THE OUTER WORLDS Will Be Reportedly Smaller In Scale And Budget Than FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS

Back in January, it was revealed that Obsidian Entertainment has acquired The Outer Worlds rights, as some clever fans immediately started to suspect that the studio's new game might be connected to E. J. Gilmour's The Outer Worlds: Book One of the Epherian Chronicles that tells the story of an exile from the ancient empire who must work together with his team to prevent the destruction of humanity.

Those fans were right, as Obsidian's The Outer Worlds was announced during The Game Awards 2018. The RPG is a spiritual successor to Obsidian’s own Fallout: New Vegas, co-created by the developers responsible for the original Fallout. In The Outer Worlds, your avatar awake from hibernation on a ship that was lost in transit to the furthest colony from Earth located at the edge of the galaxy.

In his recent report, Kotaku's Jason Schreier advises fans to calibrate their expectations properly. TOW will be published by Private Division, a label of Take-Two Interactive (parent company of 2K and Rockstar) designed to make not indie, but also not big-budget titles, so don't expect Obsidian’s new game to be as vast and rich as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt or the aforementioned Fallout New Vegas.

"[...] don’t expect The Outer Worlds to be quite as vast, with a massive open world in which you can get lost for hundreds of hours," Schreier said. "This will be a very different experience. There are two planets in the game, [...] although they’re not open worlds, they’re compartmentalized. [...] Obsidian says there will be plenty to do, but the scale will be very different than New Vegas."

Considering that Mass Effect: Andromeda had a $40 million production budget and still turned out to be one of the biggest gaming disappointments of all time, it may a good thing that The Outer World's costs are not comparable to the recent RPG games. What's even better, TOW won't be featuring any microtransactions, but Obsidian is thinking about the game's potential post-launch support.

In The Outer Worlds, you awake from hibernation on a colonist ship that was lost in transit to Halcyon, the furthest colony from Earth located at the edge of the galaxy, only to find yourself in the midst of a deep conspiracy threatening to destroy it. As you explore the furthest reaches of space and encounter various factions, all vying for power, the character you decide to become will determine how this player-driven story unfolds. In the corporate equation for the colony, you are the unplanned variable.