Obsidian has 'three-ish' teams working on different projects

Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart had quite a bit to say in a new interview with Game Informer about The Outer Worlds, the Fallout-esque sci-fi RPG the studio is currently working on, and its recent acquisition by Microsoft. He also teased a couple of new things that the studio's "three-ish" development teams are working on, and hinted that even though The Outer Wilds doesn't have a release date yet, Obsidian already has its eyes on a sequel. 

"We have The Outer Worlds team, which is the majority of our development," Urquhart says in the video. "We saw the small group of people that are finishing up in Pillars of Eternity. And then we have two other teams that are starting things up."

No more is said about it—the interview is clearly focused on Microsoft and The Outer Worlds—but it's not too hard to imagine that one of those "things" Urquhart mentioned is preliminary work on an Outer Worlds sequel. He said midway through the interview that he can't get into specifics about who would own the rights to potential Outer Worlds followups in the wake of the Microsoft acquisition, but he did hint pretty strongly that it's probably going to happen. 

"We started the company to make games like The Outer Worlds. That's what we had started going at Black Isle Studio, at Interplay, and we wanted to keep on doing that. That's why we left Interplay, we left Black Isle Studios—I didn't want to leave Fallout, I didn't want to leave the place where I'd kind of grown up in the industry. But we did it because we wanted to continue to make these things. And The Outer Worlds relay is the culmination of that," he said. 

"I think the thing that I like so much about it as well is, it's creating this world that we'll get to go play in for years. I guess that's how I think of it—I'm an old school sci-fi/fantasy reader, so everything's a trilogy, or everything's like books and books and books—although the whole Robert Jordan thing is insane—but that's what I like about it. We're building this game world, this setting, that we can go now tell all different kinds of stories in. And it lives up to that, it's that dense, it's that built, it has these cool characters in it. It's like thinking about a D&D campaign, from the standpoint of, 'This is B1, and then there's gonna be B2 and B3 and B4,' and so forth and so on." 

The Outer Worlds may or may not be scheduled for release on August 6

Andy Chalk

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.