GDC Plays The Outer Worlds with Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky

just came through hello everyone welcome to the GDC twitch channel my name is Brian Francis I am a contributing editor at Gamasutra comm I am the community manager for GDC I am here today playing a game that I have been having a lot of fun with the game is called the outer worlds it comes to us from sitting entertainment and our friends at private division this is a not quite an open-world RPG but just kind of you know it's an action RPG brought to you from a very talented studio down in Southern California who are two members of whom two directors of whom are in the lower left-hand corner of the screen before I introduced them I need to introduce Alex who I need to get his face back on camera little Alex how you doing you don't really need to hey I'm Alex I'm an editor for gamasutra calm and GDC but I'm not that important who is important is our two special guest special guests will you please tell everyone who you are and what you do I'm Tim Cain I was a

co-director on that world I'm wunderbar ski I was the other co-director nice so did you guys have been doing RPGs for a while now right what number are PG is this are we counting Diablo is an action RPG or not that counted yeah you want to count MMORPGs absolutely don't keep as an RPG right table top also counts a lot I don't know I made like seven or eight games I lost count and that doesn't mean does that include Sookie yeah for a long day it's been already a lot of them 25 years worth or so yeah I got to say real quick happy holidays to everyone who marks Halloween is a special occasion we are taking questions from chat today about game design development and this game

specifically so if you have questions for Lander Tim please throw him a chat and we will get them relayed with all haste I just kind of wanted to how you guys are feeling the game just came out you're coming off a launch is everything going to the studio good I'm feeling really good it's nice to have people out there playing the game and enjoying it you know we've gotten a lot of great reviews so that's that's always wonderful you're never quite sure how people are gonna react to what you're doing you get so close to it what you're developing it the laughing at the right time without laughing at the wrong things right they seem to like the story and the characters and Luo man so check check check all right it's all green from here tell us a bit about how this project came to be and how you came to work together this time Oh two years ago the founders asked if I was interested in making an IP and they already talked about an idea for it what

I told them to pull it off I would really need to have Leonard I would not be able to do the story and in any way the characters without his abilities so they said okay and he was over a little no-name studio lizard working on a project you've never heard of called Diablo and he he said okay yes it was such a great pitch no I I you know the the opportunity to make another IP from scratch with Tim and you know return to my single-player RPG roots was just too good to pass up Tim and I have a lot of fun when we're when we're making stuff and it was just just great to return to that they literally put us in a room for three months I think all we did is yeah they wouldn't let us out yes they just shove the food in that was really fun to do that though we hadn't done that in 10

decade yeah more than 10 years yeah I kind of want to you know as Bryant and guys just through here I kind of want to get your thoughts on where RPG design and development have gone in the past decade or plus like you know folks they don't know I mean if you can trace your work back you know through Diablo and all kinds of other stuff back to troika back to our Kadam back to also under something all the way back to you know stuff beyond that so I mean you've been doing this for well over a decade maybe to like easily right because the fallout was the 90s so tell me like somebody up succinctly the entire progression of last two decades of RPG design and development how have you how have you seen it change how are you feeling about it these days there's this game that just came out called the outer worlds that we think is a great representation of where RPG design of that no seriously I mean I think that it's fantastic you know when we first started making RPGs way back in our play RPGs were still a viable thing in

people's minds and then over the next decade or two people really weren't as interested in our RPGs in the mainstream I mean there's always you know the the the people who loved RPGs but the the mainstream of games seem to have moved away from that and then you know you get like your massively multiplayer RPGs which whether they're actual RPGs or not is open to debate so I think that some of that and then you know if games like Diablo really kind of sparked a resurgence of that and then you have you know your Mass Effect's which are very interesting I mean I thought that what they did with Mass Effect was really cool I think The Witcher is really cool but we just felt like there was a lack of games where you had the blank slate character that was really generated from scratch by the player we felt like that hadn't really moved forward as much as all the other aspects of our PG he's had you know we never except for vampires about to say we never got the opportunity to do first-person RPG we

did that with vampire wasn't as successful as we would have liked at the time people seem to like it now but I think that was one of the biggest things was having actual RPGs in first-person but then it seems to it seems like you know the stuff that we love to do the blank slate characters they're really focusing on player role-playing of however they want to roleplay and the reaction to their choices seem to be the things that that people weren't focusing as much on is that we wanted to focus on I think yeah RPGs used to be heavily influenced by and I think computer RPGs are finally moving becoming their own thing you don't have to be a D&D RPG to get a lot of people interested in your gaming or group serve I need the other Pathfinder mean those make great RPGs to create si RPGs but I think RPGs computer user now becoming like their own thing yeah and the go ahead please oh I'm just gonna say in the fact that people are excited about this this type

of RPG and and are reacting so well to the you know the stuff that we've always loved to do is just really nice because there was a time where you know you go to a publisher and try to pitch them on making a game that had a lot of you know depth and story and choices and and they just kind of give you a blank look and and try to steer more towards multiplayer or more towards an action game yeah I am it seems like people is dank totally people have to seem much more excited and passionate I mean isn't the best way they mean much more excited and passionate about this game than they are about something like tyranny or something which I also really really enjoyed and felt like it could have gotten a lot more attention I'm curious why do you think a game like this seems to be hitting so well now as opposed to some about that I cannot say obsidian stuff hasn't done well but there is it feels like the outer worlds has broken through into a larger audience then obsidian games typically do I wonder if that matches up with your own observations from inside the studio and if so why like this right now so I think

hit a good time to rob something like this but also one of the very first one of our early killers that we decided on was we wanted to make this game easy to get into a lot of RPGs and our RPGs in the past had this the very first thing you're a hit with is a ton of numbers a ton of raw stuff you have to read in order to edit and this one we said let's try to move as much imperatore creation that out of character facial let them spend skill points later let them you know 11 perks come later let the flaws and stuff come later just do some quick character creation and dive into the game so you can start playing and I think that just appeals I think that gets more casual players but I think that still kills the hardcore flames they have their depth it just comes too late and I also think it has to do with the first-person view you know I think people look at a isometric game and just really you know if you're not into RPGs I think people kind of like just back

off immediately whether or not it's true they assume there's just so much complexity and depth that they just don't want to have to deal with upfront which again goes to how we wanted to kind of ease people into making more and more choices about their character as opposed to trying to figure out you know pcs this example because because in fall you know if I put points into this energy weapon or I gotta be able to find you know energy weapons before you know halfway through the game and in fall the answer was no so you know with the categories that Tim and Charlie our lead designer came up with I thought that was a fantastic solution where I don't have to decide I'm going to be an arranged character I put points into the categories and I think people really responded well to that because it's by the time you have to start making your specialization choices you understand what the game is and you kind of understand what you would want to get into more that's why I liked having worked with Leonard for so long because we could literally have a conversation where I'd start hey you know that stupid thing we did in one of our games let's not do it at this game

that was our to-do list don't do our stupid things we had done in Portland yeah well let's uh let's focus in first I can talk specifically about that leveling system I don't know how hands-on either of you were with this but folks art and play be yet it's a RPG lovely system where people can put points into sort of skill groups up to a certain point and those after a certain point those points will go across all skills in the group so you'll get one point in all three up to fifty and then you serve you have to put in points on a one to one basis I'm curious like I've never seen that as you know as minor a changes it is like I've never seen anything like that in a PC game before so tell me how did that process how did that system get designed how do you come up with it well I already had the categories in the game where you had and you know we started with you just tagged to because I'm like you don't really I don't want them to think too much at the beginning about what they want to do I'm just interested in this in this and I think it was our creative director Josh sorter said hey that's gonna really make people want to specialize it's kind of penalizing two generalists and so I

redesigned it so that the point you put in two categories to spread out to all the skills in that category at the beginning and suddenly what we had was a game work I don't have to think about anything other than I like using guns it doesn't matter whether I like using handguns or rifles or heavy weapons I just like God and that's all you have to think about for anywhere from five to ten levels and then later on and also what's cool about that is that you try all the guns set up here in the game and we don't have to drop all the guns immediately because no matter what gun we draw you're gonna be pretty good at it and then you can you can play with different guns for a few levels on different maps and different creatures ago I really like machine guns and then some other time you realize that you can start putting points directly into heavy weapons and that applied that every all the skill categories you could play with different dialogue skills and say I really feel bad when I lie to people they love intimidating boom I love that

that attention to to the player experience I think in a way that RPGs have sometimes struggled with RPG sort of always assume that everyone's ready to get in and for the character building side as opposed to the people just want to interesting choices to make I may be a pause for a minute give a quick shout to chat and apologies for some mild technical difficulties I've been trying to solve with my end for you folks out of there in chat we have folks like big crazy wolf were so happy for their they want to say thank you guys for this game they absolutely love it I've been asked by V Raptor 64 to just do the secret people quest the stream so it's what I'm gonna work on disclosure V Raptor is friend of the show Carly over there but yeah other than that we are taking your questions we would like the questions to be focused on game development if you could some mild controller issues that we're not happening earlier so I will work on

fixing those Alex do you have any questions for our guest room I have so many you guys thank you so much for giving us a full hour yeah so like I really feel that this game does some interesting work to sort of and as you just said Jan sort of streamlined the process of getting into it and sort of make the ramp into the mid game very gentle I'm curious to know is there anything you have felt like you had to sacrifice or give up on either specifically to sort of design this sort of opening couple of hours or just in general that you sort of regret not I I don't think in the way you're you're thinking about we did have to make there's two rounds of cuts we had to make in the game for content horoscope so that we could finish the game and make sure it was as polished as it is so that was very tough but that was that was just content I don't I don't believe I don't feel like we made compromises or cuts at the very beginning to get players into it you know as Tim was saying you know Josh Sawyer's the design director at the

company and he worked on New Vegas along along with a lot of other people on our team and you know they what they had done was to make sure that in the very first area of the game they had a lot of skill checks all over the place so he was he was mentioning that to us and like you know that's that's a really good good thing to keep in mind so we just really wanted to give players a lot of feedback early on that you know all of their choices were mattering and also you know just having people like him or or other people who have worked on games but aren't working on this game currently a won't work out to be in currently around it's fantastic to have RPG developers that you can have played game who aren't as close to it as you are because you get so close to this stuff you're not quite sure if it's one ending or not I mean I know I've been telling other people wide before we shipped I finish this game 16 times terrorists occur with wildly different characters I was still finding new stuff

in the last playthrough and then after we shipped I was watching a streamer play and he found something in Edgewater I'd never before my other than is that what was that there's a brave that's all by itself allowed on the way to the beach and it's because we've changed that areas are proponents and I have gone back up the fund change but still the fact that I had never I knew there was a P Y down there good right what was going on there I really want to get into writing them around all this to but before we do that's a great point I want to jump into how did you how does the studio set up a production workflow so that you can produce ass sure how do you like this control aroma no worries there's a ton of stuff in this game it's big it's open you know it's a sizable endeavor how does the studio effectively produce the assets for a game like this because it sounds hard a coordination

yeah I think there's a lot of planning involved there's a lot of coordination you wouldn't believe how many things slip through the cracks and we're scrambling like how did we miss that I it's a lot less organized than it that it probably should be R then people would expect it to be we had amazing QA which is not a lot of bugs but they tested this game so many different ways and just a lot of very talented developers you know keeping track of things I mean we make very detailed design Docs we try to keep them living to be living documents so they don't just sit there but after a while it's you know it's almost as much work to keep up the docs as it is to just develop the game so you really rely on people who are working on their areas to take ownership of that and make sure they're getting what they need and that the doctor if the dogs aren't up-to-date that they're communicating with the other departments and then of course our producers you know I don't think the producers get enough of enough credit on a game like this we had a fantastic production team and they were they were

doing a lot of the work of keeping track of everything everybody needed and making sure was being worked on when it needed to be worked on yeah that accrues me you met you shouted out QA which is fantastic and I got to say you know I've put you know maybe 10 20 hours in this game and it's uh it's very it's very stable it's very it's proof as far as I can tell and there has been times in the past when obsidian has gotten a lot of like like critical lampooning for perhaps launching with buggy games I don't know how much of that is due to a number of cause whether it's you know just the scope of the games or the production process or the time evolved or whatever but I'm curious like you know how has the how was the series approached the QA and how is your observation this leadership our QA changed over the last couple of years and then sort of was anything new put into place on this game that maybe was done to make it like just extra bulletproof one thing I tried to do early as early as eclipse I wrote up all the playthrough paths that I wanted supported and on a game like this I didn't try to do every single one cuz

that was hard but I tried to do major ones like make a character that fights mainly with guns do one with melee make a character that uses all the science weapons make a character that tinker's everything one of them was a dumb character one of who I said make a character that kills everybody everybody run across kill them and hopefully before they keep it talked to you and of course I'm sure QA had a lot of fun with that one but that actually tested a lot of things in the game about can quest continued without a quest giver what happens when people make you know particular weapons play outside the level range we're expecting for his own what happens when people go in with wildly different skill sets idea they start off with finished particular quest and we kill we got a lot of feedback from QA in that that helped us fix a lot of quests and other content of the game to make it viable for every different kind of character I think the biggest thing overall that we did differently was in the past we wouldn't make those

choices until we had to to make cuts I mean and we were there pretty much in a place where we had to and this one but we just realized it a lot sooner or faced up to the fact a lot sooner because before we're just like no we want this content in there for the players the game is going to suffer without this without this content in there we have to make sure it's in there so that means you're you're you're developing the game way further into the data than you should be you know you shouldn't be developing really seriously past alpha you know we always end up pushing that but you know you want a really good beta period where the game is playable from beginning to end Ella contents in there and you know a lot of times we were just so passionate about what we're doing in the past that we wouldn't make those cuts and this time we forced ourselves to make those tough choices earlier than we had before and that enabled Tim to play the game 17 times instead of developing the game though some of the things we decided early like putting a dum dum character

lines in was something we said right from the beginning so it's like every time a rider came aboard or like you have to support dumb fire characters you know don't resist just give in now and write those lines and I think they wrote some great stuff I am I want to jump in a chat here and not let everybody go unnoticed big crazy wolf asked the question basically has the response to the game in what you hope for better or worse it's it's definitely what we hope for I mean it's it's a lot better than than we were expecting because you always see the flaws you always see you're so close to the game you see the game that you wanted to make when you started it and you only see the places I mean there's a lot of stuff to be proud of don't get me wrong I was very happy with the game but all I could see was you know the bigger game that I had originally envisioned and you know having to make the smaller game having to you know make some of those tough cuts not having some of the depths that I was hoping was going to be there originally was was a little bit

hard to see past and you know when we we got people playing the game earlier you know we had a three we had a very successful III and there's a judges day where the judges played it and they were all really enthusiastic about it it was kind of like at least I was a little bit in denial like every time I heard somebody had fun I'm like they must not have gotten to this part or this other part you know I wasn't until I saw you know all the great feedback that I finally go okay yeah I'm being a little bit too hard on some of the stuff and start accepting that people are having a great I don't what did it exceed your expectations yeah one day I'd love it's one of reading reviews or especially when I watch streamers or watch goodie reviews there's so many details in the game I'm so glad that people are finding like fun ways of interacting with NPCs or side quests and didn't know existed or even I loved what would people think I'm gonna do this really weird thing to solve this quest and then they discover we thought of that there's a NPC has a

response to what you just did and I'd love that they're finding these things it's like we wanted to make this world that we described this as why people talk about how long is the game I'm like let's talk again about how wide it is this is a very wide game yeah it's um let's talk about the writing mistake right so I know there was a there's a full writing team but you guys certainly had your hand in it and I want to talk about sort of like the general thrust of what you're trying to accomplish with the writing in this game and the narratives and sort of just like how do you write how do you write a funny game honestly because like I have found that many funny games that purport to be amusing are actually really tricky to get into and especially the opening of this game the comedic timing and the writing it like really lands for me and I don't see that in games very often so like how how did you approach structuring and writing that kind of stuff well the humor was was the same kind of humor means him always like to put in our games it's a combination of my dark world view and

Tim's silly world views so so that part at least knowing what we wanted it to be was I think half the battle and and we already had to try ahead done that several times before so I think that started us out a little bit ahead of the game but I think for me when I was you know instructing the writers on what we wanted yeah we wanted humor we wanted to make sure that that there was you know enough humor in it but at the same time it always had to come from situations that had to come from characterization it had to come from the absurdity of the world like people trying to live their lives and and justify to themselves how they could you know how they could live and make the choices they were in this absurd situation as opposed to just trying to find funny jokes if you create absurdity in the situations and depth and the characters just them reacting to it in an honest way is going to create a lot of that for

you and just you know that's not to say we don't have you know awesomely talented writers because we do well once they once they those things are all in place I think it's it's easier for them to kind of get the humor and they're like because Tim would play an area and say go this area is too dry and the writers would make another pass on it and it wasn't like a torturous process or anything the the raw material was already there for them to kind of exploit to make more humorous but as I pointed out Leonard for the reason this game is in goofy and I'm the reason it's not depressing I like pointing out that it's not depressing because there's sort of a way that like especially for a toe in this game which it at hearts gets back to fall out and it harkens back to you know a cynical outlook about what will happen in the future that's me it's still I've seen some really interesting tanks from people who played the game especially about the first major choice you have to make which we're pretty deep in the game but I won't go shouting spoilers in case

anyone's new or the pair of you I'd like to know it was really cool I got to see Carrie Patel will give a GDC talk last year about working with the dialogue tools that your company works with obsidian has been working with a really similar jewel set for several years now even as some making different kind of games that's been making infinity engine and tribute RPGs it's been making you know the stick of truth the South Park game and now it's come out and made something that's kind of a modern fallout like I guess you guys worked on new vague or obsidian produced New Vegas so it's fair to say that how has it been obviously as game directors like sort of keeping up your toolset to make very similar games even though you had to change on like major major genre changes that roll times well this is the first game I've worked on it up see and so I don't have a lot of history except for the history I had with the people back when we're all at interplay and when we were at troika we

used Excel so it really wouldn't be hard to clear that bar for a dialog tool but I just have to say that the dialog tool and the quest tool and the different tools that they've developed over the years here at obsidian are just fantastic you know the dialog and quest tool are big visual flowcharts so you can see how the conversation flows which is you know an enormous help with the kind of complexity that we're putting into this these kind of games but you know they've been developing it I'm assuming since since they started as a company yeah and in years and it shows it's it's a fantastic dialogue tool yeah I've been here for eight years and we use the same tools on South Park and pillars of Trinity and tyranny and outer worlds and because of that you know people can move your project project and you're already familiar with those tools they just get improved every now every cycle so we hit

the ground running up those nice real quick just for my own edification what engine is this game built in I don't think I've ever actually looked at what is this how did you what tools is built in this is unreal for okay yeah all right cool that's all just curious so let's talk a bit about how you build games that reward player choice right cuz like this game seems so much about giving players many options you know it's very wide how do you think about the way you structured choices like I have to assume it's not just always every zone has good bad you know and then third option is there a structure or any kind of like process you go through to build these out these narrow structures or they're all just kind of riders rooms and rising a little bit from a very high level if there's two things number one it should never feel like a good and bad choice it should always feel like you're making a difficult choice between maybe on the

surface very simple but as soon as you dig into it at all it gets a lot more complex and again you know not only the character stuff they talked about earlier but the character stuff on the side of the player letting the players develop I mean a make any kind of character they want and play any character they want in any way they want is like one of our most important things in the game we love our story we love our characters but at the end of the day we always are asking ourselves what our players going to want to do when presented with this choice and when we're playing through you know when we get feedback whether it's from people on the team or people off the team they're like why couldn't I do this here and we're like there has to be a really good reason in game that you can't do that there or we have to give you that option or we have to make its structure in that way that that option doesn't come up so we're always looking at how can we pay the how can we not

only let the player play how they want to reward them for playing that way that that is it always at the forefront of our mind with with creating these kind of this kind of content yeah it seems challenging to create lots of different opportunities for players to express themselves within the limited opportunities you have given the scope of the game like do you go into it with like character player archetypes you know explorers killers whatever or is there is there a different process for trying to suss out where players might want to go yeah we had 13 yeah the one that Tim came over at the very basic level it's the one we the choices we came up with way back and fallout her still at the heart of everything it's you need to be able to talk your way by your way or stealth your way through the game we added the leadership which depends on companions and of course there's all the different ways combinations whether you're you know whether you're killing people not trying to kill people whether you're playing melee ranged you know all those

different facets to it but really it you know when we when we're when we're developing these kind of things it really always does come down to how can we really emphasize the player's choice and you know what I one of the things I like to do with the writers is you know using Edgewater as an example at the surface it might seem very very simple oh here's the group of people they're kind of bad history people are very poor kind of good so you know I always want the writers to add depth to the characters and having the character that might on a surface seem like an evil choice or the bad choice is actually a very noble character who's who might be completely misguided but is doing this for the right reasons and people who are doing the right thing might be doing the right thing for the wrong reasons so there's all these different ways that you can come up with a basic choice and then layer all these different things into it to give it a bunch of different flavor that makes a lot of sense there's really good question here in chat it's very relevant sampie asks how do you deal with narrative disconnect when do you address

it and when you just let game systems happen I assume when this is sort of thing where you complete a quest that just blows somebody away right afterwards we don't some of that we try to deal with I'm in a great example where we we could have pushed it further and we didn't is you know with our body you pick her up in the first town if you killed the people who were in the room with her when you pick her up she's very upset about that you know but then you go into town and to start blowing people away and she doesn't seem to notice you know that's the kind of thing that I was talking about earlier where I would have loved to have you know made sure that we handled that like he's killing people who were obviously our friends and not just the first people you're with when you got her so sometimes we don't have the opportunity to do as much of that as we would like so I think where it's important to us is that while you're doing the quest or these people are active in the world in terms of the questing and storyline that's really

important if in a lot of ways it's after their they've played their part and they're really kind of become you know don't really have a lot more to do in the game and the player starts killing them except for the systemic reactivity we don't really put a lot of effort into making the whole game react to that and that's kind of the trade-off we make we're in the past I think we had put more effort into the kind of things and have a much less polish today for sure man I had no idea Felix had a dropkick so I want to jump back real quick I mean again chat you're killing it with questions keep throwing them out there I will keep going but real quick about a humor and stuff something that I realized really works for me in this game that hasn't always worked in the past is the animation and none of this motion capture just incredibly good animation work on part of the team but the like of little stuff with the professor and you know little physical gags I almost never see really good physical gags in a video game this might

be one of the best I've seen especially in the beginning it was any special work or shout outs you want to give on already like advice for fellow devs on how to like get that stuff working or was just the product of a really good animation team both I think are you talking about the interest of nomadic or just one yeah well because the reason I ask that is because in-game is different from how we do the cinematics the cinematics I mean even in game we did a lot of motion capture but there was a lot of hand animation there was a lot of hand editing of those and they cinematics the interest in a medic specifically there was a lot more motion capture involved and some of it was even done out of house with us directing them on the things we wanted to see and how that would be accomplished all the other in-game stuff was done in-house or most of it was done in-house and that was a totally different process we had to come up with some basic gestures that all

different characters could use and try to mix and match those well they're both great and they killed it thank you I think our animation team did a spectacular job on that stuff yeah yeah I'm not sure it's just because I'm so used to games of this perspective being tying back to stuff you know from the lineage and stuff maybe there's been enough advancement since then a technology that just feels more real but it just really works in this game in a way I haven't seen before I think you know Brian you're doing incredibly well Great Lent you let's talk I wonder you know I want to get into the business and sort of how you guys launch it and stuff but before I do I mean you both we tried to use this term sparingly but you're both game industry veterans and I'm curious like you've worked on a number of titles in your careers and I wonder if there's any specific ones that really influence the way you approach this game whether it's arcing over fallout or diablo or anything else

well i know when we started this i took our lead designer charlie staples aside and said look good I remember I said we start everything with I did a lot of stupid things that I don't do again I told Charlie but I made our pain up if I had an idea it went in so our camp is like chalk fold every idea I had at the time some of them did not belong together so I told him to edit me and so we had a lot of really cool things in mind for this game and Charlie really helped edit it down to like these are like the features at the heart of what you're trying to do and also like if you like combat you know that that was all Charlie so I think part of what we did was we we work with Leonard I worked so long and so well together and we trust each other and we kind of extended that and had a really good lead team that we also trusted and I think that in turn helped us make really good core

mechanics that were in the game right like you said you mentioned that you loved Felix Dropkick I think that means it's time for the animation department all we said was Felix loves tossball and carries a tossball stick to hit people and I think they came back they said hey how about first Special Attack he actually did a flying leap through the air the white great it is great it's fantastic yeah that makes a lot of sense I there's been a lot of questions here in chat to sort of like what you'd expect the new game they want to know when passions are coming when updates are coming I kinda wanna just get all that and ask you guys like in 2019 now that so many games are live games and like a lot of the process of releasing games seems to stretch three to nine at least I carry you how are you how are you looking at this game and its launch are you sort of keeping an eye on and hoping to keep it updated and fresh are you sort of putting it out there and giving me some time to sit before you come back to it like how do you feel about supporting this game and how is that different from the way you used to work on games well the big thing for me

is so we launched the game I could immediately watch people playing it on strings right so you can see what people do which sometimes isn't what they report like do report a bug or tuba we're watching it going that shouldn't happen we should probably fix that don't think they're necessarily fighting about but not to our horn from who to date we haven't had a whole lot above so telling our hotfix list was full of leave things on fire that we had to fix yes there was like a really rare crash and there's some other things we wanted to fix that we saw should be happening but for the most part what we've been looking is we're looking at what we call friction like people are playing and there's hemming there any friction points on the UI or parts of the game that something isn't being messaged very well we're trying to get that done in a you know things that will happen very very soon and then we're keep watching how people play for a longer term patch a few months down the road right on so let's talk about business I would you know I

mean obviously ever wants to know how I was doing I expect you probably can't talk about that kind of stuff but the platforms it's on are really interesting to me I mean you've got got Windows consoles then you're coming to switch I think next year is the plan so like was that challenging at all that like multi-platform rollout and I'm curious like yes okay we'll start there that was that was there anything new or challenging in that any advice you give other developers who are doing similar things especially targeting the switch which seems challenging what we're having this which developed out of house because he was a nut three different platforms was enough for us yeah so where we found people who were you know had done it before and had experience with it it was really hard all right how did you make cross-platform games before because you yeah in South Park yeah yeah I never made I mean when I worked on Diablo I worked on the PC SKU and then they made

the consoles will skew in-house but it was a separate team so this is the first time I've worked on a multi-platform game however being that I'm more involved in the conceptual side of the art and the writing the technical side of the art changes for platform from platform to platform but conceptually doesn't change and the writing is exactly the same so I don't have to worry about any of that Tim on the other hand has to stress on all of that so yeah we had I mean the UI there were differences in UI especially input trying to get all the stuff we wanted on a keyboard mapped onto a controller in a way that made sense we went through several different iterations of how to control things we actually ended up dropping some features just because there was no way to map it onto a controller I think what was really important though is we kept all three platforms the PC ps4 and Xbox kind of in parity we built a new build every day so every day we got it had a brand new build whatever new one in was there um you could we had I got him really early

and a few the testers got it real early we hadn't tested usually before the rest of team got in we knew whether the bill seemed stable and then everybody else could jump to the on the team could jump off with a new build and we test all three right away in the morning and pretty much the biggest difference I guess was UI and input but I yeah I think the really important point about that at least for me was from the very beginning we both said we want to design an interface that's obviously the more interfaces we get designed that are going to work on all three the better however we don't want to compromise one of the SKUs to make it easier to make another one or vice versa we wanted each one to feel really good PC shouldn't feel like a console port yes me that none of them should feel like a pork the other basically if they should all feel good our PC UI should feel like a PC why our console I should feel like a console UI yeah I am this question isn't chat about the fonts must be tricky to work out on TVs for

consoles versus PC I mean you could be like 10 feet away versus like a foot away so I imagine that's wild you know real quick as I'm talking about font size and text how did you settle on the main the outer worlds and have you played the outer wilds yet yes really good yeah we we had a few different names but we really liked outer worlds and didn't we even talk with them about wild yeah we brought we couldn't come up with in any other name we liked and we hadn't heard at least Donnell dictum or I had heard of the out of wilds and we have proposed outer worlds and then we found out I've thought it fairly quickly afterwards and we're like isn't this a concern should we keep looking and I think everybody was just kind of tired of trying to find a name at that point because we had come up with like actually one or two that we liked that I don't even remember what they were now that had already had games or books or something else I'm using that name so I

think it was a combination of fatigue and the fact that outer wilds was supposed to be out like six months before us or something like that you know we're figured well that's not a problem because you know game dev never slips well plus we have the perfect solution for gamers by both absolutely I cannot I cannot agree more Brian how you doing in there what was that I didn't he already said oh sorry I was mumbling I should have spoken up clearer I was saying that's the most positive answer I've ever heard of that kind of question yeah I haven't played it but I hear it's a fantastic game I got to get it and they're both sci-fi yeah yeah fantastic I can't believe we only have folks in chat if you want to get your questions in we would love to have your design and development focused questions we think thank you all for joining us I'm acting like I'm ending the stream but I'm not um I just duck back to my ship for a

minute to do a repair repair and mo-mo figure figure out my ammo situation because it's running out out there ten Leonard my question for you one of the things I've observed about this game like the big challenge of making games like this compared to say Fallout New Vegas is um how how you space out things in the world my complaint about Fallout New Vegas was every faction area mode which was a lot of areas in the game felt a little odd because every faction had to be ready to turn into a combat zone at the seconds notice if you shot someone so they didn't have some of the exploratory things they liked because they were also loot zones as like combat loot zones as opposed to carefully crafted dungeons in this game I have the opposite problem which is every faction zone feels great and alive and populated and that area we were just wandering through I noticed is a little more empty than other games of its site which I'm not that's I'm not trying to brag on outer worlds here I'm just this is just an observation I had how have you sort

of dealt with the concept of filling out spaces and making sure they feel like a living world even when you have the budget to only produce like a tiny aquarium sized world um very carefully we tried to fill out the areas as much as possible in terms of faction areas versus non faction areas that was something that kind of just happened it a little bit naturally I don't think we were really considering that because you know you could turn any of our areas into a combat areas as well even if didn't have anything to do with factions but I feel like you know I I kind of agree I think I feel like we should have had a little bit more content for you to explore and find on monarch but that's some of that stuff is kind of where we we made choices of like okay we're gonna we're gonna really polish this stuff we also tried to always use like I used to call it the rollercoaster model of design where you this time there's this basically some exploring and the space to do some combat and the space to talk to people

and that should vary up as you play if you know there's no area in the game or there's like two hours of solid talking or nothing you don't do anything but fight for two hours or you don't do anything but explore because it's fun to have that broken up by other things you can do and they kind of get all the different skills and play so that was one of the things like early on we had a few level before I'm like I'm going off on our fighting in here there's no to talk to so we we actively tried to break that up right on there's a question here in chat that I like because it's just so bold dissol wants to know do you plan on improving simulation elements such as NPC scheduling in the sequel and what do you think about integrating quests with simulation systems so yeah apparently yell I'm making a sequel you know we'd be fun to do about the scheduling though we actually talked about that earlier on and I actually always got a little annoyed when it's like oh I'm gonna go

sell myself the shopkeeper oh it's closed and then it's like do I break in and get him out of bed or you know what do i I just like this the are shopkeepers are always there our vending machines are always on I mean we have day/night cycles but we didn't we kind of steered away from baking people making the player have to watch a clock in fact your nose there isn't even a clock in our game because we had no time to quests and we had no scheduled request to can only be done a particular time of day or a particular wound right yeah right on I I had because I just thought there was no time in space or maybe we can dig into a little bit we'd only about 10 minutes left here but I definitely want to get more into the Companions as well cause I mean they're a big part of this game and their charm sort of pulls you through beacon field wants to know where did the ideas for Parvati and Ellie come from are any of the companions based on real people not that I know of for a body came from

Chris L'Etoile one of our writers he started the character on Kate dollarhyde finished her so that was basically a combination of both of them we had some very basic ideas of what she needed to do in the game but her personality and who she was was was very much there of their creation for Ellie was a little bit of a different path she was also worked on by two different writers dan McPhee and Carrie Patel but and felix is kind of in the same category as le we were making our vertical slice and we just had to come up with two companions to start proving out systems so we came up with Felix and le and there really wasn't a whole lot of discussion put into what what their place in the game was and what they were supposed to represent thematically it was just like let's make some characters who would be interesting to have banter with each other and to interject into conversations so that really came out of

those riders just Nitai Hotaru Rhodes Felix and Dan McPhee at the time was writing le and they just wrote these characters and came up with some interesting interesting things about them Felix just kept getting revised and iterated on by fine attire as we went through the whole game and then at a certain point Kari took over le and kind of revamped some of her but that was really interesting because every other NPC in the game kind of came about to fit a certain spot in your party or just fit a certain story kind of style or theme and those two really just started out as like we need two characters two companions to follow the player around let's just let's just jump in and make some interesting characters and then we kind of like to figure out where they fit in the world after that it didn't need to know Rose Way was our first like zone that we made that had all the quests in it and NPCs and all that and Elliot Felix for the two characters it just they were already when you started up that zone they've just already attached to you so

I probably played Rose way with alien feelings at least five or six dozen times and it's funny now to play it with them because it just reminds me of two years we had that we all we had a lot of that banter stuff work even back then right on I am I wonder I you know I assume every writer brings their own inspirations and influences to whatever they touch but I imagine you guys had a lot of control given your lead role on the project it was there any specific influences or inspirations that shaped the tone of this game I get a lot of stuff like Firefly and Red Dwarf but is there anything else yeah besides just our senses of humor we yeah Firefly we talk a lot about the Simpsons and Futurama were huge for the writers specifically I really talk to them a lot about Brazil the movie Brazil yeah some Wes Anderson movies some of the darker poem brother movies early Kurt Vonnegut so we just kind of like really talked a lot about a bunch of different

influences like that and how and what type of things we wanted them to get out to meet a great example of that with Wes Anderson four instances I think the grand Budapest hotel has some really sweet endearing characters and also some very very broad characters with a lot of images a lot of kind of sorrow and depth and darkness there with a very kind of like silly overtone to it so I thought that was like a really good touchstone for for people who weren't as familiar with some of the games we made in the past but I love our writers write with it because like Sam Sam was my idea but all I said was I want a robot of the game he's a cleaning robot he's not sentient at all and all he does everything he says is something about cleaning or can being a robot and Megan start just with over born it was the stuff she did was so good because sometimes you're being a situation examples say something that's just what you'd expect to pop out robot

but it's kind of a meta commentary on what's going on and it's very funny I think she nailed that character yeah totally we got about five minutes left so any last suppressing questions please get them in Brian to have any of your own even though I've been spending so much of this encounter in combat what what do you think makes good combat like like why is this game sort of not just like me talking to everyone like what was your guiding light for making this gunfire filter or melee oh it's really cool Charlie and I wanted it to be impactful especially melee we had a lot of talks about hey we have a lot of guns in our game but melee has to hold its own so like all her melee weapons have a really strong hit impact they all do Eric Eric effect they basically all hit anything that they sweep through people are inventing baylin's are all automatic kids if

you're standing near someone and you swing your weapon it always hits the amount of damage you do berries but you always hit with a melee weapon and they often do lots of damage you gets swarmed like mid swarms so we haven't we had a lot of interesting rules like that does just make sure that combat always felt really good no matter what weapon you were holding like all the weapons are different like though we had a plasma charge up in really early and that's a totally different way of using weapons and say spray-and-pray with the machine gun but they all work you put points into them they get better no matter what style you like that's something I really like in this very RPG s you matter what gun you like in this game you can find or gun style you can find a gun like it what points into that skill I just have fun with it although you tend to run out of ammo if you like machines as you can see from the stream I am them unfortunately dealing with some ammo loss challenges I'm gonna be all the time there you go alright buddy Wow we

are coming into the end of the stream thank you everyone so much for watching thank you Tim and Leonard for joining us today thanks for having us anything you want to get in right now no this games great schemes fantastic thank you we're games so cool like complementing the game but I have endings air moves to complete thank you so much to Tim and Linda for joining us here on the GDC twitch channel thank you all for watching if you are a fan of games and how they get made would encourage you to hit that follow button because if you do you will get notifications on when we get live and when we go live we will be talking always be talking to interesting developers or doing something that is we're big believers in the process of making games tells us so much about why we enjoy the games really the joy we think it's valuable for people who like games for people who just play games us that's why we do what we do if you are a developer yourself we'd love to have you

at GDC next year there are so many really interesting things to do at GDC interesting ways to learn about making games you can scroll down this page and click on the bypass to more about our passes for GDC and I guess it's a I do best to say that this time of year before while we're still in the early early pricing period it's also the time to get the best price on your pass for everyone else I hope you have a good day I hope you have a good time in the colonies and I guess the board wishes you well although I don't like the board I'm not going to do anything for the board oh I guess I'll ask this question if they have we've had a lot of great questions in chat about support about other factors that we we didn't want to quite throw in because we want to keep the instead focused if they want to ask those questions where should they ask them for where can they reach you guys support an obsidian dot meant we also have obsidian yeah um Oh perfect

Facebook as well before we sign off like there's a bunch of great talks no no no company may have a like there's a bunch of great talks on the GC YouTube channel there totally free to watch including some I think dating back to other obsidian games some from these folks as well I think Tim one of your follow up horse waters is on there and it's incredible so go watch those they're good and they're free and they're more great content like this you