The devs from Obsidian tell us “we took something really cool, and found a way to make it a bit better.”

The conversation was both delightful and insightful, and featured a cameo from DeMilt’s puppy Luna, but as soon as it was over I discovered it hadn’t recorded properly, and had to creep back, cringing and whining, to ask for them to please answer some email questions. Luckily for all of us, they very kindly did.

There are a bunch of new features. As well as bundling in the DLCs, Spacer’s Choice raises the level cap; there are small adjustments to AI, including improved routing for your companions; the team did art passes on most assets and characters, improved facial animations, re-lit environments, and added new animations for creatures and ambient NPCs. There’s dynamic weather, and you’ll see foliage move according to wind speed and direction, which is the bit that excited me the most. But I’m told it was important that they stay true to what made the game successful in the first place. DeMilt says they “always focused on preserving what we had, not just making changes for the sake of making change. The best single example I can think of to summarize our approach was creating custom anims for the Astrolabe in Byzantium town center. We took something really cool, and found a way to make it a bit better.”

Given the changes, I wondered if the team had been tempted to dig up some old darlings they’d had to kill for the first release of The Outer Worlds, and put them back in while nobody was looking. They didn’t, but both Cain and Boyarsky said they’d have loved to have bigger maps with more exploration and replayability. “Monarch originally had a bigger map, and Terra had an overlands map that we had to cut. We also had to cut back on our number of locations,” says Boyarsky. “Our plan was always to make a smaller game – we weren’t shooting for a hundred plus hours, but it ended up being even smaller than we had originally envisioned.” Cain agrees, saying that he “missed those bigger maps because they helped support a feeling of exploration and vastness of the two planets Monarch and Terra, and when those maps got cut, we lost that feeling.” The trade off though, was that they shipped a polished game, with very few bugs and a complete storyline.

You don’t often see co-directors on game projects, but Cain and Boyarsky are no strangers to teaming up. “It’s always been easy for us to work together, even back when we first started working together onFallout,” explains Boyarsky. “We have complementary skill sets – I focus on story and art, and Tim focuses on the skill system and gameplay, and we trust each other’s instincts in those areas. We both work together on the world building, combining Tim’s love of silliness and my dark cynicism.”

It doesn’t even feel like work with Leon," adds Cain. “We bounce ideas back and forth, and we edit those ideas from both of our unique perspectives. But best of all, we always seem to be making the same game. While we both make course corrections during game development, we’ve never had to convince the other person that the final destination was correct.”

Not that DeMilt is any kind of third wheel, because he’d worked with both Cain and Boyarsky on projects early in his career, and again with Cain at Carbine Studios. “I had a great front row seat for the creation of Fallout and to see how they collaborated to create a great game and an amazing IP (I also got to break Fallout 1 from time-to-time and added “What would Eric do?” to Tim’s design lexicon…),” he explained. “So the chance to be a part a team with the two of them creating a new game and new IP that already had a strong vision was amazing.”

That vision will, we assume, be present inThe Outer Wolds 2, whichwe know exists, but nothing else. All three men scrupulously avoided talking about it at all, even when I pressed in as irrepressibly cheeky a way as I could manage. If I’m any judge they’re near the point that theywantto talk about it - there’s a little twinkle in the eye there - so hopefully more will be revealed soon. For now, you can prepare with The Outer Worlds Spacer’s Choice Edition on March the 7th, for $60 or €60 if you didn’t have the game already - and, if you did, I’m told you can get the upgrades at a reduced price. The in-game Spacer’s Choice would tell you they know a good deal, I suppose.