Fallout fans will likely be happy about a singular new detail about The Outer Worlds 2.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Tim Cain is now an advisor to developer Obsidian as they work on the sequel to their 2019 action RPG, The Outer Worlds. This game was a space exploration adventure with a set story, but some degree of narrative choices.
For those not in the know, Tim Cain was a principal figure in the creation of the first Fallout video game, all the way back in 1997. Video Games Chronicle credits him as a co-producer alongside Leonard Boyarsky, but of course, there was a bigger team of people whom they were a part of and worked on the game.
Tim does deserve a pre-eminent place in the game’s production, as he quite literally worked on the game alone for the first six months. In time, Lenoard, who was art director, and designer Christopher Taylor, joined Tim as leads on a 15 person team, that would become a 30 person team by the time the game was done.
Among Tim’s seminal decisions was basing Fallout’s game engine on GURPS, table top roleplaying system invented for board game RPGs. That made this first Fallout very grounded in those old school RPG conventions, and this found a new audience in the video game sphere.
Finally, Tim saved Fallout from cancellation after convincing Interplay to keep development going, even after they had secured the Dungeons & Dragons license. Of course, Tim’s Fallout wasn’t like the later, even bigger Fallout games made by Bethesda, but he has that very old school philosophy of game design, rooted in pen-and-paper RPGs, that even an accomplished studio like Obsidian would find useful.
Here’s what Tim shared about The Outer Worlds 2, and his role advising them about it:
“There’s stuff they’re trying to do in the sequel, that of course I can’t talk about, that I get pulled in on because it’s similar to stuff I’ve done in the past.
Sometimes it’s just me saying, ‘I’m not gonna tell you what to do, but here are the pitfalls. Here are some of the huge, huge chasms that lie in your way, that you’re gonna have to wend around.”
The Outer Worlds 2 is in production for Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam. As a first party game with Microsoft, it will presumably also come to Game Pass.
