Infinitron

April 15

April 9

https://www.ign.com/articles/new-gameplay-the-outer-worlds-2-ign-first

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The Outer Worlds 2: 11 Minutes of Exclusive Gameplay – IGN First
A deeper, more involved trip around the galaxy.

Welcome to our latest IGN First – a month of exclusive coverage in April, and it's all about The Outer Worlds 2. This is the very first look at its gameplay in real time, and it takes us through a quest where you infiltrate the N-Ray Facility to show off several of the game’s new features and mechanics, as well as how it’s rethinking level design. And one of the biggest things that stood out to me is how much deeper it’s going to be as an RPG with developer Obsidian looking back at its past and even drawing inspiration from immersive sims like Deus Ex and Dishonored.

While that DNA has always been a part of first-person RPGs, The Outer Worlds 2 has more sophisticated systems compared to the first game like a true stealth system and better tools to make the playstyle viable, including effective melee weapons and skills to make silent takedowns possible. Take, for example, the health bar above enemy heads – there’s a purple-colored readout that displays how damage a stealth attack will do, helping you judge whether or not you can get a one-hit kill or if it’s even worth pouncing on your target. Enemies will also detect dead bodies and alert guards, but you can quickly clean up if you have a skill to disintegrate bodies on the spot.

Later in the quest, you pick up the N-Ray Scanner, which lets you see certain objects and NPCs/enemies through walls. While this is crucial for finding important parts of more involved environmental puzzles, it’s also an important tool for a stealth and combat. There are enemies throughout the N-Ray Facility who cloak themselves; invisible to the naked eye, but not able to escape the lens of the N-Ray Scanner. If you’re not dilligent about using it, cloaked enemies can easily run up on you. That's just one example of how the addition of gadgets add a new wrinkle to gameplay.

There are several interlocking systems that factor into how you're able to play, leaning more into the RPG elements that make up specific character builds. So, stealth and those immersive sim sensibilities aren’t the only way gameplay is expanding in The Outer Worlds 2. Improving gunplay was a major focus for Obsidian, citing Destiny as a touchstone for what good gunplay should feel like. Not that this game is going to turn into an all-out shooter, but it plays closer to how a first-person game with firearms should play.

You see an example of this in the approach to the N-Ray Facility movement when we go in guns blazing. Movement has been tweaked to complement gunplay as well, letting you be more nimble and do things like sprint-slide while aiming down sights like an action hero – and with the return of Tactical Time Dilation (TTD), the bullet-time fantasy is again an effective part of your combat rotation. We were able to see throwables, which is by no means revolutionary for a game like this, but with their inclusion this time around, you have another tool that you can weave into your arsenal – and even do something sick like tossing a grenade, activating TTD, and shooting the grenade midair to have it blow up on unsuspecting enemies.

There isn’t much to share on the story front as of yet, let alone the context around the quest in the N-Ray Facility, but we do see how conversations have been tweaked slightly in the sequel. In the gameplay video above, there's a moment we confront an NPC named Exemplar Foxworth who's survived the cultist takeover of the place. She's bleeding out and you can help patch her up based on your Medical stat, or respond depending on your Guns or Melee stats. Although we couldn't dig into companions in more detail, this part also highlights the new companion named Aza, a former cultist who's a bit frantic but joins you to seemingly help undo what they've done.

Many of these elements were part of the original Outer Worlds in some form, but where that game was more about laying a new foundation for Obsidian, The Outer Worlds 2 looks to be a fully realized version of what it was trying to build with the first one. In addition to checking it out early, I had conversations with the folks at Obsidian to get insight on a ton of its new features and the vision that drove this sequel. It seems keen on wielding the RPG roots of the studio’s past while considering what a modern first-person RPG can be in the vein of a Fallout – and to be clear, they often referred to Fallout: New Vegas as a touchstone when making The Outer Worlds 2, so my hopes are certainly high.

That's just a taste of what's to come in The Outer Worlds 2 and what we're covering in this month's IGN First. I'll be breaking down character builds, the new flaws system, all the wild and wacky weapons, and how much bigger this sequel is through interviews with key people like original Fallout developer and creative director Leonard Boyarsky, game director Brandon Adler, and design director Matt Singh. Keep checking back at IGN all April long for more!

March 26

Can you be more specific than "later this year"?

December 13, 2024

December 13, 2024

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1449110/The_Outer_Worlds_2/

https://www.obsidian.net/news/obsidian/the-outer-worlds-2-wishlist

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The Outer Worlds 2: This Sequel Features More Action, More Weapons, and More Graphics!

The call to go beyond the stars is here once again, and it’s bigger, bolder, and more unpredictable than ever. We just revealed a first gameplay trailer for The Outer Worlds 2 during The Game Awards 2024, promising a fresh adventure in a brand-new colony next year. No really, we know we’re not supposed to promise things in marketing, but the setting is completely new, so this is all factual. Just don’t break the colony again. We’re looking at each of you who sent the Hope into the sun in the last game.

In true Obsidian Entertainment fashion, you carve your path through Arcadia, a colony teeming with factions, intrigue, and chaos. It’s also home of skip drive technology and where the fate of the entire colony – and the galaxy – rests. As a daring, undeniably good-looking, and questionably competent Earth Directorate agent, you’re tasked with uncovering the source of devastating rifts threatening the entire galaxy. Talk about stakes (not to be confused with raptidon steaks, those are very different)! The choice of how to deal with the rifts is up to you. “Your worlds, your way,” as we say at Obsidian.

Are the rifts the only thing threatening Arcadia? Of course not! That would be too easy. A factional war between the “benevolent rulers” known as the Protectorate, a rebellious scientific religious order, and a corporate mega power has the colony torn apart. Each is trying to close or control the rifts for their own good/monetarily profitable needs. Church, state, and capitalism! Who will win?! Well, that’s really up to you. This is your game. We’ve said the choices were yours the whole time. See that Obsidian motto above? Yeah, you get it.

We’ve said choice a few times already, but guess what? This is an RPG so it’s going to come up a few more times. When it comes to crafting your commander, it is full-on “RPG with RPG elements” time from ability points to skill checks in conversations, to even how flawed you want to be because, let’s admit it, no one is perfect. Except those who think they are. Look at you go. Being perfect.

How you build your commander and chart your way through the narrative is uniquely yours as you plunge into this player-driven story. Whether you’re a disciple of diplomacy, a smart strategist, a crusader of chaos, or defiantly different (so we can keep the alliterations), the choice – you guessed it – is yours. Oh, and with this being The Outer Worlds, yes, you can dumb!

While The Outer Worlds 2 is a single-player RPG, you won’t be alone! Not virtually anyway. Enlist a crew of companions to help you achieve your goals. Nothing says “‘middle management’” more than sending people out to fight your fights for you, then having them judge everything you do with a visual reminder of how much they loved or hated it. Maybe you’ll help them fulfill their dreams or goals along the way. Clearly you care enough about the people working with you to see their dreams realized... right?

As excitement grows for the upcoming 2025 launch, now is the perfect time to revisit The Outer Worlds and relive the adventure that started it all. Whether you're a seasoned spacer or are setting foot in Halcyon for the first time, there’s no better moment to prepare for the next chapter. The Outer Worlds is available for purchase on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Steam, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Epic Games Store, and Nintendo Switch. You also can jump in today if you’re a Game Pass member.

On top of that, the universe is expanding beyond the game! The Outer Worlds 2 will be featured in the upcoming Secret Level anthology series, streaming on Prime Video. Tune in on December 17 for a short story that takes place between The Outer Worlds and The Outer Worlds 2. While you may have thought that was a lot of shilling, the Secret Level episode is legitimately good, and if the Board were around, they’d tell you it was mandatory viewing.

Wishlist the game today on Xbox Series X|S, the Xbox app on Windows PC, Steam, and PlayStation 5 and stay tuned for more updates on The Outer Worlds 2—we can’t wait to share what’s next with you. The galaxy is yours to explore; the only question is, how will you shape it?

The Outer Worlds 2 will be released in 2025 on Xbox Series X|S, the Xbox app on Windows PC, Steam, and PlayStation 5. It will also be available on day one with Game Pass.

December 3, 2024

June 12, 2022

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1205520/Pentiment/

June 12, 2022

https://www.ign.com/articles/josh-sawyer-pentiment-mystery-medieval-manuscript

Obsidian's Xbox-Exclusive Pentiment Is a 16th Century Mystery Styled Like a Medieval Manuscript
Follow a medieval artist who keeps getting wrapped up in murder cases.
After a number of rumors, the next project from Obsidian's Josh Sawyer has finally been revealed: it is indeed called Pentiment, and it's a narrative crime story of sorts set in 16th century Bavaria and styled like a medieval manuscript.

While we got a look at a visually fascinating trailer at Xbox's showcase today, IGN spoke with Sawyer ahead of the announcement about what exactly Pentiment is. As Sawyer explains it, Pentiment follows a medieval artist named Andreas Maler, an educated journeyman who's near to becoming a master artist. While visiting an abbey to make an illuminated manuscript, a monk who is also Andreas' friend and mentor is accused of a murder he claims he didn't commit. Since no one else steps in to solve the case, Andreas dedicates himself to finding the real killer.

Sawyer tells us that key to Pentiment is that it never explicitly tells you who the murderer really is. Andreas will have to decide who he thinks committed the murder, or at least who he thinks should be punished for it even if it isn't the actual murderer. And those decisions will ripple out through the rest of Pentiment, which covers a span of around 25 years and multiple crimes and murders that Andreas keeps getting caught up in.

Though there are mysteries at its heart, Sawyer is adamant that Pentiment isn't explicitly a detective game, because it doesn't contain typical detective mechanics. He says it's more of a narrative adventure with mystery and murder elements, and as per his past work, lots of player choice.

"There will be familiar elements in terms of choice and background development and consequence for people who like our RPGs," he says. "But it really, at its heart, is a narrative adventure story."

And he's also adverse to the comparison with another narrative detective story, Disco Elysium.

"We never set out to make a game that's like Disco Elysium," Sawyer says. "Structurally, it is much more similar to a game like Night In The Woods or Mutazione. I think our dialogue is pretty good, but it simply is not structured and developed the way that Disco is. Obviously, the viewpoint is very different. But the whole focus of the game is just not the same. So yeah, please don't hold us to that standard."

We spoke to Josh Sawyer at length about the development of Pentiment, and you can find our interview here. And he's not the only person at Obsidian we spoke to. We also chatted with Adam Brenneke about Grounded as it approaches its full 1.0 launch, and we spoke to studio head Feargus Urquhart about Obsidian's relationship with Xbox and the future of Obsidian -- stay tuned for our interview in the coming days.

https://www.ign.com/articles/what-is-obsidian-pentiment

What Is Obsidian’s Pentiment?

We spoke to Josh Sawyer about his decades-old ideas for Pentiment, and how he finally brought this medieval mystery to fruition.
Josh Sawyer’s just-announced medieval narrative mystery, Pentiment, has been in development for about four years now. But if you ask Sawyer, it really started way, way back in 1992.

At the time, Sawyer was enjoying an RPG called Darklands, developed by Microprose Labs for MS-DOS. It was set in the Holy Roman Empire in the 15th century, but with a supernatural bent that left room for demons and Templar conspiracies. Sawyer fell in love with its approach to historical fiction, and as he went on to get a degree in history and subsequently work in games, the idea of a historical fiction game stuck with him.

Sawyer first pitched the seed of what would become Pentiment to now-Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart back when they were still working at Black Isle together. There, Sawyer was a designer working on projects like Icewind Dale 2 and the original, cancelled Fallout 3. As Sawyer explains it, Urquhart was “not into” his pitch at the time, and felt people who wouldn’t know history wouldn’t want to play it.

But Sawyer disagreed, and the idea came up once more years later when the two were reunited at Obsidian Entertainment, where Sawyer was the lead designer on Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity, and the director on Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire. During the lull after Deadfire, while discussions about a Microsoft acquisition were floating around, Sawyer revived his old pitch as a narrative adventure game. It was not quite a murder mystery, but with mystery elements, with a strong visual style and gameplay, like Night in the Woods, Mutazione, or Oxenfree. It would incorporate exploring, talking to people, and little puzzles sprinkled throughout. Sawyer knew what he pitched would be niche, so he wanted a fairly small team and didn’t want to do anything too mechanically complex.

This time, his pitch won out, and Sawyer got to work on Pentiment: a 16th-century narrative adventure set in Upper Bavaria. As he explains it, you play as Andreas Maler, a journeyman on the cusp of becoming a master artist who’s traveling around Europe, taking on odd jobs as he goes. While staying at a Benedictine abbey and working on an illuminated manuscript, his friend and mentor is accused of the murder of a prominent individual. His friend claims innocence, but no one seems especially interested in investigating who the real murderer is. That leaves Andreas to step up to the job, becoming a medieval detective of sorts as he speaks to the many suspects.

“One of the key things in the game is that we do not ever definitively tell you, canonically, [who] the murderer [is],” Sawyer explains. “You have to investigate, find as much evidence as you can. You make your decisions based on whatever you think is most important. You are basically deciding who's going to pay for the crime. That can be the person that you think actually did it. That can be the person that you think should be punished, whether or not they did it. Maybe it's the person you like least. Maybe it's the person you think that the community will miss the least.”

But the scenario Sawyer describes is just the beginning of Pentiment. In total it covers a span of about 25 years, during which multiple crimes, murders and conspiracies occur that Andreas gets roped into somehow or another. But despite the detective story bent of Sawyer’s explanation, he’s averse to calling Pentiment a detective game, because he says it’s light on detective game mechanics. It’s a narrative adventure, he says, with mystery and murder elements, and where choices have consequences. For instance, Andreas is an artist with a university education, but players can choose what he excelled at in school. That choice will dictate the kinds of conversations he’s able to have with others as he tries to find information about various crimes.

Aside from its narrative, one of Pentiment’s core elements is one that immediately stands out in its trailer: the art. Sawyer says without art director Hannah Kennedy’s ideas and execution for the style, Pentiment may never have even existed. In fact, for a time early on in the project, Pentiment was mostly just the two of them. “I really believe that if I had gone to Hannah and said, ‘Hannah, I have this idea for this style,’ and she either wasn't interested, or just [couldn’t make it work], I would’ve dropped it. I wouldn’t have done it,” Sawyer says.

His pitch to Kennedy was a pretty specific and strange one: Sawyer wanted to mix late medieval manuscripts with woodcuts and engravings and early print, to better show off the transitory period between late medieval and early modern art. And Kennedy delivered.

“One of the things that I think is really great about her is that she is very good at critically analyzing how a piece of art is put together in terms of line weight and color, where colors go and where they don't, where blacks go and where they don't, when ink is used rather than paint, and things like that,” Sawyer says. “So she was able to deconstruct a lot of these images that we were looking at for reference, and then reconstruct a style guide so that she and the other artists on our team were able to synthesize this new style, which I just think is really compelling.”

For some, medieval manuscripts might be a bit daunting to look at, with their stylistic font choices. Sawyer reassures that accessibility was taken into account with an easy font mode, which he says was made possible in part due to Xbox’s support and interest in the project and access to its accessibility teams. In fact, the Xbox acquisition of Obsidian in 2018 brought a number of benefits to Pentiment specifically, and Sawyer says he had always conceived of it as an ideal GamePass game.

“I think that Microsoft and Xbox have access to a lot of accessibility,” he says. “Their accessibility labs are extremely helpful. “This game is not really supposed to be hard. … So having the accessibility labs to give the game to people who have different limitations than you or I might, it's really great to get feedback like, ‘This text is hard to read. We need better contrast. We need more options. We need text to speech.’ All sorts of things like that are extremely helpful to us. We normally wouldn't have access to those resources.

“Also, honestly, Microsoft's access to localization is really important. This game is very text heavy, [it’s] an Obsidian game. Especially when people play it not in English, the quality of the localization is going to make or break their experience.”

Sawyer says that while the setting and style are quite different, Pentiment explores a number of the same themes as his past work on New Vegas and both Pillars of Eternity games, in particular death, social transformation, and class conflict. Specifically, Sawyer says Pentiment examines these ideas by showing a broad, diverse portrait of medieval society and the numerous types of people who made it up.

“I wanted to show a wide spectrum of people in this community, which is why it's not just monks, but it's monks, the nuns that live in the house near them,” he says. “It's the peasantry, the crafts people, the smith, the miller who everyone hates because he's awful, as is often the case. I wanted to show the breadth of society and portray it as well as I could.”

While Sawyer is aware that Pentiment is a bit niche, with its deep exploration of medieval history, art, and culture, he feels that watching the trailer shown today at the Xbox Game Showcase is a pretty good benchmark to gauge whether or not an individual will like it. But he also says he wants to capture an audience interested in history or medieval art who may not necessarily be dedicated gamers or familiar with his past work. And his ultimate goal for Pentiment is for it to be, at least on some level, educational for anyone who picks it up.

“If people don't know anything about history, and they just like the look of it and the idea of it, I want them to play it and passively absorb knowledge as they go through it,” he says. “I want them to enjoy the story, be entertained by it, but also gain a greater understanding of how people lived in the 16th century.”

June 12, 2022

November 12, 2021

Obsidian Pentimenti Winc

https://www.windowscentral.com/new-upcoming-xbox-exclusives-project-midnight-compulsion-and-pentiment-obsidian

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Recently revealed by Jeff Grubb on his premium Grubbsnax show, Obsidian's "indie"-style effort is emerging from a small team led by Josh Sawyer, famed for his leadership on what is arguably the best Fallout game; New Vegas, as well as a personal fave, Pillars of Eternity.

I recently revealed the game's name with my co-host Rand_Al_Thor_19 on our Xbox Two podcast. It's being called "Pentiment," which refers to "an underlying image in a painting, especially one that has become visible when the top layer of paint has turned transparent with age," according to the dictionary. This naming convention hints at the game's premise, by which you act as an investigator in 16th century Europe uncovering the truth behind a grisly murder.

Grubb mentioned that Pentiment takes cues from the likes of Disco Elysium and the branching narrative designs Josh Sawyer is known for. You'll be able to investigate and make accusations against the characters in-game, which could lead to cascading consequences if you're wrong. It'll be a dialogue-heavy game with decisions to make and response options to choose from, which will shape your experience as you unwrap the murder conspiracy before you.

I am told that Pentiment is being built by a small team of around 12 people, and is more of a narrative RPG adventure than something combat-oriented. The art asset above may represent some of the designs the game is gunning for. Jeff Grubb also mentioned that Pentiment is exploring "experimental" gameplay elements, too, although they may ultimately not make it into the final release. Speaking of which, Grubb also noted that Pentiment is indeed gunning for a 2022 launch.

July 28, 2021

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/836367155/monomyth

https://store.steampowered.com/app/908360/Monomyth/

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MONOMYTH is an immersive, first-person dungeon crawling RPG in the vein of Ultima Underworld, Arx Fatalis, and the King’s Field series.

Travel through an open, highly interactive game world, unrestricted by scripted sequences, hard-coded barriers, or tiled movement.

Use swords, daggers, hammers, maces, bows, or a wide range of versatile spells to overcome your enemies in real-time combat!

Remain unseen and unheard by sneaking through the shadows of eerie dungeons deep below the surface of the world.

Talk with the inhabitants of the underworld via a detailed, keyword-based dialogue system. Trade with them or press them for information. But don’t go too far or you may suffer the consequences!

Experiment with a wide range of utility items: Speed potions, water arrows, lockpicks, and many more!

A highly interactive world awaits you! Douse torches, bake bread, drink from fountains, and even play instruments!

Unravel the mysteries of Lysandria as you uncover hidden passages, dive through flooded caves, and overcome the living nightmares that inhabit the ancient halls far below the mighty fortress.

Demo: https://rattower.itch.io/monomyth-kickstarter

June 26, 2021

It's happening:

https://chrisavellone.medium.com/ending-silence-c48e86f7c523

https://chrisavellone.medium.com/its-come-to-this-chris-avellone-2fe5db836746

June 14, 2021

Emphasis on only. Does that mean the new star system we'll visit in TOW2 will have a larger representation for some sort of Earth Directorate civilian authority (and not just a pathetic "Earth Minister" who is a hostage in his own home)?