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It's been 15 years since Obsidian Entertainment released the now-beloved Fallout: New Vegas, but the developer can't escape it. Though it turns out, it doesn't want to. As part of a larger interview about The Outer Worlds 2, game director Brandon Adler tells GamesRadar+ that, after the original Outer Worlds, New Vegas was the "very first game" he studied when making the sequel. "It was definitely a touchstone," but don't expect every game Obsidian does to follow it aggressively.
Amongst Fallout fans and RPG fans at large, New Vegas is often held up as a pinnacle of immersive roleplaying design. That is thanks to how reactive it feels to the player's actions. With Amazon's Fallout series heading back to the iconic location for its second season later this year, New Vegas is more top-of-mind for people than it has been since the Obsidian game's initial release.
While Obsidian hasn't dipped its toes back in the Fallout waters since 2010, New Vegas continues to loom large over the studio's subsequent games. Adler acknowledges that it is "an important thing to folks that have been at Obsidian for a long time," including members of The Outer Worlds 2 team.
For that reason, Adler referred back to New Vegas to help inform the direction of the sci-fi RPG sequel. Adler says he asked himself, "What are the things I enjoyed from Fallout: New Vegas? Why do I enjoy those things?" and then looked to translate that into The Outer Worlds 2. The result, Adler reveals, is the game's tendency to constantly give you RPG checks — think dice rolls to overcome obstacles in Baldur's Gate 3 — outside of traditional dialogue trees, and in the world itself.
This design ethos is most evident in The Outer Worlds 2's unique Flaw system, in which your actions can give you unintended buffs or debuffs. Perhaps the most meme-worthy is the Bad Knees trait, which reveals itself if you crouch too much. It permanently gives you a 50% increase in crouch speed but makes it so enemies can hear when you crouch if you are within 10 meters of them.
The Flaw system isn't directly lifted from New Vegas, but it comes from a drive to build on what that game did right. As Adler puts it, the essential piece of New Vegas' design is the "general idea of really allowing the player to role-play who they are through their character build." That resulting feeling of player freedom is exactly what makes The Outer Worlds 2 work as a compelling RPG.
While Adler doesn't want every single game the team makes to look back on New Vegas, he does say this commitment to honoring the player's actions "is something we want to continue forward in any Obsidian project."
"And, you know, I can't say that every single game we're going to be working on is going to look back to New Vegas and go like, 'Oh, we should bring all of these things forward,'" he says. "But like, that general idea of really allowing the player to role-play who they are through their character build, and through their actions in the world, is something that we want to continue forward in any Obsidian project that we're really working on."
