The Outer Worlds is hilarious, if the quick PAX East demo is indicative of its general high quality.
The demo – during which voice appearing isn’t but carried out – kicks off exhibiting us the town of Byzantium, a metropolis for the wealthy. It’s the place everybody needs to dwell, however powerful immigration insurance policies typically imply they will’t. But beneath all of the gloss, The City of the Elite hides a darker facet.
You can see this rot represented visually, with buildings wanting shiny and glamorous from afar, however with put on and tear clearly seen upon nearer inspection. The complete metropolis is a facade and the one factor that issues is promoting attain, as you’d count on from a colony based by megacorps.
One of the primary belongings you see upon getting into is an promoting drone that’s peddling Auntie Cleo’s Energising Ointment, “Enjoy six cups’ worth of concentrated caffeine in every dollop!” it proclaims. It’s like if Dubai was ruled by eating regimen pill-peddling Instagram influencers. There’s a grim facet to The Outer Worlds, however the fixed barrage of gags retains issues balanced.
The demo additionally provides us a have a look at how Obsidian makes use of participant stats to supply distinctive choices – calling out a dumb comment along with your intelligence stat, for instance – or how your selection of companion can add one thing to totally different conversations. Then there’s how one can categorical your self silently, with one dialogue possibility being merely “exude wordless fury” and one other being “say nothing, but make your eye twitch a little”. It’s dripping with daftness.
At the beginning of the panel, Obsidian co-founder Tim Cain mentioned, “People don’t want to feel depressed while they’re playing games”, and all the game is seemingly constructed round this precept. This ethos even extends to the weapons you wield.
The Mandibular Rearranger is a science weapon that Obsidian created after discovering a bug that added random values to NPCs’ heads and faces upon contact. Rather than fixing it, it was packaged as a characteristic within the type of a weapon that twists and deforms faces, making enemy heads go a bit Beetlejuice with every swing of the baton.
“There was a bug where the NPC faces were getting pushed to the extremes in some of the builds, and it was making us laugh,” mentioned lead designer Charles Staples. “And we thought we should use this because it was making us laugh, and humor is a big part of this game.”
Let’s hope Obsidian runs into some extra unintentional hilarity earlier than The Outer Worlds launches a while this 12 months.
Source
