Obsidian: A studio where fun, fantasy and dedication to role-playing games reign supreme
Joe Fielder has had a subversive agenda for almost 20 years. Like most secret plots, it probably went unnoticed that he’s been good at executing it. Unlike such plots, though, his intent is decidedly more wholesome: to make people laugh.
“I’ve tried to sneak humor into games that shouldn’t by any rights have any humor within them,” says Fielder, a principal narrative designer for The Outer Worlds 2, which launches Oct. 29 on Xbox Series X|S, PCs, PlayStation 5 and cloud gaming. “This is the first time where it’s a part of my job to do that.”
The Outer Worlds 2 is a role-playing game (RPG) set in a wild west-like sci-fi future in a colony called Arcadia, where multiple factions vie for control. Being a good subject of one of those factions – an authoritarian regime called The Protectorate – means proactively engaging in “mental refreshment” – aka brainwashing – when they feel they’ve thought the wrong thing. (There are approved and unapproved thoughts. The propaganda line is that “Thinking is best left to our betters.”)
“There’s a lot of Protectorate humor that comes from how much people are willing to give up for a sense of security. Would you give up any shred of independent thought if you could eat surf-and-turf every night?” Fielder says.
“It’s funny, but it’s also saying something deeper about their society, like how the subjects view themselves as needing constant monitoring,” says Brandon Adler, game director for Obsidian Entertainment, the 22-year-old studio that created the game. “This is how they get to be a better cog in the machine, that’s what they live for and care about.”
RPG specialists
California-based Obsidian, which joined Microsoft in 2019, is known for its development of role-playing games, such as The Outer Worlds, Fallout: New Vegas and STAR WARS: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords.
In role-playing games, a player assumes the role of a character in a fictional environment and makes choices that determine their trajectory through the game – and in some games, like The Outer Worlds 2, influence the story itself.
Obsidian’s RPGs are known for the depth of the worlds they imagine and bring to life, and that extends to how the world around them reacts to the decisions the characters make. Their motto is also their ethos – “Your Worlds, Your Way” – and they’re dedicated to making each game feel like it’s the player’s story to tell, rather than following a pre-determined and static script.
“We let players choose whatever they like and let that kind of fantasy play out… whether that’s being a villain… or the hero that’s protecting everyone,” Adler says.
To that end, the team behind the game are elaborate world builders. Players can choose from lots of different characters, personalize them and have deep interactions with companions and other characters throughout their journey.
“Even though there’s a lot of absurdity in the game, we still want people to be emotionally affected by it, to feel there are real stakes involved and that the people they’re dealing with have some depth to them,” says Leonard Boyarsky, the creative director of The Outer Worlds 2, which he irreverently refers to as “low-tech robber barons in space.”
He was one of the co-game directors for The Outer Worlds, the original game that this sequel is built upon. As one of the co-creators of the franchise, he’s driving the storytelling and tone of the sequel.
Obsidian has also put a lot of thought into the ambiance of the game, even going so far as to create 60 original songs for radio broadcasts for each of the three factions in The Outer Worlds 2. The DJs for the game’s stations comment on player actions. It’s not just background but an integral part of the narrative to reflect how the game leans into satire.
Even their gameplay trailers reflect that wry sense of humor.
“Like all good sequels, we’ve included everything that should’ve been in the first game,” the narrator says in an early trailer.
Taking fun seriously
Obsidian has always been a place where fun flourishes, where new hires get invited to Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. And in the spirit of baseball cards, they created profile cards based on toss ball, an in-game game found in The Outer Worlds.
Being part of Microsoft gives them more resources to expand their worlds. It’s been six years since The Outer Worlds debuted and they’re eager to show fans how much more they’ve been able to build upon for the sequel.
“Even though we’re a big company and we’ve got a bunch of games going at once, it really is about the passion. It’s about the love for the games we’re making and how much fun we’re having making them,” says Boyarsky.
For him, the process of making games always has humor in it, the mixing of the silly and the absurd with sometimes serious or dark themes.
Adler explains that in games like The Outer Worlds 2, the issues they explore have been around “forever” – such as an imbalance of power, corruption and free will. Obsidian’s creative staff avoid weaving current events into their games because that can feel dated after a few years.
“When we’re being funny, it’s not just to be funny, it’s to tell a story of what’s happening, to give some insight into the people you’re interacting with,” Adler says.
But what they do take seriously is player agency – the idea that your choices matter when moving forward in the game. Making decisions in some role-playing games doesn’t result in a big impact. In those titles, there are guardrails built in to keep the character safe and able to take back missteps. But in The Outer Worlds 2, players live with the choices they make.
“In some ways, a bad choice isn’t even a bad choice,” Adler says. “It just opens up new opportunities as a player.”
“They’re not trying to tell them you should have done this, you didn’t do this. They just want the people to go in and play the game they want to play and have a good time doing it. And I think that takes a lot of discipline and a lot of dedication to the player,” says Mary McGuane, a studio general manager at Microsoft who oversees five different game studios that the company acquired in 2018 and 2019, including Obsidian.
Building on legacy, expanding depth
Obsidian made The Outer Worlds 2 as a love letter to classic RPGs but also took what fans loved about the first game – player choice, branching narratives and satirical world-building – and expanded it with more depth and reactivity.
The sequel introduces three major factions: Auntie’s Choice (corporate), the Protectorate (authoritarian government) and the Order of the Ascendant (science-religion cult). They populate a world that’s dystopian, but that also ends up being vibrant and tongue-in-cheek in its tone, which pops up in propaganda posters and in the dialogue from companions who react to the player.
“None of these people know they’re in a comedy. They all think they’re in a serious, dramatic tragedy,” says Boyarsky.
“Exploring those factions has been some of the most fun. Of the three, the Order of the Ascendant is probably my favorite to write for,” Fielder says. “I have friends and family who are academics and scientists, and I have a real affection for how they sometimes get so focused on research, they become a bit out of touch.”
Fielder took inspiration from the first The Outer Worlds while working on Auntie’s Choice, which is a “cutthroat meritocracy.” He admits that he drew from his own experience as “a pretty ineffective middle manager” and the strife between management levels.
The key, Fielder says, is to write characters who have “zero awareness” or who “engage in backflips of logic to justify their point of view.”
“I think both of these character types are pretty evergreen,” Fielder says. “People like that have always existed.”
Still scrappy at its core but growing fast
“The narrative designers on our game not only write dialogue, we design branching conversations that the player can navigate using strategy, unique opportunities based on the background they’ve chosen for their character, and/or random whimsy,” Fielder says. “We call it ‘conversation gameplay.’ They, hopefully, call it fun.”
He is also, like a lot of the people who work at Obsidian, a multi-tasker. He’s been a producer, a designer and a director in his career. For The Outer Worlds 2, he focused on character dialogue and narrative design.
“Obsidian is really scrappy,” Adler says. “The devs that work here have a lot of hats, and that is born out of our independent developer mentality that we had for so many years before being purchased by Microsoft. That’s still something that’s very core to who we are.”
“One of the biggest benefits to the studios is they have access to go call up any of the other studios and say, hey, we’re struggling with this one thing. Seems like you guys figured it out in your game. Can you help us?” McGuane says.
McGuane, who’s been at Microsoft and with Xbox since 2001, was already familiar with Obsidian before they joined the collective and has continued to be impressed by their ambition and the deepening of their craft.
And their sense of humor? She says that they’ve got down.
“Humor is really hard and they’re able to infuse it in their games in a way that is unexpected,” she says. “They’re passionate, they’re ambitious, but they’re also fun and funny people you want to spend time around.”
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