The Outer Worlds 2 dev says "it was quite a shock" to get bought by a giant corporation like Microsoft while making a game about how evil giant corporations are

Whether you call it psychic intuition or just the way the world works, The Outer Worlds devs were a little spooked when a megacorporation gobbled up their studio while it was working on a game about how predatory megacorporations are.

Speaking to Edge for its issue 414, The Outer Worlds co-creator and The Outer Worlds 2 creative director Leonard Boyarsky remembers "it was quite a shock" when Microsoft purchased developer Obsidian in 2018 to sit under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella.

"We went to work at Obsidian," Boyarsky – who joined the studio in 2016, after a stint as the face and heart of Diablo 3 at Blizzard – says. "And halfway through a game about corporations running everything, a giant corporation bought our studio."

But the irony was bigger than any threat Xbox may have posed. Boyarsky continues to tell Edge the 2018 Microsoft acquisition didn't and hasn't impacted Obsidian's creative freedom at all – which is likely why The Outer Worlds is proudly a story of "corporate mismanagement, mistreatment, or straight out malevolence," as we write in our 2019 The Outer Worlds review.

"Unfortunately, power corrupting [people] has always been an issue in humanity," Boyarsky says, "and I don't think it's going to change anytime soon."

"We want to focus on stuff that's much more universal," he continues, "and less specifically tied to our time."

How Obsidian became Xbox's most prolific studio: "There's not a lot of studios at Microsoft that have an entire external developer making the whole game for them."