It's hard to find things to praise about Destiny 2 right now with the MMO mired in bewildering, seismic economy changes, but if Bungie can do anything right it's make guns feel good. So it's both unsurprising and encouraging to hear that Destiny was a "guiding light" for The Outer Worlds 2 developer Obsidian as it worked to beef up its gunplay.
Speaking with GamesRadar+ at Gamescom, The Outer Worlds 2 game director Brandon Adler discussed Obsidian's conscious push to polish and refine the solid but not amazing combat from the first game.
"Early on, we kind of knew what players had said that they wanted us to improve," says Adler. "Combat in general was one of those things that came back, and that can mean a lot of different things. It could be like, hey, our encounter compositions could be more varied, things like that. And we did do that. We actually rebuilt our encounter systems. We made, overall, that portion of the combat feel really good. But another part of that is just the gunplay itself. It needs to feel good to just take actions in the world. We, luckily, were able to work with 343, or Halo Studios now. They sent us some feedback on our gunplay and what we could improve and different types of settings we could be using. And so we tweaked all of that stuff."
"Our design director, Matthew Singh, it was his task to work with the system designers and to put together this system," continues Adler. "He really likes Destiny, so he took that as a guiding light, and we spent a lot of time early on really refining and trying to get that feel. It was also important, not even just the actual shooting mechanics, but movement. We tried to make movement feel really good. Lots of sliding, parkouring. We just wanted moving around the world to have less friction. I think all of those things combined made a really great experience, which, when you add it to the thing that's already a good RPG, it's just the cherry on top, in my opinion."
Fittingly, Bungie was the original creator and shepherd for Halo, which came to define the setup and feel for countless first-person shooters. Destiny and later Destiny 2 just raised the bar for silky-smooth head-popping action, and when we finally got Destiny 2 on PC with the power of the mighty mouse in hand, it was downright heavenly. It still feels great to play, even if I cannot find it in me to care about playing it in this new Power-burdened era. If The Outer Worlds 2 can get anywhere close to that flow state, I'm in.
In our Outer Worlds 2 hands-on preview, a difference in gunplay was immediately noticeable and palpable throughout. "Killer writing and shockingly slick combat suggest Obsidian will deliver on the Fallout: New Vegas comparisons," our own Andrew wrote at the time.
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