Outer Worlds 2 director: Watching streamers make bad builds is part of the “true RPG” experience games like Baldur’s Gate 3 are reviving

For a long stretch, the industry pushed toward maximum accessibility and minimal friction — systems designed so players rarely had to stop and think. Adler highlights objective markers as an example: “Many games will say, ‘go do this thing’, and it will put an objective marker directly on the thing that you need to go [to]. You don’t have to think, like, legitimately, I don’t have to read – I mean, I do this when I play MMOs – I just spam through what they’re saying, because it doesn’t really matter. It’s not that important. I immediately see where the objective marker is. I walk over to that thing and I pick it up. I don’t even know what the goal of the quest was, but I just finished it, and that’s not how I want a true RPG to play.”

There was a time when serious RPG fans kept paper journals: mapping labyrinths by hand, tracking quests, and weighing every stat point. That old-school attention to detail is part of what The Outer Worlds 2 aims to recapture. As Heather observes in our The Outer Worlds 2 review, the game is “willing to play game master to my silliest decisions,” and that degree of agency — including the chance to blunder — depends on giving players room to think for themselves.

“In a true RPG, you need to think about what is happening while you’re playing through the game. You have to be willing to engage with a game. I’m starting to see a lot more of that now, as I see things like the Baldur’s Gate 3s of the world coming out. I think that, yeah, it is starting to go back in that direction. I think that’s great, because I think that people are really going to enjoy kind of relearning how RPGs can really allow this kind of player choice that maybe they’ve been missing over the past little while.”

The Outer Worlds 2 is one of the most anticipated new games for 2025, and it aims to stand alongside the best RPGs out there.