'do People Even Go To The Main Menu Anymore In Their Games?' The...

The Outer Worlds 2's main menu is the epitome of "Oh hey, that's neat!" All of your options are structured as a dialogue with an animatronic Moon Man, the in-game corporate mascot who serves as the series' own Vault Boy in real life.

Things get really interesting, though, when both he and the environment around him change based on where you're at in the game, as well as the choices you've made⁠—I was delighted when I booted up the game and he roasted me for being a tryhard playing on the Very Hard difficulty setting.

"[Game director Brandon Adler] came up with the idea for the Moon Man menu at the beginning, and it just took a long time to make that work," The Outer Worlds 2 creative director Leonard Boyarsky told PC Gamer in a recent interview. "We thought it was a good idea, but I was really terrified as the person who's having to direct the writing on it."

According to Adler himself, you were originally supposed to be able to ask the Moon Man questions as well, but it became "way too involved." The team was uncertain what the character of the Moon Man should be like, how reactive the conversation should be, and whether players might get tired of the schtick over the course of a 30-plus hour playthrough.

The Outer Worlds 2 design director Matt Singh also recalled a console specific worry that threw me for a loop: Apparently, some members of the studio wondered, "Do people even go to the main menu anymore in their games? Don't they just suspend the game and never really even see it that much?"

That concept is utterly foreign to me as an almost exclusively PC player⁠—and I'm also a good noodle who powers his computer down all the way every night to boot. Thankfully, the Obsidian team got some statistical vindication to move forward with the idea. "Around that time there was an article that had come out saying, well, actually we noticed that at least 50% of PlayStation 5 users shut their console down, and they don't actually keep it in suspend mode," said Singh. "And we were like, well see? All of them are going to see it."

"I got [The Outer Worlds co-creator Tim Cain] on the line, and I was just like, what do you guys think about this? Do you think this is worth doing? Tim was all about it," said Adler. "Leonard was a little scared. He was like, I don't know how we're going to do some of this stuff.

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"The Moon Man doesn't actually have a voice, we've

Source: PC Gamer