Almost immediately in The Outer Worlds 2, the player receives news of a corporate shake-up: Auntie Cleo and Spacer’s Choice, two of the in-game retail brands, have merged to form Auntie’s Choice. Less a chain of stores and more a feudal power, Auntie’s Choice manages its employees — serfs, really — with the cruelty of the balance sheet, its military business far more important than the faux-cheery public-facing purveyor of somewhat-useful crap customers can’t get from anyone else.
The fictional business news parallels real-world business news. Right before developer Obsidian Entertainment began work on The Outer Worlds 2 in 2019, the studio was acquired as part of Microsoft’s game developer shopping spree. Less than a decade later, Microsoft’s gaming division doesn’t seem to be flourishing despite its incredibly deep bench of talent; in 2025, the company’s games efforts have largely been characterized by price hikes, layoffs, lopsided priorities, and an all-consuming interest from the company’s top brass in becoming an AI company.
Yet Obsidian is still here, and it has something to say about this stuff. At least, its new role-playing game, which casts players as an agent in a cheerily fascist organization that becomes embroiled in a conflict between a megacorporation and a totalitarian government, might have a few things to say about it. The studio itself? It’s a little less clear.
Image: Xbox Game Studios
The Outer Worlds 2 creative director Leonard Boyarsky and game director Brandon Adler are not in the business of making games that respond to any specific moment — games take so long to make, after all, and fun is their fixation. They do acknowledge that their game’s scenario can feel quite topical. “Tim [Cain, co-creator of the Outer Worlds franchise] and I have always made games that are about what happens when people get power,” Boyarsky told me in a Zoom interview alongside Adler. “We’re expanding on that continually.”
Boyarsky and Cain (who announced his “semi-retirement” in 2023 but still does contract work for Obsidian) are co-creators of the Fallout franchise and have deep roots in the computer RPG scene, having worked on a string of cult classics like Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and the little-played but deeply beloved Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. Their influence is everywhere, establishing modern RPG trends where factional conflicts and institutional mistrust are leveraged to generate interesting problems for players to solve.
The Outer Worlds games are best understood as another run at Fallout. Both franchises use a divergence in American history to spin out bizarre far futures defined by lopsided institutions. Fallout imagines a nuclear golden age post-World War II, where the science fiction of the ’50s became science fact, before a 21st-century thermonuclear war turns the world into Mad Max-style wasteland in which players eke out a mean, odd existence. In The Outer Worlds’ fictional history, President William McKinley is never assassinated, an antitrust movement never materializes, and the robber barons of the early 20th century run rampant for hundreds of years. Hence the heavy layer of corporate satire, which Obsidian expands in Outer Worlds 2 to become something darker.
In the first 15 minutes of the game, players are hit with:
a glib conversation with a mascot for one of those retail companies owned by a defense contractor;
a TV show clip that suggests a level of Starship Troopers-esque propaganda;
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