Obsidian Entertainment has had a profound effect on the role-playing genre over the decades, from the complex morality of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 to the minuscule multiplayer mayhem of Grounded. But not a single Obsidian game has had more of a lasting legacy than the beloved Fallout: New Vegas — and elements of that very game have bled into the studio for years, but never more so than the new sci-fi epic The Outer Worlds 2. While the first game was sometimes colloquially called Fallout in space, The Outer Worlds 2 only strengthens that idea with some very specific elements. Nowhere is that more abundantly clear than with the game’s surprisingly robust radio system, letting players tune into dozens of songs, radio dramas, and pieces of propaganda that help flesh out the factions of The Outer Worlds 2. And there’s a direct link between this new feature and New Vegas.
“Bethesda introduced the radio in Fallout 3, which we didn’t have in the original Fallout games, and I thought that was really cool. But most of the stuff they did, and in New Vegas, was all off-the-shelf existing music,” The Outer Worlds 2 creative director Leonard Boyarsky tells Inverse, “I understand why they had to do that, because it’d be ridiculous to think you would come up with 60 songs from scratch. So even back then, it was in the back of my brain that it’d be cool to hear what music from this place would have sounded like.”
