Obsidian’s ‘buggy games’ reputation is in the past, suggests writer

Obsidian has spent the past few months focusing on eliminating bugs in The Outer Worlds, according to narrative designer Megan Starks.

Earlier this year, Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer said a combination of having more development time (due to not being at the mercy of publisher deadlines) and better planning was helping the RPG specialist shed its reputation for releasing “buggy games”.

“With Pillars 1 and Deadfire, we were the ultimate arbiters of our ship date,” he said in June. “In both cases, when it came down to the wire, we decided to push back the release of the game by a few months. That can make a huge difference.

“We’re not total idiots,” he added. “We know that we have a reputation for buggy games. And while some of that is endemic to making big, complicated RPGs with thousands of different ways through them, it’s still within our power to reduce bugs on our end with more time. When it’s a publisher’s choice, that ability (or priority) can be taken away from us.”

Asked about Sawyer’s comments and how The Outer Worlds is shaping up quality wise, Starks told VGC: “I think he was contrasting how it was in the past versus how we’re operating now.

“We’re currently playtesting, polishing and catching all of those edge cases and smoothing them out. That’s been our focus for the last few months.”

Starks also told VGC the Switch version of The Outer Worlds is looking “really exciting”.

The Outer Worlds is due to be released by Take-Two publishing label Private Division on October 25 for PS4, Xbox One and PC, while a Switch version will be released at a later date.