In a new video from The Outer Worlds director and Fallout co-creator Tim Cain, he talks us through tone in videogames. Tone is a tough thing to nail down. It’s easy to feel, but hard to describe and harder still to execute well. Cain points to The Outer Worlds and its strict adherence to only portraying a particular type of discrimination as an example of why its tone felt off to a lot of players.
“One thing we did have as a rule was, we didn’t want discrimination that was racial or gender[-based], like misogyny, or any kind of other discrimination except discrimination based on societal class, and then you could tell all your discrimination stories through that lens,” Cain says. In its attempt to make its message and tone clear, it seems The Outer Worlds may have oversimplified to the point of causing confusion.
“That made the tone of the game feel off to many people because they were like, ‘I think what they’re talking about is a discrimination thing,'” Cain says. “But it was always, ‘I don’t like you because you’re a janitor and not a doctor,’ or something along those lines.”
It does feel a bit naive to try to explore class in a vacuum, even in a game where you go to space. Being exploited by our capitalist economy sucks for everyone getting thrown into the meat grinder, but women get called dramatic while men get pain killers even though they’ve all had their limbs chewed up by the machine.
Cain concludes, “it’s really hard to define and quantify tone,” and different department heads are often at odds with each other, too. Cain says an artist might want a weapon locked to a specific class because it suits the visual identity, but a game designer then has to think about loot tables and if other players will be disappointed they can’t use the shiny toy. Someone has to step in and make a decision: preserve the tone, or not?
The Outer Worlds and its sequel are very clearly anticapitalist in their messaging, but as our own Online Editor Fraser Brown writes of The Outer Worlds 2’s “toothless satire of capitalism,” “Obsidian has absolutely nothing to say about the ideologies that push the game forward, beyond just pointing at them and saying ‘Look, isn’t this awful?’, which, you know, duh.”
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