The Outer Worlds was always an RPG about the terrors of evil mega-corporations, and there's more than a little irony in the fact that it was ultimately released after developer Obsidian was acquired by Microsoft. The Outer Worlds 2 has been developed entirely under Microsoft's ownership, and while the game's developers are stopping well short of drawing any direct comparisons between their parent company and the game's plainly evil businesses, they still find the comparisons pretty funny.
"The Outer Worlds 1 was originally conceived and made before we were even purchased by Microsoft," game director Brandon Adler tells GamesRadar+ when asked about this particular irony. "But, I mean, it'd be ridiculous to say that we don't notice that. We obviously do. We think it's funny, and we kind of play into it. You even see it, sometimes, in our trailers and things like that. We poke fun at that, we get a little wink and nod, we realize that whole situation. But, we still have a message that we're trying to tell. Regardless of who's funding it, we're still trying to tell that same message."
"The people we work with really love the game," creative director Leonard Boyarsky adds, "so no dictates or anything like that."
Boyarsky previously called Microsoft's acquisition of Obsidian "quite a shock," especially given the subject matter of the original game. But it seems the satirical bite of both The Outer Worlds and its sequel are both surviving the new overlords well enough. Whether ethical satire can exist under capitalism at all is another question entirely.
