The Outer Worlds - Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky's Design Lessons

Remove all ads!

@Gamasutra Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky talk about what they learned from making The Outer Worlds.

​

Making RPGs in 2019

When Cain and Boyarsky first began working on The Outer Worlds, it occurred to them that the world of game design had dramatically changed since they last worked together on the Vampire: The Masquerade series at Troika Entertainment.

Boyarsky noted that while the RPG genre has gotten more financially viable, it's also twisted and morphed into other genres as well. "There's always the people who loved RPGs but the mainstream of games seemed to move away from that."

"I thought what they did with Mass Effect was really cool, I think The Witcher is really cool, but we just felt there was a lack of games where you have a blank slate character that was really generated by scratch from the player."

Cain jumped in to point out that when he and Boyarsky first got started in the genre, most RPG designers were working off systems inspired by tabletop design, for tabletop players. "I think too is that RPGs used to be heavily influenced by tabletop, and I think computer RPGs are finally becoming their own thing. You don't have to be a D&D RPG to get a lot of people interested in your game."

With that in mind, Cain said that one of the goals for The Outer Worlds was to design it to be more accessible than some of Obsidian's previous titles. "One of our early pillars that we decided on was that we wanted this game to be easy to get into," he explained. "A lot of RPGs-and a lot of our RPGs had this. The very first thing you were hit with were a ton of numbers, a ton of stuff you had to read in order to get into the game, and for this one said 'let's try to move as much character creation out of character creation.'"

"Let them spend skill points later. Let perks come later, let the flaws and stuff come later. Just do some quick character creation."

[...]

​