The Outer Worlds 2 director calls for a return to meaningful choices in RPGs
Following The Outer Worlds 2’s recent launch, game director Brandon Adler pondered and shared his thoughts on RPG design philosophy, stating that the genre has spent years “coddling” gamers by offering a guaranteed chance of victory, regardless of their choices or builds. He wants to see this trend fade, and it seems like it's reversing thanks to recent hits like Baldur’s Gate 3.
Speaking in a session with GamesRadar+, Adler explained his ideology:
In general, it feels like many games, but RPGs in particular, are like, ‘Well, you’re not allowed to make bad choices, so every character build is viable, and we make sure that no matter what you do, everything’s going to be fine.
And you know, the problem with that, at least in my opinion, is that for those choices to matter, they have to be things that could be good or bad, depending on what you’re doing.
Adler also mentioned that he’d already observed many content creators and streamers mashing together “bad character builds” in The Outer Worlds 2. According to him, these builds and choices were “perfectly fine and valid ways to play.” However, he criticized the over-reliance of gamers on objective markers, which let players skip carefully placed NPC interactions and dialogues.
He further stated:
In a true RPG, you need to think about what is happening while you’re playing through the game. You have to be willing to engage with a game. I’m starting to see a lot more of that now, as I see things like the Baldur’s Gate 3s of the world coming out.
I think that, yeah, it is starting to go back in that direction. I think that’s great because I think that people are really going to enjoy kind of relearning how RPGs can really allow this kind of player choice that maybe they’ve been missing over the past little while.
True to this philosophy, Obsidian decided not to hard-gate quests in The Outer Worlds 2, allowing players to experiment and resort to smarter builds while keeping all content accessible from the get-go.
In a separate interview, Adler referred to The Outer Worlds 2’s RPG experience and said, “Everybody is going to have a different experience, and they may not see everything, and that’s okay.”
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