Loan Verneau, Creative Lead at Mobius Digital on Outer Wilds
This text is a narrative transcription of the interview with Loan Verneau, available as a podcast on Point’n Think.
That’s it, the weekend’s here. You wake up a little later than usual, encouraged by the early morning chirping of birds on the tree you’ve watched grow with you all your life. The morning freshness rushing in through the open window quickly rouses you from the torpor of waking up, while the brightness already well established forces your eyelids to take their time before letting you observe the room. But you know the bedroom, it’s your home. So you get up and set off with a determined step towards the breakfast waiting for you in the kitchen. The bedroom door opens onto a straight corridor, at the end of which is the kitchen. With your eyes closed and your step still hesitant, you move forward to the rhythm of your yawns, when suddenly, BLAM. You bump into something hard in the middle of the corridor. You look up to see what your body has just hit. There’s nothing there. But the pain on your forehead is there. You reach out with your hand, but it meets nothing but empty space, jostling the invisible particles that move there in the general indifference. Dazzled by the sunlight illuminating the white walls of the room, you close your eyes for a moment, while continuing to search with your fingertips for anything you might have hit. That’s when you feel it. A wall, cool as stone. Surprised and worried, you open your eyes again, but nothing has changed. The corridor, the light, the birdsong, the kitchen at the far end. Immediately, you drop your eyelids again and stretch out your arms: the wall is still there. This object only exists when you’re not looking at it! Strangely enough, you’re more intrigued than terrified. As you dance the palms of your hands over the invisible facade, you feel the roughness that runs along it, like grooves twisted in on themselves. The strangest thing is the material: the surface looks like rock, but it’s smooth and rough at the same time. It seems malleable and rigid at the same time, as if it were just an amalgam of scattered rocks. And that protrusion on the right? A handle. Yes, that wall is actually a door. You must be dreaming, there’s no other possible explanation. You open your eyes again and find yourself back in the good old corridor. No more nonsense, it’s time to eat. You make your way through the door, which isn’t there anyway. It’s going to be a long day, with a few appointments, not forgetting the garage mechanic, and buying DOOR a few things to eat. Tonight, a good DOOR series, and off to bed. DOOR.
DOOR !
All of a sudden, you turn around, the phenomenon is too incredible not to leave your curiosity on the side of the road. You pass the place where the anomaly should be, close your eyes, take a deep breath and look for the handle with your hands. It’s still there. You grab it. It’s as heavy as an ocean liner washed ashore and as light as a hummingbird feather. With a delicate but confident movement, you lower it. A sound like two rocks rubbing against each other echoes down the corridor. You reach forward, the door has disappeared. Your heart is pounding. The blood dances in your veins. Your shoulders heave with jerky breathing. You take a step forward and open your eyes.
Here you are in a strange room, with wooden floors, walls and ceilings. But before you contemplate the bric-a-brac strewn about, you turn round: the door is still there, open, leading to the reassuring corridor. You don’t understand it, but you tell yourself that if you’re in danger, you can always turn back at any time. So you take the time to inspect the room. The first thing that catches your eye is a bust, forged from the same rocky material that appears to make up the door. The bust reveals a cheerful face, a young man with short hair, seemingly elated by some event. His smile makes him instantly endearing. A plaque is placed in front of the bust, and you approach it to read it.
Loan Verneau
An alien born in a land so far away that his name means nothing to you, Loan is Creative Director at Mobius Digital Games. Loan knew he wanted to work in the video game industry from a very young age, when he was just thirteen. He graduated with a Masters in Interactive Media from USC in 2013, and it was during his studies that he found a job with a major player in the industry, only to learn, just a month before the end of his course, that the team he had been promised was going to be cut. With no job and under the weight of a visa about to expire, fate played a surprising hand of poker, allowing Loan to meet Alex Beachum, the future founder of Mobius Digital. Looking to set up their own independent development studio, Alex and Loan quickly agreed on how to design a video game, sharing a common game design philosophy. Alex had had an atypical, all-round career, from creating special effects at ILM to becoming an actor. But his dream was to create a video game, the game that had haunted his thoughts for so many years. Meeting Loan was the catalyst for this adventure. To convince himself of his future partner’s talents, Alex asked him to create a few prototypes for mobile games. Among the proposals, one idea was chosen, with Loan becoming the first official member of the Mobius Digitial adventure, and this little mobile game their first production.
The wooden walls of the room are studded with paintings hung in apparent disorder, but sharing a strange characteristic: they are all empty. Wooden frames of different colours enclose the same rock that forms the door or the bust. Around the bust, hourglasses of various shapes are placed on several pedestal tables, shelling out their sand (or whatever material it may be) in general indifference. The room is extremely silent, the sound of birdsong a distant memory, and only the sound of your footsteps creaking on the floor breaks the ambient calm. You move slowly to the right, navigating between the pedestal tables and their hourglasses, glancing regularly at the door: it’s still there, still open. One of the pedestal tables holds not an hourglass, but a Swiss Army knife, accompanied by a descriptive plaque. Intrigued, you take it and read it.
In a development studio with a relatively modest number of employees (less than fifteen for Mobius), and although everyone has a role assigned in the company’s organisation chart, in reality everyone does a bit of everything. Loan started out as creative director, but also as lead game designer, while sometimes managing the rest of the team. Apart from the positions officially described for compliance purposes, in the field everyone touched everything. After working on a pair of mobile games, when the Outer Wilds project began, the team obviously went through a number of transformations. For example, Loan sometimes ended up taking on tasks that would otherwise have fallen to the producer. Thanks to her studies and accumulated experience, when there was no one available to take on a task that could make use of her talents, Loan would take on the backlog. As a result, the creative director soon became known by a funny nickname: the Swiss Army knife.
You put the plate down again and suddenly, with a strangely heavy yet discreet rumble, the ceiling begins to slide to one side. Beyond the wooden room in which you are standing, the vault of heaven, an ebony canvas sparsely strewn with stars of every colour, nebulae and stars revolving around each other. The universal canvas, in all its beauty and horror, reminding you of the tiny speck that you are. The banjo of Outer Wilds’ emblematic melody echoes through the room. Even more incredible, and against all the odds, the starlight reveals a few inscriptions on the empty paintings that dot the room. You enthusiastically head for the nearest one.
A small diagram opens the text that has just appeared: it represents Rocaille, a small moon well known to fans of Outer Wilds. You may be wondering how these different stars were conceived, how to create a ‘design for exploration’, how to stimulate players’ curiosity? According to Loan, it was a joint effort by the creative directors. The main philosophy behind the game is to focus most of the work on detail, but not everywhere. We had to refine the areas of interest, while deliberately leaving out areas that didn’t provide any clues to progress or any other important elements. We need to attract players to areas that offer content, be it text, mechanics or clues to overall progression within the title. You have to find a way of guiding players intuitively. On Rocaille, the Moon is relatively small, with only a handful of noteworthy areas. Between these areas, there’s nothing but emptiness, smooth textures and no ruins or features to catch the eye. Only emptiness remains. Emptiness, and that little tower in the distance, jutting out over the horizon, whose presence is bound to attract interest. The construction of planets is designed to do just one thing: naturally highlight the content. By extension, open worlds need to showcase their content, but whereas an Ubisoft game will fill its map with markers to be ticked off one after the other, in a routine that could become boring for a fringe of the audience, Outer Wilds showcases its content through the eye and exploration. Many modern open worlds sacrifice curiosity for content, offering experiences that can become obsessive: you MUST empty a zone of its content, not by discovering it, but by chaining together the emblems placed on a map. This works for a category of gamers who simply want to play a video game, but there isn’t necessarily any entertainment aspect beyond the gameplay loop, which is then repeated ad nauseam. What’s more, the content of Outer Wilds isn’t offered on a platter. Often, clues lead to it bit by bit, so that players know where to go. The texts give clues to places that may contain information related to a specific objective, and the environment emulates situations that players have already encountered to raise their awareness, and so on. In this way, the game is based on beacons, which trigger curiosity in the player, who is then guided, step by step, towards the next part of the plot they are exploring. It took a huge amount of playtesting and changes, both insignificant and huge, to arrive at the final result.
No sooner have you reached the end of your reading of this painting than all the inscriptions that were engraved on it diminish until they disappear. You notice through this process that it’s not just writing, but that each letter, each sign, is in fact engraved in the rock of the ‘painting’, which closes itself up again. Between this painting and the next is a poster on the wall, the only one in the room. It depicts the cover of an old video game you know, an adventure game full of puzzles of all kinds. The game is Myst. A plaque like the one you came across earlier is also fixed to the wall. You read it.
Outer Wilds is one of the first games to be defined as a knowledgevania. This term is based on a media genre known as metroidvania, itself made up of parts of titles from two cult sagas: Metroid and Castlevania. These two games are known for being non-linear action-adventure games, in which players progress through a more or less labyrinthine environment, and have to unearth abilities to improve their character’s ability to explore more areas of the game. Knowledgevania is an evolution of this progression system: from now on, it is no longer the discovery of objects or abilities that allows you to progress further in the game, but the discovery of knowledge. A rather recent ancestor of this sub-genre in the short history of the medium is Myst, which Mobius claims to be a reference for Outer Wilds, going so far as to describe it as ‘Myst in space’. Another reference that has played its part in the experience is an episode from The Legend of Zelda saga that had a strong influence on Alex: Wind Waker. It’s easy to understand his love for the game, given its emphasis on exploration. And he was doing it in a very deliberate and total way, long before the Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom diptych. In Wind Waker, there’s a museum run by a photographer, displaying shots of the islands dotted around the game’s maritime world. Alex was blown away by the concept, with simple images shouting out to players ‘you see these islands, they exist!’, inviting them to find them. To explore. In their view, these photos are like windows onto the world that can then be explored and discovered. At the very beginning of the pre-production of Outer Wilds, even before the project took the direction it will (a time loop), Mobius thought of building its game around expeditions to be prepared in advance. Loan cites Spelunky as one of his inspirations for choosing the equipment to take with you and the resources you’ll need to survive the journey. In the end, Alex and his colleagues wanted to focus on the expedition itself, rather than the preparation for it. The very act of exploring had to BE the goal, the objective of the game. All the members of the team are big fans of both large-scale exploration (NASA) and exploration on a human scale, particularly with the many hikes they enjoy. So it’s no coincidence that the game opens with them relaxing by a campfire with a fellow countryman, roasting marshmallows and sharing stories. Outer Wilds wanted to combine this full-scale exploration with an expedition pushing back the limits of the universe and space. During the first iterations of the gameplay loop, Mobius realised that an exploration game that allowed you to unlock bonuses, items or skills had no relevance to the objective they had set themselves: to satisfy curiosity. Adding upgrades that could be used to reach new locations would break the philosophy of the game. The only tool that could be used to go further would have to be what it has always been: curiosity. The knowledge accumulated in the game serves only one purpose, the same as the one mentioned above: to satisfy that curiosity. It’s a very powerful idea, but one that came incredibly late in the game’s development. That’s when the real challenge began.
Above you, in the infinite space that replaces the ceiling of the room, you witness an incredible ballet. Comets streak through the eternal twilight, hurtling past colliding planets and releasing a maelstrom of colours you’ve never seen before. Nebulae spin on themselves, while some stars light up while their neighbours fade away. You are seized by a giddiness of horror and majesty. How can all these stars coexist? While you’re still wondering whether you’re in the middle of a dream, you approach the next painting, on which the grooves that make up the words of the next paragraph are beginning to pierce the rock.
In Outer Wilds, contrary to what some people have suggested, the various stellar objects are not on rails. We didn’t place Sombronces or Leviathus on invisible, circular lines before adjusting their speed, rotation and launching them into orbit around the Sun. Even though we sometimes cheat, essentially for mathematical or gameplay reasons, the various celestial bodies interact according to the forces we have coded. In the museum on the first planet, you can find a small display case containing balls that are supposed to react to the planet’s moon as it moves. Well, it’s not a simulated, programmed movement, it’s a reaction to the influence of the local Moon. The rules of physics are simulated in this small solar system. In one of the early prototypes that Alex was working on, the idea was to see if it was possible to have a spaceship, climb into it and fly to the nearest planet just to see if it was technically possible. At the time, we were working with the Unity 4 development engine. When Mobius carried out these tests, everything worked incredibly well. Then came the new version of the engine, Unity 5, and with it this tool called PhysX which, as its name suggests, was supposed to manage physics. It was a disaster, because this new model made certain collisions with hollow objects impossible. By hollow, we mean not entirely full. Sablière, for example, is not a solid ball to walk on; it’s filled with galleries, corridors and even an underground city. For Unity, Sablière is an empty object. So it was no longer possible to manage the collision between the ship and the planets. This was a major challenge, and one that put many of the team’s knife-edge members to the test, because they wanted to retain this key concept at all costs. They also had to have a simulation aspect, they needed a living world. Which is what a lot of open worlds do, like Red Dead Redemption II for example, of course. That game (incomparable in terms of budget) uses a myriad of tools to bring its world to life, but Loan also wanted the world of Outer Wild to feel alive. So rather than simulating life, Mobius has simulated the universe. Big science nerds, as they describe themselves (Alex is a fan of quantum physics, Loan of planetary and stellar physics, for example), they decided to exploit both their passions and their knowledge to pay tribute to science, quite simply. All through the single concept of curiosity pushed to 100%. So Outer Wilds isn’t just about putting planets on rails. And finally, Loan confesses that setting up forces was easier than creating rails. Setting up forces is all very well, but forces that manage a system capable of remaining stable were a different kettle of fish. All the simulations ended up going in all directions after a given time. So we had to cheat, which gave rise to two concepts. Firstly, many forces in the form of lines of code govern the solar system, but these forces are localised to the stars they support. For example, the gravity of one planet will never have any influence on a neighbouring star. The only exception is the link between the moons and their parent planets (which explains the movement of the balls in the museum window). Secondly, and this is how one of the game’s most unforgettable ideas came about, by limiting the system’s existence in time, there was no chance of it breaking up after a few years.
A crackling sound is heard behind you. The hourglasses have begun to glow, the little pedestal tables supporting them are gone, the utensils floating in the air and spinning around a new plate. Cyclones seem to encircle the room, and brambles have appeared around the central bust. Strangely, you still feel safe, and the door to the breakfast room is always nearby, ready to suck you in if you’re in danger. So you read the new tablet.
The stated aim of each of the game’s major planets was to create dynamic and unique systems. At the very beginning of the project, even before the idea of creating a time loop, the game was linear in time, with certain events triggered at specific points in the timeline. The idea of the loop stemmed from this concept, coupled with the inescapable collapse of the solar system mentioned above after a longer period of time. The observation was simple: if a planet breaks up over time, then it becomes impossible to find clues that were present earlier, before the first signs of its collapse. The time loop solved this problem. And it brought with it a new question: why does this loop exist? The team would have liked to have more transformations linked to the progression of time, but in the end it wasn’t really that important in terms of the overall gameplay experience. In reality, these transformations serve a much more interesting purpose: to make the player understand that, unlike other games, he is not the centre of the universe. He’s just a grain of sand. It’s space out there, look up and see the stars, governed by forces beyond our understanding. We absolutely had to avoid putting a self-centred point of view on the player, which would have contradicted the fact of exploring and understanding elusive forces. You are not the centre of your world, your world is not the centre of the solar system, which is not the centre of the Milky Way, which is just one galaxy among millions and millions. The aim here is to make the player (the individual?) understand that he is just a visitor. The Atlantean has to survive something bigger than himself. As far as the planets are concerned, Sablière quickly emerged from the brainstorming sessions: unduo of hourglass planets in a time-based game, it was both obvious and poetic. Cravité was born during the prototype, but finalised later during development. In the first version, meteors destroyed the planet and pieces of it floated in space. Sombronces was also conceptualised very early on, and the others came along gradually. And it was above all the evolution of these planets that changed as the project progressed. For example, Âtrebois was supposed to have more and more active geysers as the loop progressed, but as time went by, there wasn’t much point, and the developers preferred to focus on the transformations that made sense while drastically altering the exploration. The idea was to give the impression that the universe doesn’t care about you, and continues its rounds without you being there. For example, if you leave your ship in the path of the tornado at Sablière while you go for a walk, your ship will be transported to the other part of the planet, without you. These forces are completely beyond you. The loop also helped a lot in terms of managing the memory of the different media. By simulating only limited zones in space (where the player is) and time (22 minutes), it allowed a reset to be placed to avoid accumulating too much data. Of course, we had to play around with the code, removing a texture on a distant planet, loading those that were close by, only playing a particular sound when the player explicitly wanted to hear it, and so on. Behind the curtain, it’s always imperfect, there’s always a leak. But the loop prevents just that.
On the last wall of the room is a fresco. It depicts all the planets of the Outer Wilds, but at the far ends are portraits of the Nomai. It’s quite disorientating, because no matter where you are in the room, they seem to follow you with their eyes. The fresco is of course accompanied by a new text panel, this time luminescent.
Creating a civilisation that has disappeared has been complicated, because so many stories these days (whether science fiction or not) exploit what has become a cliché. A forgotten people, shrouded in mystery, of whom only a few relics and ruins remain, bearing witness to their past existence. For the Nomai, the first inspiration echoes the hikes so popular with the members of Mobius Digital. It was while visiting national parks in the south-west of the United States, as well as deserts in Mexico and isolated canyons, that the idea of representing ruins in the game in this way arose. According to Loan, the sensation of stumbling across ruins several hundred years old while hiking is indescribable. The idea behind the creation of the Nomai has evolved considerably over time, as the studio sought to move away from stereotypes. The developers didn’t want to turn the Nomai into a cold, distant, proud race, but instead wanted to make them understandable beings, sometimes funny, sometimes full of doubts and therefore, by extension, paradoxically quite close. One of the team was in charge of writing the newspapers, giving each contributor a personality, and even creating a kind of humour, both touching and outdated, to make the Nomai palpable beings. The aim was to make people understand that the Nomai were ultimately beings like you and me, confronted with an extraordinary event, who had lived an eternity ago, curious and fascinated by the world, who had given everything to try and understand the universe. The Nomai had this positive side to them. In this respect, the first version of the village was different: the player was confronted with inhabitants who had a negative view of space exploration. The playtests were a disaster; the atmosphere in the village was so gloomy that it stopped players in their tracks. On the contrary, we had to make them curious. So it was that space exploration became the great passion of the people of Altria, to the point of building a museum around it. We had to surround the player with curious people, to make them curious. Just as it was necessary to surround him with people who felt empathy, so that he too felt the same things. The starting zone has become a bubble in keeping with the player’s motivations. In the end, the Nomai are the geeks of their time, making jokes despite the events they face. With this general idea in mind, Mobius Digital created a civilisation that wanted to fit into the world, not invade, exploit or destroy it. The Nomai had empathy for this system, and in particular for these little aquatic creatures to whom they did not want to leave a world destroyed by their folly or their ego. The Nomai don’t disappear because of their actions or for having defied a ban, they end up like everyone else, because the end is inescapable, whatever form it takes.
At that moment, and you’re startled, the bust comes to life and turns towards you. It begins to wait, as if you had something to tell it. A thousand questions go through your mind, the first half wondering what’s going on here, the second all about Outer Wilds. A little hesitant, but curious to learn more about this absolutely unique game, you ask him what was the most complex thing about setting it up.
Everything! he laughs. From the birth of the idea to the release of the game seven or eight years later, via the extension that took another handful of years to complete, not forgetting the patches and other fixes, each day revealed problems and surprises. One of the most surprising was when we realised that the public didn’t necessarily have the same knowledge as scientific geeks like us. Some players didn’t really understand the difference between a solar system and a galaxy, for example. When you make a game about space, you inevitably put up a barrier straight away. So we realised that we needed to explain a number of initial concepts before moving on to more advanced ideas, and that’s partly what the museum in the first game zone is for. We knew that we’d have to explain concepts like the Big Bang, and do it in a fairly correct way, while talking about the death of the universe. We haven’t been able to talk about everything we’re passionate about, of course, but we’ve done our utmost to make the concepts necessary to progress in the game intelligible. As you know, our universe will continue to expand, the space between objects will increase exponentially over time, and there will come a point where there will be no more heat, no more light, just inert matter scattered over incalculable distances. To make all the essential concepts clear, we reworked the village almost a dozen times. For seven years, we were discovering new problems of the same kind.
After saying these words, the bust shuts down, closes its eyes and slowly sinks beneath the ground. A few seconds later, the pedestal on which this copy of Loan rested rises to the surface, but the bust has disappeared. In its place, a finely sculpted, extinguished lantern has taken its place. Of course, a new plaque is still there, attached to one end by a chain. Read on.
Even before Outer Wilds was available, the possibility of creating an extension was raised by the team and the publisher. It was an entirely viable option, not only in terms of themes but also quite simply financially. Work on the extension as such didn’t begin until Outer Wilds was GOLD (i.e. finalised, ready to be marketed), but a few seeds had already been planted among the team. The most important thing was to align ourselves with the game’s theme of curiosity. And so Mobius quickly asked themselves what question they could answer during a second adventure integrated into the game. What would hook players? All eyes quickly turned to the most mysterious civilisation, the Nomai. Why had they lost the Eye signal when they arrived in this solar system? One of the suggestions put forward by the team was to point out that the travellers were now too close to the signal, and that it was being picked up from all sides. It was impossible to locate it in these conditions. It was an answer that made sense in narrative terms, but which the creative directors felt didn’t resonate enough with what the game was about. So they came up with another answer: to create the antithesis of the Nomai. Sometimes, knowledge can be frightening. So why not create a civilisation terrified of the signal, which deliberately concealed the Eye? There were two opposing viewpoints here, the signal having been hidden by this new civilisation, which had undergone a traumatic experience because of it. In this case, the knowledge had to be hidden, made inaccessible. To convey this trauma, the expansion didn’t shy away from horror, either in its atmosphere or in certain gameplay mechanics. And it’s a subject that fits in perfectly with the walks, those nocturnal moments like the one that opens the game, during which the walkers exchange horrific tales and other chilling urban legends. Once the idea had been validated, there were only a few months left before the release of Outer Wilds. The teams made emergency calls to change a few lines of code and leave the door open for this extension, Echoes of the Eye.
The pedestal on which it was resting begins to descend beneath the floor again, so without thinking you grab the artefact by the handle above it. As soon as you grab it, the lantern suddenly lights up, projecting light to the four corners of the room. Well, light is a misnomer. The lantern actually projects darkness. It’s very strange because you can still see what’s lying in its beam, but everything is dark, as if plunged into a night with a discreet moon. Stranger still, you notice that this light of darkness causes new inscriptions to appear on the paintings in the room. None of this makes any more sense than it did before, but at this point it doesn’t matter, you approach the nearest text and resume your reading.
When a game is financed through a community and participatory campaign, there are what are known as tiers. Each tier corresponds to a target sum and, if it is reached, it unlocks the advantage associated with that same tier: such as an additional playable character, a hidden boss, items, etc. In Outer Wilds (via the FIG platform), there was a tier that featured an invisible planet. In fact, it would only have been possible to see it by taking a photo, thanks to the camera that found its way into the final version of the game. There would have been a piece of this planet on Âtrebois, which would have launched this series of quests, although you can’t really talk about quests when it comes to Outer Wilds. This invisible planet would have been something that would have survived from the previous universe, but for technical reasons and the pace of the game, the idea was abandoned, despite the use of similar concepts via the camera. As far as Echoes of the Eye was concerned, there was this idea of platforms covered in domes, which would envelop the area and then disappear. Depending on whether or not the dome was present, it changed the cycle in progress, alternating between day and night, revealing new things depending on which version was being explored. But the twist is that, after a while, the player realises that there is no day/night cycle, but that these two versions of the platforms exist simultaneously. The dome transports the player to the darkened or lit part, which are actually one under the other. This idea of making the player think they’ve understood something when in fact they’ve been guided down the wrong track is an idea that’s been taken up again in the expansion, via dreams/simulation. There were a huge number of avenues that were abandoned because we couldn’t fit them all in. However, all these avenues explored helped us find the right versions to incorporate into the game. In fact, this is something that’s very important for Mobius: every member has the right and the duty to express themselves and share ideas. It’s by pooling everyone’s suggestions that the game can move forward. There were meetings dedicated exclusively to sharing ideas, and even if none of the 100 ideas of the month were good, it didn’t matter, because bad ideas help us to understand why they don’t work and how to make them work. This community aspect is essential at Mobius Digital.
When you point the lantern of darkness at the following paintings, it’s no longer paragraphs of text that appear, but magazine covers from the specialist video games press! Outer Wilds here, Outer Wild there, praised, acclaimed, adulated. Qualities galore, awards, GOTYs, it’s all there. All that’s missing is some fireworks. What the hell, anything’s possible here, so let’s go for it! Explosions of colour lit up the night sky from all sides. A burst of applause echoes from who knows where, while the coloured sparks above you reflect their hues on your cheeks. Hypnotised by this breathtaking spectacle, you realise that it will all be over soon, and that you’ll have to go home eventually. In the meantime, you approach the magazine boards, in front of which is a sort of tiny rectangular basin, not very deep, say not even five centimetres. Just enough to stand out from the rest of the floor of the room. As you step into this cavity, the environment around you collapses in on itself, leaving you alone, facing the stars that overwhelm you from all sides. It takes you a few moments to realise that you’re not as alone as you thought, and you see a holographic form a few steps in front of you. It’s Loan, speaking directly to you.
‘If you ask me how I feel about Mobius Digital’s second major project, I’ll tell you: ask me in four or five years’ time! Let’s be honest, we’re extraordinarily lucky to have such an incredible community. I’m not saying this for the sake of publicity or to flatter anyone, but our community is really healthy and generally very welcoming to newcomers. But above all, and this is rare enough to emphasise, it’s very, very careful not to divulge anything, not to spoil the experience of others. It’s a community that takes care of itself. It’s extraordinary, we couldn’t have asked for better. It’s so important to us and to our publisher. One of our initial objectives when we started working on our next project was to hope above all that it would be something that would appeal to the same audience. As people can imagine, especially after the expansion, we can’t expect to do the same thing. Outer Wilds has been done, it can’t be done again. Not in any way, shape or form. Doing the same thing again would be a disappointment (both for the fans and in creative terms). We’re going to do something different. We also hope to do something that will touch people. We’re going to take risks, some people will like it, some people will be disappointed, and we apologise for that in advance. But it will be unique. We’re also trying to improve accessibility. In short, we’re touching on everything, exploring new areas and offering a challenge capable of stimulating players and their ability to understand. We want them to arrive in a mental posture that allows them to enjoy the game, while understanding how to move forward, figuring out what the rules are, and finding solutions to the problems that beset them. All this while bringing to the fore, as always, that appetite for curiosity. At first, Outer Wilds was a difficult game, but thanks to the patches we’ve managed to make it more accessible and more logical for a larger number of people. For this work we have recurring interactive theatre exercises. This is what gives our small studio its identity, we have a wonderful creative team from which we draw our strengths. We’re not restricted by anyone’s job; as I said earlier, everyone can do a bit of everything. But in reality, applying this diversity is a concept that requires a lot of effort to stick to. Everyone wants to move forward with the part that’s dedicated to them, so it’s hard to move on to something else, but it’s also an asset, because it means you can constantly bring fresh perspectives to different situations. For example, it’s difficult for a game designer to be open to other ideas that don’t come from him, and that can change the overall experience of the game! However, everyone does their best in this idea of sharing. And this idea of improvised theatre helps us to understand the feelings of the other members of the team.
I think the desire for more contemplative, exploration-oriented games has always been there. I hope that Outer Wilds shows that it’s possible to focus on that aspect, because at the end of the day that’s what it’s all about here: Outer Wilds is all about exploration. I’d love to see this become a bigger pillar of video games, the whole team would love to see more games like this, and I think we’re far from alone. Breath of the Wild has already shown that it’s possible in mainstream games (editor’s note: don’t forget Elden Ring, Tunic, Animal Well, etc.), so we’d love to see it again and again, both in triple-A games and in the indie scene. Personally, I often play AAA games, but I get tired of them pretty quickly, because these open-world games are paradoxically extremely dirigiste. It’s a funny observation, because for a while, the games weren’t tested enough and turned out to be pretty hard, with explanatory phases that weren’t very clear. Then, let’s say during the period surrounding the release of Skyward Sword in the 2010s, everything was, on the contrary, over-tested, but the answer to the problems raised during these doubt phases was always the same: get the player on track. And now we have hints at every step of the way (editor’s note: information-saturated UX, markers, clearly written objectives, etc.) or characters who give the answers to puzzles when a player is too slow to progress. And at the opposite end of the spectrum we had Dark Souls (which is also a clear inspiration for our game, Dark Souls which also has an absolutely magnificent level design). In those games, you’re either good at it or you don’t finish it. So there’s a sort of ping-pong game between too much accessibility and none at all, and I think Outer Wilds shows that there can be a happy medium. Not pointing the way but suggesting it, having a Dark Souls-style design without sacrificing accessibility. That’s where we’d like to go. As it stands, Outer Wilds isn’t as accessible as we’d originally hoped, but my hope is that people will continue to think about these issues and explore this facet of game design: how to give players the freedom to explore their own path, without punishing them when they don’t know what to do.
Faire Outer Wilds shared a number of debates with us in the studio, one of which concerned our personal beliefs about the universe. Personally, I think the universe is infinite, but that’s not the case for Alex, for whom the notion of infinity is abstract and cannot exist physically. I don’t think there’s anything at the end of the universe, but Alex would have a different answer.’
As the last word is spoken, the hologram disappears and the décor of this strange hut emerges from nothing, as if it had never moved. An overwhelming force pulls you towards the door, as if the weight of the world is gently pushing you back to reality. You scan the room quickly, taking in its surreal charm one last time, wondering who brought you here and why. The writing on the paintings begins to fade, the stars fade as the ceiling slowly returns to its original position, and a shiver runs down your spine as you pass through the strange door. The reassuring corridor is there. You’ve got to write down everything you’ve just seen and learnt, you’ve got to immortalise this experience, others like you may have been through the same thing. You run to the pen pot in the hallway and look, what are you doing here? You must have slept badly to get up all the way to the corridor without even being fully awake. You’re feeling good this morning, like everything is in its place. The day’s looking bright and it’s time for a good breakfast.