The Outer Worlds 2 isn't the only massive RPG that Obsidian Entertainment has released in 2025. The studio kicked off the year with Avowed, a fantasy role-playing experience set in the Pillars of Eternity universe. There are a lot of things to love about Avowed, but I still keep coming back to the way it employed an in-dialogue glossary system to help contextualize and clarify aspects of the sprawling, layered PoE lore.
Avowed certainly wasn't the first game to utilize this sort of system, which essentially presents hyperlinks within dialogue explaining key phrases, settings, characters, and more without pulling you out of the game world and into a web of menus to access a journal or codex. Hell, Obsidian's own Pillars of Eternity 2 had an in-dialogue glossary too. So I was a little surprised to see that the feature wasn't present in The Outer Worlds 2.
Game director Brandon Adler flags that The Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed were made "on completely different code bases" as one reason for the absence, before drawing creative director Leonard Boyarsky into the conversation as the pair try to recall decisions made in the earliest days of development.
"The thing for me, and I always try to push for this in the games I have a say in, is that I like unreliable narrators," says Boyarsky. "I like the player having to decide what's true and what's not. If we start giving you glossaries or all the lore like it's coming from an encyclopedia, I think it robs the world of some of its mystery. I don't think that's always a bad thing, but there's a place for it."
To be clear, The Outer Worlds 2 may be a sequel but you needn't have played the first game to fully understand what's going on. There are callbacks to the corporation wars that helped form new factions, but beyond that you can come in completely fresh without fear of getting lost in the past. Still, some may have appreciated the additional context. Boyarsky contends that "I know a lot of people really like that sort of system and they want to learn everything about the world, but I like the discovery aspect of not having it."
"I like that we ask players to figure out, well, do I actually believe what I'm being told? There's even some things that we establish early on into The Outer Worlds 2 about what's going on, and then later you find out that that's not actually what's going on. To me, that's where the player becomes more and more involved in the story. I think if there's no definitive answer, and the player has to make those decisions for themselves – if what they believe is true – it becomes another element of interacting with the world and being present in the world."
