In a new video from The Outer Worlds director and Fallout co-creator Tim Cain, he talks us through tone in videogames. Tone is a tough thing to nail down. It's easy to feel, but hard to describe and harder still to execute well. Cain points to The Outer Worlds and its strict adherence to only portraying a particular type of discrimination as an example of why its tone felt off to a lot of players.
"One thing we did have as a rule was, we didn't want discrimination that was racial or gender[-based], like misogyny, or any kind of other discrimination except discrimination based on societal class, and then you could tell all your discrimination stories through that lens," Cain says. In its attempt to make its message and tone clear, it seems The Outer Worlds may have oversimplified to the point of causing confusion.
