This isn’t a box-ticking feature for The Outer Worlds 2; it’s a statement about why Obsidian sits among Xbox’s top studios. After taking fans seriously and running the numbers, the team chose to add a third-person camera to its new RPG.

Bethesda has won over millions with unforgettable journeys through dreamlike worlds, yet its camera design has long sparked debate. Few complain about playing in first-person, but many argue the third-person view still needs work. Early on, Obsidian likewise considered skipping third-person in The Outer Worlds 2 to channel resources elsewhere. Eventually, though, the studio pivoted—and the story behind that turn neatly captures a core Obsidian principle.

An Option Made Possible by Players

As shown in presentations—and repeated by Obsidian more than once—The Outer Worlds 2 supports both first- and third-person views. That’s a modest evolution from the original, which shipped without third-person, and it almost didn’t happen here either. Project director Brandon Adler told GameInformer that the plan changed after listening to the community and, crucially, confirming it was financially viable.

Third-person wasn’t on the whiteboard at the start. Adler says the perspective arrived fairly late in production: “When we started making the game, we had no intention of using third-person,” he said. “In fact, we didn’t start doing it until about two years ago.”

The camera wasn’t the only item under review. The team weighed several other community-requested systems and features, then cut those that would strain the budget. “You’re like, ‘Some of these things are too expensive for us; maybe we’ll do it next time.’” Third-person, however, didn’t get kicked down the road because the studio found a cost-sensible path to include it without blowing up the sci-fi game’s finances.

The key was outsourcing the heavy lifting. Rather than build it entirely in-house, the Fallout: New Vegas veterans hired external partner Disruptive to craft a third-person system that could snap into the existing experience—covering animations, world interactions, FOV, and more. “Halfway through the process, we said, ‘I think people are really going to want this.’ So we did an assessment of how difficult it would be to implement,” Adler explained. That pragmatic calculus is a big reason Obsidian ranks among the most valuable teams under Xbox and Bethesda.

Why Obsidian Belongs in Xbox’s Top Tier

Yes, the third-person camera exists in The Outer Worlds 2 because players asked for it. But there’s a broader lesson: Obsidian now works in a way that prizes ideas, tests their feasibility against the target budget, and quickly drops them if they don’t fit. It sounds basic, yet in a climate of industry cutbacks, resisting feature creep—and the risky expectation that sales will bail out ballooning costs—is essential to survival.

So far, the approach is paying off. Beyond acclaimed releases like Fallout: New Vegas and the Pillars of Eternity duo, Obsidian has been a prolific machine in recent years: Pentiment, Grounded, Grounded 2, Avowed, and now The Outer Worlds 2. In 2025 alone, the studio has spoken to fans of fantasy RPGs, survival sandboxes, and sci-fi adventures with those projects. In short, Obsidian keeps shipping quality games without losing its way in expensive bells and whistles that would raise sales pressure. If that philosophy holds, they’re built to last.

Source: 3DJuegos