The Outer Worlds, Obsidian’s more-anti-corporate-than-anti-capitalist RPG, is set for a sequel. To hear our own Ted Litchfield tell it, that sequel might even be quite good. But there’s an irony here, isn’t there? The Outer Worlds 1 was conceived of in a whole other era, before Obsidian was snapped up by Microsoft (though it did eventually release after the studio was bought). The Outer Worlds 2, in all its anti-The-Man glory, is presented by Microsoft from root to stem.
Which is a bit incongruous. You don’t get much more megacorp than Microsoft, with its multi-trillion-dollar market cap, brutal layoffs, and clamping down on protests on its own campus. But Obsidian is, at the very least, self-aware about it. “It’d be ridiculous to say that we don’t notice that,” game director Brandon Adler tells GamesRadar. “We obviously do. We think it’s funny, and we kind of play into it.”
Obsidian promises that its corporate overlord isn’t interfering with its message. “The people we work with really love the game, so no dictates or anything like that,” noted Leonard Boyarsky, the game’s creative director (and OG Fallout dev, by the by).
“You even see it, sometimes, in our trailers and things like that,” says Adler. “We poke fun at that, we get a little wink and nod, we realize that whole situation. But, we still have a message that we’re trying to tell. Regardless of who’s funding it, we’re still trying to tell that same message.”
Frankly, I believe every word of it for two reasons. The first, naturally, is the Situationist International’s concept of recuperation: the means by which bourgeois society takes hold of anti-bourgeois art and twists, contorts, commodifies it into something marketable—criticism of capitalism becomes by perverse mechanisms a means by which to uphold it. You might remember this being gestured at in Disco Elysium: the line from Joyce Messier that “Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself.”
Anyway, reason two: I’m not sure The Outer Worlds—or at least The Outer Worlds 1—ever really had much of a “message” in the first place. Its hyper-corporate setting was a mine for comedy rather than critique (you can combine both, sure, but there wasn’t a huge amount of the latter).
Honestly? That’s fine. I actually thought that game was perfectly solid, but it had the misfortune of launching at a time when the ol’ contradictions of society were sharpening and a lot of people were looking for something more seriously critical to sink their teeth into. They didn’t get it with OW1.
Will they get it with The Outer Worlds 2? We’ll have to wait and see. But if it’s not prompted at least one concerned email from the Microsoft C-suite, consider me sceptical for now.
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