The first Outer Worlds has a very tight scope. The 2019 Obsidian Entertainment RPG, according to our review at the time, is “expansive when it needs to be, but never falls into the trap of believing that bigger is always better.” You could beat the game in 15 hours if you wanted — unlike, say, Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas. But that also meant Outer Worlds’ anti-capitalist satire could only go so deep. In an interview at Summer Game Fest 2025, design director Matt Singh and creative director Leonard Boyarsky told me about how the scope has widened in Outer Worlds 2 — ideally without the team losing sight of what made the first game work.

“First and foremost, we are an Obsidian RPG, and we want to make sure that that’s the foundation,” said Singh. “But what’s nice is, we had that foundation built from the first game, and what we looked at was, what are the aspects that we want to improve on? OK, we know how to make Obsidian role-playing games. Oh, here’s an avenue for improvement, which is, how do we upgrade our gunplay? How do we get more variety in there, right? How do we add more to our stealth toolkit that allows people more ways to express their character build? Which is ultimately where we’re coming from. Our motto is ‘your world, your way.’ What we’re really saying is, we value player agency. And so if you want to go just shoot, you want to just engage with all of that combat loop, you actually don’t even want to do a whole lot of the conversation stuff — OK, you can totally do that. We are leaning into all of those conversations, we’re leaning into all of that reactivity — but we let you play it however you’d like.”

A key part of Outer Worlds is its sense of humor and social satire, which is something else the developers wanted to expand upon in the second game. “I was really proud of the first game,” Boyarsky told me. “I think it came out really well, but it was smaller. We were introducing people to the world. So it was very much kind of like — a little too much the same joke over and over, a little one-note. I mean, I think we did a good job with it, but I still felt like it could have been more.

“In this one, we now have the different factions,” he continued. “Each has their own kind of flavor of humor. So we’re able to juxtapose those things, or have moments that are mixed in with a lot of the darkness — with the silliness a little bit more than we were in the first game. It’s just kind of like with everything here, we’re just kind of expanding the whole world. We’re expanding the universe, we’re expanding the themes.”

Each of the factions has its own motivations and in-game propaganda. One of the factions, called Auntie’s Choice, isn’t so much a faction as a corporation; it represents a corporate merger between two factions from the first game, Auntie Cleo’s and Spacer’s Choice. And in Outer Worlds 2, Auntie’s Choice is all about advertising its products — “that’s part of their identity,” as Singh put it. That’s expressed through dialogue, of course, but the devs also wanted to find a way to turn the faction’s devotion to commercialism into an in-game weapon.

Here’s the result, via Singh: “You can shoot out ad drones to distract your enemies. And so they’ll come out and they’ll just do slogans and stuff, and people are like, ‘What the f? Get away from me!’ But then now you can use that as a distraction, so that you can capitalize on taking them out or you can even detonate them as little remote minds that can go kind of scurry around the place.”

That’s far from the only comedy weapon in the game. “So we had the shrink ray in the first game where you could kind of shrink somebody down to half size,” said Singh. “I really wanted to finish that gameplay fantasy. And so in the second one, you shrink [your enemies] down to this size” — he held his fingers about an inch apart — “and then you can run over ’em and then just get ’em, and it’s super fun. It never gets old. So I love that one.

“But I mean, with the game as a whole — weapons, we wanted to increase the variety of them, and then make the moment to moment gunplay feel better. We also wanted to synergize well with all of our perks and flaws and companion abilities. So we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how all of the different skills and perks could play well with those weapons across a couple number of different archetypes that we defined so that you can do some really cool stuff depending on what your goals are.”

Outer Worlds 2 will have more perks than its predecessor, including some that sound like they’re going to lead to very funny outcomes. “You could take one where it’s like, you can tell the most outlandish lies and people believe you,” Boyarsky said. “But if you take that flaw where it forces you to pick the lie every time, if it happens to be one that’s also tied to a skill, it ignores the skill requirements.” The result, Singh added, is “a lot of fun.”

Outer Worlds 2 will be released Oct. 29 on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.

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