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Why The Outer Worlds & Fallout Lets You Kill Anyone You Want
One of the best things about the early Fallout games, and The Outer Worlds, is how players are able to play any way they desire, even if what they desire is to go through the entire game attacking every NPC they come across. Many games don't let players do this, instead applying some sort of built-in defense mechanism or invulnerability to their characters which are deemed too important to the game's plot to kill. Now, thanks to a new documentary, players know the reason why this feature was implemented in both The Outer Worlds and the first entry in the Fallout series.
It's common knowledge that The Outer Worlds is a spiritual successor to Fallout: New Vegas, and some of the developers of last year's sci-fi RPG first-person shooter not only worked on New Vegas alongside publisher Bethesda but they also pioneered the creation of the franchise with the first Fallout title, which was released all the way back in 1997. There are already lots of small touches in The Outer Worlds which hints at the game's Fallout roots, alongside a number of hints and rumors that it could somehow take place in the same universe as New Vegas, but a new video shows the games have an even deeper thematic connection, one which can be traced back all the way to the early days of Interplay.
Thanks to a recent entry in NoClip's documentary on The Outer Worlds on their YouTube channel, players now know the real reason the ability to attack any NPC in the game was implemented. During an interview with The Outer Worlds Co-Game Designers Tim Caine and Leonard Boyarsky, Cain stated that during playtests of the game their producer, Eric DeMilt, would simply shoot everyone he came across no matter what, causing them to re-evaluate the way they were gatekeeping certain puzzles. "Not only was he missing out on all the dialog," Cain said, "he made it challenging for us to figure out how to advance story lines... he didn't talk to anyone the whole game... If he saw someone, he shot them." Check out the video, timestamped to the proper location, below:
Boyarsky then reminded his co-worker that this was not new behavior. "You make that sound like it's a new thing," he said. "Eric was working with us at Interplay and he went - he played Fallout by punching everybody. And found a bug that way!" Seeing one of their team members completely ignore all of the hard work put in to the game's dialog was clearly slightly irritating for some of the creators, but it helped them to realize how accessible they needed to make their game's structure to accommodate different kind of gameplay styles. "So, even from way back then we've known, if you've decided you want to be able to kill everybody in the game, you need alternate ways of getting this [plot] information."
If Eric DeMilt hadn't gone around punching everyone he met back in the 1990's (in Fallout, not in the real world) then it's quite likely the developers would not have thought to implement such a vast array of playstyle choices in their subsequent games. Players love the Fallout series and games like The Outer Worlds for their ability to adapt and mold themselves to however the player feels like like approaching any given situation, and thanks to this Noclip documentary more people know just how much work creating such a world entails.
