Obsidian Entertainment unveil THE OUTER WORLDS 2 with self-mocking trailer

Obsidian Entertainment have announced the existence of The Outer Worlds 2, a sequel to their well-received 2019 CRPG.

The trailer takes a mocking shot at hype-building announcement trailers that reveal very little about the game other than using stock concepts like "slow-motion action" and "main character silhouetted against the horizon," before doing exactly the same thing. Obsidian separately revealed that the game will be set in a new star system to the original game and will feature a brand-new cast of characters.

Unlike The Outer Worlds, which was released by Take Two Interactive who, among other things, insisted on an exclusivity period on the Epic Games Store, the sequel will be published by Microsoft (who acquired Obsidian two years ago) and should get a wider release on Steam and Xbox Game Pass. The game will also be console-exclusive to the Xbox Series X/S.

As well as The Outer Worlds 2, other teams at Obsidian are working on an Elder Scrolls-esque fantasy CRPG set in their Pillars of Eternity world, Avowed; diminutive crafting/survival game Grounded; and a mysterious new CRPG about which nothing is known.

The Outer Worlds

The future. Vast mega-corporations control Earth and its colony worlds. One such colony is in the Halcyon system, where the colony ship Hope is taking thousands of colonists to help start a new life. One colonist - yourself - is awoken early by a scientist named Phineas Welles, who has dire news. The Hope came out of its skip drive far too early, and has spent decades in sublight flight to Halcyon. The colonists have been frozen so long it's too dangerous to wake them up without an exacting and difficult procedure. He calls on you to help save your fellow colonists and save Halcyon from its current troubles.

The Outer Worlds has some serious pedigree behind it. It's a collaboration between veteran CRPG designers Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, the creative geniuses behind the original Fallout, Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, among many others (Boyarsky also worked on Diablo III and Cain on Pillars of Eternity). It's also the first 3D RPG game from Obsidian aimed at a commercial audience since Fallout: New Vegas in 2010. Their intervening games have mostly been crowdfunded, 2D retro-RPGs such as the Pillars of Eternity duology and the excellent Tyranny: great games, but not likely to win over vast audiences.

The Outer Worlds resembles - very closely in places - the Bethesda-published Fallout games. You create a character whom you can customise to your heart's content, through skills, perks, weapons and armour choices, and can also choose your character's name, gender and appearance. There's a main storyline you can follow but also a vast number of side-quests you can complete for extra rewards, and you are also joined on your adventure by several companion characters, who also have their own loyalty missions for you to complete. Everything unfolds in 3D with an emphasis on first-person combat, although you can also use stealth, engineering skills or negotiations to overcome obstacles. Expect to do an enormous amount of exploring, shooting and talking.

A key difference is that The Outer Worlds not exactly an open-world game. The game's universe is split between several planets and each planet has several large wilderness/outdoor areas, some of them very generously sized but not on a par with the open worlds of say New Vegas, the province of Skyrim or the Boston Commonwealth. There are usually one or two large towns in these areas, surrounded by more hostile areas plagued by bandits and dangerous wildlife. A plethora of different storylines and missions take you through these areas.

As an Obsidian RPG, The Outer Worlds hits the right notes of being a morally murky, twisty game where the "right decision" is not always immediately obvious, and where each problem has multiple solutions. A stressed boss has fired one of her pit gangs for asking for a pay raise: you can use persuasion and logic to get her to give in to their demands, or you can hack her terminal to find out she's been skimming off the back end and blackmail her into agreeing to their demands. Or you can break into the pit gang boss's house and find his stash of stolen goods, and then blackmail him into giving up without a fight. Or just say sod it and shoot both of them. The Outer Worlds gives you a tremendous amount of freedom in how you play it, leading to several wildly different endings.

Mechanically, the game is very solid. The Unreal 4 engine is a vast improvement over Bethesda's Creation Engine and makes the game look great (helped by a slightly retro art style) and feel much more modern. You can customise weapons through mods and different ammo types, and also modify armour to give you strong bonuses (further improved by your skills and perks). Your choice of companions - you can bring two with you at any time - also gives you bonuses to different skills and perks. Shooting is chunky and solid. There is a weapon and armour degradation mechanic which I found a little bit tedious, especially because the risk of your weapon actually breaking is pretty much non-existent due to the vast amount of repair parts available. Ammo and cash are also extremely readily available, and apart from the very start of the game hoarding ammo and supplies is not really necessary.

The writing is pretty good, as you'd expect from this team, and the central story about the saving of Halcyon is reasonably engaging, especially the clever way it ties together many of the quests and companion missions as you go along. Open-world CRPGs can feel a bit diffuse at times, their main storylines lacking urgency because they have to be able to explain you wandering off to do completely unrelated activities for 200 hours instead. The Outer Worlds' tighter focus is to its benefit in that area. This is still not a short game - I finished it off in a bit under 30 hours - but it's more in the vein of Knights of the Old Republic or Mass Effect than say The Witcher 3 (which takes more like 80-90 hours to complete).

The companion characters are also brilliant fun, witty and engaging (well, maybe not so much Felix), providing valuable support in combat and engaging in banter with one another, sometimes in ways that opens up new storylines and quests. Earning the respect of each team member is a lot of fun and gives the game greater depth.

On the negative side of things, The Outer Worlds is perhaps a little too easy. On the second-highest difficulty level, the game is still very forgiving and does not pose too much of a challenge. The game is also not that great at supporting a jack-of-all trades kind of player. It really encourages you to play as a soldier (with a strong focus in weapons), engineer (with a focusing in hacking and lockpicking) or stealth operative. If you try to spread your points out over a variety of skills, you may find yourself unable to deal with several late-game challenges. Fortunately you can re-spec at any time using a console on your ship, the Unreliable, but this did feel a little bit like cheating. Some areas of the game also feel like they had more time spent on them than others: Monarch and the areas on Terra 2 all feel huge and packed with quests, whilst it took less than half an hour to do everything I could find to do on Scylla.

The Outer Worlds (****) is an excellent CRPG with a strong focus on writing, character and player choice. It can't quite compete with the likes of say Fallout 4 for budget (The Outer Worlds' budget seems to have been around one-sixth that of a Bethesda title), but it certainly outstrips it hugely in terms of dialogue, a genuinely reactive storyline and moral murkiness. The game is available now on PC, X-Box One (UK, USA) and PlayStation 4 (UK, USA).

THE OUTER WORLDS gets release date

Obsidian Entertainment's science fiction roleplaying game The Outer Worlds has been given a release date: 25 October 2019.

The game, an original title in a brand new universe, sees the character (who can be fully customised by the player) waking up from cryo-sleep in the remote Halcyon system, which is dominated by powerful corporations. The player finds themselves embroiled in a struggle between the different factions and can choose which side to support and which characters to align with.

Created by the team behind the original Fallout and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, the game will be available on PlayStation 4, X-Box One and PC via the Windows and Epic Game Stores (with a Steam release to follow in 2020).

Epic vs. Valve: The Battle for PC Gaming

For the past fifteen years, the PC gaming market has been dominated by one retailer above all others: Steam. An online sales, downloading and gaming service, Steam is run by Valve Corporation and has utterly dominated the market since launch, fending off several competitors along the way. But that has now changed, with Fortnite developers Epic Games launching a rival service that means to do nothing less than smash Valve's monopoly forever.

The Epic Store launcher.

Steam was launched in late 2003 as a system for updating Valve's online games, titles like Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat and Team Fortress Classic, keeping players all in sync with one another and allowing new maps and patches to be rolled out quickly and efficiently. In 2004 the service transitioned to a store, selling new games. It was mostly ignored until the November 2004 release of Half-Life 2, arguably the most eagerly-anticipated video game in history up until that time. It was the sequel to Half-Life, the 1998 game that rewrote the first person shooter rulebook and established Valve as a force to be reckoned with in the PC gaming scene.

Half-Life 2 launched with the required use of Steam. You could buy Half-Life 2 in stores, but to install it you had to also install Steam and sign up to the online service. In 2004, when not every gamer was online and certainly most gamers did not expect to have to sign up to an online service to play a single-player-only game (Half-Life 2's multiplayer mode wasn't patched in until months later), this idea was hugely controversial. Gaming communities rebelled, some gamers tried to report Valve for breaches of the law (no such claim was ever upheld) and so on. But Half-Life 2 was anticipated in a manner almost no other game in history was, and the sheer juggernaut force of the game's hype and its overwhelmingly positive critical reception saw gamers swallow their pride and buy the game in their millions. In many cases, they used the service to buy and download the game at midnight on release day, and were playing hours before their friends could get to the shops to pick up their copies.

After Half-Life 2 showed that online PC sales were viable, other publishers signed up to the service and more and more games appeared there. Valve had been either lucky or prescient, as 2004 arguably marked the last highwater for PC gaming in the 2000s. The 2005 release of the X-Box 360, followed a few months later by the release of the PlayStation 3, saw a huge crash in PC gaming sales. Within just a couple of years, the number of big titles being developed for PC dropped significantly. 2007-08 was arguably the nadir of PC gaming history, with few big titles coming out, almost no PC exclusives doing well (The Witcher, from CDProjket, being an honourable exception) and the platform being almost dead on its feet.

Remarkably, though, Steam had continued to grow in popularity and success. Valve jumped on the rise of indie gaming, adding lots of popular, low-budget titles to the platform. Valve also pushed their big sales hard. They won back support from big publishers through various tactics designed to promote sales. Rockstar Games had released the PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV after a long delay, but noted that although initial sales had not been as high as the console versions, the "long tail" of the game was significant, with sales picking up years later every time the game was put in a sale, making it far more profitable in the long run on the PC platform. By the start of the 2010s the platform had recovered most of its losses, bolstered by the arrival of Kickstarter as a platform for funding niche, mid-tier games. By the end of 2018, Steam had 150 million accounts (30 million more than Netflix) and dominated the PC gaming market with a share of between 18 and 20% (but 75% of the online market). According to some reports, Microsoft has offered over $20 billion to buy the service and the company behind it outright, but Valve's owner, Gabe Newell (who worked for Microsoft in the 1990s, quitting to co-found Valve), had rejected such overtures out of hand.

Understandably, other services have tried to compete with Steam. CDProjekt launched GoG (Good Old Games) as a rival service which focuses on getting older games updated to work on modern hardware. Their main selling point is not using an form of DRM (Digital Rights Management), which they feel hinders the customer experience. Meanwhile, Electronic Arts, UbiSoft and Blizzard-Activision launched rival services to exclusively launch their games, respectively Origin, UPlay and BattleNet (although many UPlay games are also available on Steam). With relatively small game catalogues and niche target audiences, these services have existed alongside Steam, rather than trying to compete directly with it.

This has now changed thanks to a company whose pedigree in PC gaming is even older than Valve's: Epic Games.

Founded in 1991, Epic Games spent the 1990s releasing a large number of low- and mid-budged action games before releasing their first 3D shooter in 1999, Unreal. Unreal was followed by both sequels and the immensely successful multiplayer spinoff series, Unreal Tournament. In 2006 launched a new single-player focused series on console, Gears of War, which was immensely successful. They also made immense amounts of money by licensing their Unreal Engine to other companies and publishers. In 2017 they redeployed the Unreal Engine to make a new, fun and lighthearted co-op shooter called Fortnite: Save the World, and its multiplayer spin-off, Fortnite: Battle Royale. Better known just as Fortnite, the game has become the biggest global success story since Minecraft, with Epic Games making significant profits from the game's downloadable extras and content.

Late last year, Epic Games launched the Epic Store, which they proudly proclaimed was going to take the fight directly to Valve. At first gamers chuckled and moved on: many companies had vowed to do the same thing and all had failed. But then Epic Games started doing something that no other would-be Steam-killer had done before: actively seeking out PC gaming developers and offering them staggering sums of money for a 12-month exclusivity period on PC. In addition, Epic Games offered to take only a 12% cut of the sales of games, as opposed to Valve's huge 30%. Developers, watching profit margins drop steadily over the years due to an inability to keep development costs down and also an inability to raise prices accordingly due to market saturation, started signing up enthusiastically.

The first casualty was Metro: Exodus. The third game in a popular first-person shooter series, following on from Metro 2033 (2010) and Metro: Last Light (2013), Metro: Exodus's Ukrainian developers were offered a huge sum of money for a 12-month exclusivity period. They agreed. Fans of the series and more casual gamers railed angrily against the development, citing it was bad form for a company to wall off a game behind a new service, especially a new service that did not have the ease of use or many of the most basic features of Steam. They were also suspicious of Tencent, a Chinese company accused of spying on customers, which had acquired a 40% stake in Epic in 2012. Despite these complaints, Metro: Exodus sold exceptionally well on release, outselling Metro: Last Light more than two-and-a-half times on launch day.

Last week Epic flexed its muscles by locking in Phoenix Point to an exclusivity period. Phoenix Point is the eagerly-awaited new turn-based tactics game from X-COM creator Julian Gollop and his company Snapshot Games. Using an approach similar to Firaxis's recent XCOM games, the game goes for a more simulated-based approach and has been praised for its gameplay decisions. For a tiny company like Snapshot the deal was apparently "impossible to resist," as the money offered could keep the company going for "years." For fans, the anger was much more palpable this time around and also more readily supported: Phoenix Point had been crowdfunded with the explicit promise that the game would be available on Steam and GoG on release day, and that was now not going to happen. Possibly the most eagerly-awaited PC game of 2019 became reviled overnight, with an absolute flood of refund requests pouring in.

But this has not stopped Epic's onslaught. In the last few days they have announced a blizzard of new acquisitions and deals. Obsidian Entertainment's The Outer Worlds, another of the most eagerly-awaited games of 2019, has joined the exclusivity deal (or, more accurately, publisher Take Two signed up for them). Quantic Dream, known for their moody console games with jaw-dropping graphics, were offered a deal so lucrative that they have gone back and dusted down all of their previous games going back to 2010 for release through Epic (comprising Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls and Detroit: Become Human). Remedy Entertainment's promising Control has also signed up, along with RTS Industries of Titan and The Sinking City. The full list is extensive and surprising, encompassing many mid-range upcoming PC games, which are the bread and butter of the platform.

This is nothing less than a full-scale assault on Valve's control of the PC gaming business. Whether it can be sustained is unclear, but it represents the biggest challenge to Steam's supremacy in over a decade. Valve will have to respond and in some respects it already has, promising to fix long-standing problems like people gaming the review system and offensive zero-budget, zero-effort games being shovelled onto the platform. The real test, I think, will come when a real AAA big-hitter that should be on Steam goes Epic Store exclusive. Take Two putting some games exclusively on Epic has to be a major concern. It's an open industry secret that Take Two and Rockstar Games are prepping a PC version of Red Dead Redemption 2, 2018's biggest game on console, for release likely in 2020. If they decided to make that game an Epic exclusive, it would be a huge and fundamental blow to Steam's position in the marketplace.

This battle could determine how PC games are bought, sold and played in the 2020s, so is hugely significant. But it may also be futile, as waiting in the wings is Google's Stadia system, which may offer a completely different, more Netflix-esque approach altogether. How this pans out will be very interesting, and no doubt contentious.

Obsidian announce their new RPG, THE OUTER WORLDS, from the creators of FALLOUT

Obsidian Entertainment have formally announced their next game, The Outer Worlds. As anticipated from teasers earlier this week, this is a retrofuturistic SF roleplaying game. The setting is the planet Halcyon, one of numerous colony worlds overrun by corporations. The player creates a character who wakes up from a long period in cryosleep and is asked to help recover missing colonists from across the planet. The trailer hints that you may also travel to other planets and engage in space combat.

The game is the brainchild of acclaimed RPG designers Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky. The two developers are best-known for creating the Fallout franchise for Black Isle Studios and Interplay, jointly creating the first game in the series in 1997 and working on the sequel of a year later. They later left the floundering Interplay to found the highly-esteemed development studio Troika, where they worked on Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (2001) and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (2004), two of the most highly-acclaimed CRPGs of all time. After Troika was disbanded, Cain joined Obsidian Entertainment (the successor to Black Isle) where he worked on games such as Pillars of Eternity (2015). In the meantime Boyarsky joined Blizzard and worked as a writer and “loremaster” on Diablo III (2012) and its expansion Reaper of Souls (2014).

In 2015 Boyarsky joined Cain at Obsidian and the two were given the freedom to work on a new game, one they’d been discussing informally for over a decade by that point. Obsidian had created a new niche making retro-2D isometric RPGs like Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny (2016) and Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire (2018) but they didn’t want to get locked into that permanently and wanted to make a colourful 3D RPG with high production values that could go head to head with the likes of BioWare and Bethesda.

The Outer Worlds is the result of that collaboration. As with Cain and Boyarsky’s previous games, it is set in an unusual, colourful and characterful world which reacts and changes to the player’s actions. Players have freedom to solve problems with violence, wits, stealth or negotiation, and have a lot of freedom over their builds. Skills play a much larger role in dialogue choices than in many RPGs (which sometimes have oddities where characters with very high science or medicine skills are unable to use those skills to solve problems, instead having to go on lengthy quests to recover information). They can also amass a crew of various characters who can provide assistance and support.

The game is played from a first-person perspective and looks on first glimpse like a cross between New Vegas, Borderlands and Mass Effect. The trailer demonstrates combat, dialogue and roleplaying possibilities. It is unclear at the moment if the game is a huge open world (like a Bethesda title) or more of a focused game set in large but linear environments (like BioWare's Mass Effect series).

The Outer Worlds will be published by Private Division, the new indie publishing division of Take Two Interactive. Obsidian were recently purchased by Microsoft, but this will not impact on The Outer Worlds which will be released on PC, X-Box One and PlayStation 4 in 2019.