![]() ![]() ![]() GamesBeat: Why are these corporations that you came up with, and the idea of a corporate dystopia, why is that such a ripe place for dark humor?īoyarsky: It’s kind of a reflection of our society, the consumer-based values. Games should be fun, but we also like talking about some deeper themes within them. We feel that we can explore deeper themes when we have that kind of dark humor up front, so it doesn’t get too oppressive or too depressing to play. It’s what we like exploring in these types of games. Every time we’ve made a game together, it’s always had that dark sense of humor. Tim Cain, the other co-game director, loves silly humor, so we kind of meet in the middle. GamesBeat: But it’s happening through a lens of humor though?īoyarsky: Yes. We’re using that in order to express this idea of corporate dystopia, where the central premise in the science fiction of the story is, what if corporations were powerful enough to run an entire world? That’s essentially what’s happening here. The role of government has been subsumed by the Board. As you play through The Outer Worlds, the Halcyon board, they are a megacorporation, yes, but they also run the colony. There’s no sense of them being separate from the government. Poddar: Because we wanted to make this game set in a kind of corporate dystopia, it was very important to have corporations as a unilateral power. It was kind of a weird coming together, just us coming up with these ideas on our own, and saying, oh, that feels a bit more like this, this is more like Brazil, we should bring in more things from those different sources. Then I kind of started toying around with it from more of the sociological side, what that would mean if a corporation ran people’s lives, like they did around the turn of the 20th century, the robber barons and the Gilded Age, things like mining towns. But the way we came around to this kind of setting was that Tim started really playing around with corporations in a future setting, coming up with funny taglines for them, funny products, very much inspired by Futurama. There’s a lot of classic sci-fi with big bad corporations. Was that part of your thinking?īoyarsky: All kinds of things inform our thinking. GamesBeat: It reminds me of how in Alien, corporations and not the government seem to be the ones who have the upper hand. ![]() There’s supposed to be a representative of Earth on all the colonies, and there is on this one as well, but in this colony specifically, corporations have gotten the upper hand, or they’ve always had the upper hand, because they bought it.Ībove: Corporate propaganda is a mainstay of The Outer Worlds. What happened with this colony is that the 10 corporations got together and pooled their resources to buy the colony. Once they did that they started auctioning off colonies. GamesBeat: How did this area of space become dominated by corporations, as opposed to a government force?īoyarsky: What happened was, when they started, they discovered skip drive, or the principles of the skip drive, which allows you to skip past the speed of light. Nitai Poddar: As you play through the game, we present them as the dominant force that pretty much runs the entire colony from top to bottom. The board of directors, colloquially in the game known as the Board, are the ones who are in charge of the colony. The corporation, a group of 10 corporations banded together to create a kind of megacorporation, the Halcyon Holding Corporation. They just left you guys all out there drifting for eternity, I guess, frozen. They finally found it drifting, but they decided not to unfreeze you or any of the rest of the hundreds of thousands of colonists on the ship, because it would be a strain on their system. Your ship was supposed to arrive 70 years ago, but it did not. In Halcyon, the first colonists arrived 80 years ago. Humanity in this universe has been colonizing for about 120 years. Leonard Boyarsky: This specific colony that you play in The Outer Worlds, Halcyon, they first began terraforming it about 100 years ago. GamesBeat: What’s the history of these colonies and this sector of space? How long have people been here? Who is in charge? This is an edited transcript of our interview. ![]()
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