsky told me they wanted to have specialized perks for each flaw that you couldn't obtain any other way. That would entice players to try different things, but time and budget restraints prevented them from fully implementing anything other than what we see in the final version of The Outer Worlds.
"The specialized perks were more related to the flaws," Cain said. "There were a whole bunch of flaws that we never implemented, but we had things like if you'd take more damage from robots you could also give more damage to them. I think we had one where your aim would go down but your fire rate would go up if there was a robot around. It was like 'ok I'm terrified and I'm just spraying bullets.'"
Cain and Boyarsky wanted flaws to force player to adopt different play styles when special situations come up. They didn't want players to exploit the flaw system in a way that simply reinforced or entrenched them in one play style. "Picking a difficulty setting makes the whole game hard," Cain said. "Flaws are supposed to make it situationally hard."
