It seems Bethesda has seriously dropped the ball with Fallout. Fans were…hesitant, to say the least when footage from the new entry into the post-apocalyptic franchise put even more emphasis on (unnecessary) world building and Todd ‘Napoleon’ Howard told concerned gamers that it was headed down the road of MMO.

Then the reviews started coming in…and boy, they were bad. Then there was a major upset over items included – or rather that weren’t included – in the Power Armor Edition. And finally, there was a major data breach last week, exposing the personal data of thousands of users.

You’d imagine then, that the developers over at Obsidian have been quietly enjoying the show, after all, they missed out on a bonus from Bethesda because their game, Fallout: New Vegas, missed an 85 score on Metacritic…by one point. (Fallout 4 scored 87…and Fallout 76 scored 52.)

So, with almost poetic timing, Obsidian and partner studio Private Division announced The Outer Worlds recently at the Game Awards. Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, the original creators of the Fallout games, are co-directing The Outer Worlds, a single-player RPG that looks quite a bit like a new Fallout: New Vegas.

You can watch some gameplay courtesy of GameInformer.

“In The Outer Worlds, you awake from hibernation on a colonist ship lost in transit to its destination on the edge of the galaxy, only to find yourself in the midst of a deep conspiracy threatening to destroy the colony,” the game’s description reads. “As you explore the furthest reaches of space and encounter various factions, all vying for power, the character you decide to become will determine how this player-driven story unfolds. In the corporate equation for the colony, you are the unplanned variable.”

Unlike the Fallout games, The Outer Worlds looks more like a Space Western – think Firefly – though it still appears to have the draw of the best of the Fallout franchise. There’s some possible Borderlands influence and maybe even a little No Man’s Sky in there too.

The game is being published by Take Two Interactive, the parent company of Rockstar Games and 2K. That’s good news for PlayStation 4 players. Obsidian was recently acquired by Microsoft, which may be bad news for future Obsidian titles coming to PS4 and it’s currently slated for a 2019 release date, providing there aren’t any delays. Regardless, we shall be watching the development of this with great interest. Finally, gamers who prefer to go it alone have a reason to be hopeful again.

Scott Snowden is MyM’s US Editor. Follow him on Twitter.

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