The Outer Worlds Stealth Kill

A threatening maurader aiming his gun in The Outer Worlds

Yous can kill everyone in The Outer Worlds. It's a development nightmare.

Senior designer Brian Heins explains how tricky information technology is to pull off space murder

By Aug ii, 2019, ix:00am EDT

The Outer Worlds is existence made by the aforementioned minds behind the original Fallout games and Fallout: New Vegas. Those games, dissimilar the Fallout titles made by Bethesda Game Studios, allow players to kill every single living being. Whether yous think this is a good or bad matter is up to you lot and your god, simply there are certainly folks who savor that level of moral freedom in their video games.

Simply with that freedom comes a major pain in the donkey: really making it work. It's a major development challenge for a game that is fully voiced and offers handfuls of means to solve every quest. How much of a challenge? Polygon spoke to Obsidian senior designer Brian Heins to get a better sense of the minefield the developers have laid for themselves.

"It is insanely hard," says Heins when I ask him most the development side of existence able to murder anybody. He goes on to explain that the ability to murder everyone actually adds more than complication than annihilation else in quest pattern. "Whatever NPC that is critical to a quest or some data, we have to have backups for the actor."

A weirdo with a robot mask in The Roseway of The Outer Worlds

Heins lays out a specific case:

"Anyone you lot encounter, you lot can kill, [so] at that place's got to be a mode to get whatever they were going to give you, whether it'southward a final entry or you lot can loot something off of their body or at that place'due south a chest in their office that yous would now lock-option to get the data from. We gotta kickoff figuring out all of those."

But that's not all.

"When we're looking at the quest itself, nosotros have to now have updates that will fire to show, 'OK, you got this data past doing this,' and brand sure that the [dialogue makes] sense," says Heins. For example, you can't accept an NPC saying that y'all bought an particular from someone when you ripped it off their cold, dead body. "So that adds complication [and] also the localization budget goes through the roof."

With so many variables, how is information technology possible to make certain every possibility is accounted for? Heins explains that it's a boring, methodical process.

"Nosotros start off with the area designers creating a general stub for a conversation. Like, 'Here are the diverse options nosotros want to make certain are accounted for and [are] covered by the NPC. And we endeavour to include all the various decease states in there."

Shooting a mech with electricity in The Outer Worlds

From there, the conversation goes to the narrative design team, which fleshes out the details into a full-length, man-sounding back-and-along. "Unremarkably what happens at that indicate is and then QA finds bugs. 'Oh, we gotta take this whole other branch of conversation for this [possibility].' And so a conversation that they started out writing equally very compact and curtailed now starts growing much bigger, because they have not had to handle a lot of other states."

Heins admits that the team is "not perfect at it," and he's sure some bits will skid through the cracks, but he says he's hopeful the developers accept deemed for nigh of it. Information technology's a ton of effort, though, and makes me wonder if the team is interested in taking information technology a little easier on choices with the side by side game it makes.

"When we're in the middle of issues fixing, everyone wants to make an easier game," says Heins. "But every bit shortly every bit we kickoff pre-production, we start talking nigh similar, these are the games we love. And then as much as we regret it — what we're gonna take to do with all the bugs — I don't think we'd desire to brand anything else."