The Outer Worlds 2's Worlds Are Going Bigger – IGN First

“One of the very first things we were targeting when we started The Outer Worlds 2 was to make these big, expansive areas. It's what players told us they wanted,” game director Brandon Adler told me when talking about how the team at Obsidian built the open regions for this sequel. But bigger doesn’t always mean better, and they seemed aware of that when creating the more expansive zones across the different planets and moons you’ll visit in The Outer Worlds 2. There appears to be a focus on rewarding exploration, creating dense environments, and designing areas that pull you in specific directions to investigate points of interest off in the distance. So, while it’s structurally similar to the original where you visit distinct open areas through the main quest, there’s a greater sense of scale this time around. I was able to see some of these ideas in action with a gameplay tour of Golden Ridge, a new open region on the planet-moon Dorado that you’ll visit early on in The Outer Worlds 2. It’s an arid, desert-like region with trench lines from a war that broke out in the past, mining facilities run by a faction called The Protectorate, and a ton of hostile wildlife mutated from the polluted environment. Art director Daniel Alpert spoke about maintaining the first game’s decorative art nouveau and retrofuturistic inspirations, but going with something a bit more harsh for Golden Ridge. “We were able to pull from areas of the late old West to World War 1 and imbue the areas with little touches – you’ll notice a trench warfare line, and if you go a little further into a town, you'll still find that frontier colony vibe,” he said when working on Golden Ridge. Adler spoke to how the art direction feeds into the stories they’re trying to tell, specifically on this planet: “Before we get into any area, we have deep conversations about the overall story, the factions and what they’re doing, and what's important to them. Asking things like, why was anybody in Golden Ridge?” He gave examples of collaborating with the art team to have a sort of synergy between aesthetics and the game’s purpose, saying “We’ll say like, we want the trench lines here, maybe for gameplay reasons, but talk about why it makes sense story-wise.” As any good RPG does, these kinds of stories are woven into the regions themselves, and Adler teased some of that, saying “I won't get into what happens at the beginning of Golden Ridge, but there's a big state change in the area when you first get there. It’s going to blow people away and make them really want to investigate what's happening.” That’s said to be indicative of the rest of the game, as he continued telling me, “You’ll see that throughout a lot of our areas as well. We try to do those types of things - let the players see big events that are happening pretty early and get them hooked into the area.”