At E3 2019, we had the chance to speak to Dan McPhee, narrative designer for Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds, about whether or not the game will feature a character morality system.
“There’s not one that’s tracked,” says McPhee. “There are certainly moral choices, and we track your faction’s feelings towards you. If you murder everybody, everyone is going to hate you, but we don’t have a sort of good vs. evil scale, and a lot of that is because a lot of the decisions you make in this game aren’t really good vs. evil. There’s a lot of grey area. There’s a lot of ‘this character is doing this thing that makes sense for him against this other one that makes sense for the other one.’ It’s really just who you personally believe in.”
Some of the game’s moral ambiguity may stem from the nature of The Outer Worlds’ story which portrays a world where so much has essentially been bought, twisted, and corrupted by various corporations.
“The basic idea is that corporations can buy colonies and star systems then send their people out there to colonize them, mine minerals, and bring it all back to Earth” says McPhee. “[The Outer Worlds] is on the very edge of space, the Halcyon Colony. 10 corporations formed the board that bought the place. They send out two ships, one that gets there and one that didn’t. That ship came in sort of 70 years late to the party. That’s the ship the player wakes up on and is dropped in from.”
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So how does Obsidian manage to account for so many possibilities in such an ambiguous world where the player shapes their own story? McPhee says it involves “quite a bit” of storyboarding as well as being able to adapt the direction of the game’s narrative as it is in development.
“It’s not really until it’s in the game and you can play it that you really know if it’s good,” McPhee says of the team’s story creation process. “Part of our process, for example, is when we plop an NPC in the world, our area designers will go and add a dummy conversation. [It’s] like, ‘ok, here’s the option where he gives you the quest, here’s the option where you tell him to go sod off, here’s the option for like a dumb character.’ They’ll just sub that stuff in and then we’ll go and flesh it out later. There’s a combination of planning and implementation at the same time.”
Matthew Byrd is a staff writer for Den of Geek. He spends most of his days trying to pitch deep-dive analytical pieces about Killer Klowns From Outer Space to an increasingly perturbed series of editors. You can read more of his work here or find him on Twitter at @SilverTuna014.