Much has been made of the fact that the capitalist satire of The Outer Worlds 2 was published by Microsoft, itself one of the biggest and most influential corporations in the world. Game director Brandon Adler says there was never any conflict between developer Obsidian and the higher-ups at Microsoft, and adds that the RPG is not really meant to be a critique of this particular moment in history, either.
"I'll say, to Microsoft's benefit, or to kind of put them in a good light here, they didn't ever say anything to us. They never once said, 'you can't say that,'" Adler explains on a new episode of the My Perfect Console podcast. He adds that Microsoft "literally never once" asked to "review what we were going to do," and were generally "pretty chill" about the whole game.
"In general what we like to do, especially for The Outer Worlds, is a critique on the power structures of various things, but more the people in power and how they abuse the people that don't have that power. Looking at, for example, corporations taken to the extreme – what does that actually mean? How are they exploiting their workers, but also, how are they also exploiting the consumers in various ways to try to get ahead? How far can they push those things? And then, again, looking at that in an absurdist lens, where people in that world think that that's totally normal and it's totally fine, and you on the outside are like, 'What the hell is going on here?' That's where that humor comes."
Besides the megacorps, The Outer Worlds 2 also features factions like the authoritarian Protectorate and the religious science worshippers of The Order of the Ascendant. "Whether that's a critique on everything current, I'll say that, again, we don't really try to aim at that," Adler says. "But these are problems that have existed forever, and I think that's why people think that…no matter when we're doing this, they're like, 'Oh, you're talking about this thing that's happening right now.' And it's like, well, it's just because this thing happens all the damn time, and we're just seeing it over and over on a loop in some respects."
Adler says that the team designed the The Outer Worlds 2 factions to try and explore what those philosophies would look like fully laid out, with all the positive and negative consequences laid out passionlessly so players can come to their own conclusions.
"I don't like, necessarily, for video games to come off as preachy," Adler says, "but I do like to present scenarios and let people make their own decisions as to what they think about that. Which, again, was why I think there's some people that say, you know, even the first game, 'it's very anti-capitalist,' and then I've also seen some people flip it around and say, 'no, no, no, no, no, it's actually anti-communist, and here's why.' So they argue with each other as to what we truly intended, and the real answer is, we are presenting a scenario, and we are showing how we think that this would play out, and we're showing the positives and negatives of those things. Really, you need to make your own decision as to how you feel about that."
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