The Outer Worlds 2, Obsidian Entertainment’s upcoming open-world sci-fi RPG, will include an option to let you play the game in third-person. But according to the game’s director, Brandon Adler, this wasn’t originally the plan, and it only happened because a lot of fans made it clear that they wanted this choice of perspective.
The Outer Worlds 2 is set to launch on October 29, and is Obsidian’s big sequel to 2019’s Outer Worlds, which was seen by many as a spiritual successor to the studio’s beloved Fallout: New Vegas. However, unlike 2010’s New Vegas, the original Outer Worlds didn’t include a third-person camera option. And for most of its development, the sequel was similarly planned to ship without that option, until it became clear that a lot of fans would be disappointed again with the lack of a proper third-person camera.
“We didn’t intend to do third-person when we first started the game,” Adler told Game Informer in a recent interview. “We actually didn’t start doing it until, really, maybe about two years ago or so.” According to Adler, the people working on Outer Worlds 2 were discussing a list of features and ideas they wanted to add to the game, but which might be “too expensive” to pull off and might have to wait for a hypothetical sequel.
“But again, about halfway through, we were like, ‘I think people are really going to want this,’ so we did an evaluation of how difficult it was going to be to implement it.”
Adding a third-person option to Outer Worlds 2 wasn’t easy. Every animation, weapon, mechanic, and setting in the upcoming RPG had been developed with the assumption that the game wouldn’t include a third-person perspective. So all of that had to be tweaked to work correctly and look right when playing Outer Worlds 2 in either first-person or third-person. To help pull that off, the studio enlisted the help of an outside game studio, Disruptive. This studio focused on making sure every part of Outer Worlds 2 works in the game’s two different third-person options.
Hopefully, Outer Worlds 2 is great to play in either first- or third-person when it launches on Xbox, PS5, and PC on October 29. The RPG was planned to be Xbox’s first $80 video game, but the company reversed course earlier this year and confirmed Outer Worlds 2 as well as this year’s Call of Duty will both be priced at $70.
