Obsidian didn't add this cool feature to The Outer Worlds 2 until the game was well into development — here's how it happened

Obsidian Entertainment's third game launch this year is available now. Ahead of the launch, I recently had the chance to chat with Brandon Adler and Matthew Singh, game directors on The Outer Worlds 2.

One of the more interesting tidbits that came out of our conversation was the reveal that the Rifts players can find scattered across planets and space stations weren't originally something that could be interacted with.

This came as a surprise to me, since much of the game's plot revolves around finding a way to keep the larger Rifts from completely destroying the solar system. After acquiring a special device partway through the game, players gain the ability to temporarily reset Rifts, exposing new pathways and uncovering interesting secrets.

"We didn't know we actually wanted to do interactible Rifts at the beginning. It wasn't until maybe a year or two in that we were talking about 'Hey, this is a pretty important story point for the player, and we don't really have much interaction with that,'" Alder says.

"And so we were like, 'Hey, let's just do it. Let's come up with a way for players to interact with these in some way, use these as puzzles and we can do some fun stuff."

From here, Alder explains he tasked Singh's team with finding the right places to include Rifts and use them as part of the game's design, something that came as a process and required a decent bit of iteration in order to figure out. That in turn led to other quality-of-life additions, such as making sure a rift was marked on the player's map once it was found.

"I wish we had come up with it even earlier, because I think it would have been even more deeply integrated into what we were doing," Adler says. "But I think that luckily we did do it early enough where we could actually still make those fairly impactful and just fun."

"They were a good space for us to say, 'Hey, let's integrate this threat that is looming over the colony.' We want to show it early and we want to show bits of it, but we can use this as a fun re-traversal tool for the player. That's totally optional, but there's actually a lot of really cool and good stuff you can get out of those things, even going back to the very first area," Singh says, adding that the team tried to "seed" examples of the Rifts to garner players' attention early on, even though most of the Rifts are completely optional to interact with.

The Outer Worlds 2's exploration was shaped by other games and Disneyland

Even outside of the Rifts, one aspect that I found The Outer Worlds 2 to handle much better than its predecessor was general exploration, with larger areas that were more rewarding to traipse through.

While the team ended up pivoting away from this (somewhat) in order to make sure there were plenty of towns to explore and interact with, the studio still looked to open-world RPGs.

Alder explained that the team studied lots of larger games in order to get a better idea of how they could handle expanding the playable space, even if it wasn't truly open world.

"We looked at things like Breath of the Wild. Matt in particular brought that up as something that he thought was really important because they use amazing shape language to draw the player from location to location, even something as simple as the geometry of the terrain," Adler says, adding that another source of inspiration came from a real-world location: Disneyland.

"We actually looked at Disneyland. So they have these things called Weenies, which are like points of visual points of interest around the park and understanding how they actually have people flow from area to area and ride to ride [was important]," Adler says.

"So Tim Kaine, he actually did a presentation. He was one of the game directors on the first game. He gave a big presentation to the team where he broke down the weenies in Disneyland and like how they actually use that to draw people around."

Personally, I've quite enjoyed my first playthrough of this improved sequel, and if you haven't yet, be sure to read my review of The Outer Worlds 2. I'm already looking forward to a vastly different replay where I invest in different skills and take a different Trait or two.

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