The Obsidian studio, which previously developed Fallout: New Vegas or South Park: The Stick of Truth, had its design director talk about the team’s past and present.

Earlier this year, Josh Sawyer said that the extra development time (Obsidian now belongs to the Xbox Game Studios, so they don’t have to satisfy the needs of a publisher), as well as the better planning, helps the studio, which specializes in RPGs, to leave the mark we put on them behind, claiming that Obsidian releases buggy games. „With Pillars [of Eternity] and Deadfire, we were the ultimate arbiters of our ship date. In both cases, when it came down to the wire, we decided to push back the release of the game by a few months. That can make a huge difference. We’re not total idiots. We know that we have a reputation for buggy games. And while some of that is endemic to making big, complicated RPGs with thousands of different ways through them, it’s still within our power to reduce bugs on our end with more time. When it’s a publisher’s choice, that ability (or priority) can be taken away from us,” Sawyer said.

„I think he [Sawyer] was contrasting how it was in the past versus how we’re operating now. [With The Outer Worlds,] we’re currently playtesting, polishing and catching all of those edge cases and smoothing them out. That’s been our focus for the last few months,” Megan Starks, the narrative director, told VGC.

More development time allows getting rid of more bugs, and if Take-Two (who owns Private Division, the publisher of The Outer Worlds) is more patient than Bethesda or Ubisoft were, it will benefit us (less annoyance at bugs). The Outer Worlds is out on October 25 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The Nintendo Switch will also get it at a later date.

Source: VGC