Fallout co-creator Tim Cain shows off the remarkable The Outer Worlds demo that got the publisher thumbs up only a year into development
There are a few more bald blokes than we got in the final game, but you can definitely see the vision in what became the Roseway level.
Tim Cain might be best known as a co-creator of the original Fallout, but some of his most recent work has come with Obsidian on its The Outer Worlds series. While he’s currently consulting on The Outer Worlds 2, Cain’s just shared a demo of the first game from just a year into its development, and it’s well worth checking out.
In the video on his YouTube channel featuring this vertical slice - which he’s shown off with permission from Obsidian itself - Cain explains that it’s a vertical slice. What is that? Well, basically a limited section of the game which has to “look and play like the final game” and is shown to the publisher, which in this case was Private Division.
As you can watch below, this demo of The Outer Worlds - or as it was know during development, Project Indiana - is narrated by designer David Williams and shows a player negotiating what would turn into an early version of the final game's Roseway level.
“This vertical slice was so good, that rather than just throw it away, we made it a shipping map in the game,” Cain explains, emphasising that being able to create something like this just 54 weeks into working on a fresh IP in an engine the developers weren’t familiar with is “a testament to just how good the team was”. “I’ve seen teamS or heard of teams that couldn’t do this after two, three, or four years,” he adds.
Naturally, given that this demo was made two years before the game ended up shipping and is only designed to convey what the final version might look like, there are plenty of differences between it and the finished product. For example, a lot of the UI elements simply hadn’t been designed or finalised because the mechanics they were related to had only just been made and there are also a lot of bald NPCs, since “hair wasn’t ready”.
“We didn’t have any companions available aside from Ellie and Felix, so you only see them,” Cain outlines, “but the way we hid that from you is that we didn’t let you go aboard your ship, The Unreliable, which is the only place you can swap companions. We also didn’t have crafting ready, so by not letting you go on the ship, we didn’t let you get to the crafting table that’s in the ship, and we just didn’t put any crafting tables in [that version of] the Roseway level”
Despite these caveats, the slice does do a great job of showing off how the full game would handle things like guns, creature and world design, as well as dialogue with NPCs. So, it’s a cool watch if you’re keen for some insight on what the game development process looks like.
As Fallout New Vegas director Josh Sawyer has tweeted about Cain's video: "It's rare for the public to be able to see the VS and compare it to the final game, so hopefully this gives some insights about how VSs fit into the development process."