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?”

(Image credit: Obsidian Entertainment)

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.

“The Moon Man doesn’t actually have a voice, we’ve never talked to him. We don’t even know how he’s supposed to act or how he’s supposed to respond to things, or what he’s going to sound like, since we have to voice him. But I was like, Leonard, I trust you. I know you’ll be able to figure it out.”

Boyarsky recalled that their first stab at a personality for the Moon Man “really wasn’t landing.” Things came together when the writing team took inspiration from events in the game: The Moon Man’s corporation, Spacer’s Choice, had been acquired by a competitor in-between the first and second Outer Worlds, with the Moon Man playing second fiddle to another mascot. “It just occurred to me, he’s kind of pissed off,” said Boyarsky. Hence the seething, yet weirdly endearing delivery of the final character.

Adler turned to the game’s designers to break down the easiest and most impactful variables they could have the Moon Man comment on, but one note they couldn’t hit was your digital storefront of choice: “We were like, Well, what about if you’re going Game Pass, he’ll make some comment about you being on Game Pass. The game doesn’t actually know where you’re running it from. There’s a lot of those things that we tried to do, but couldn’t.”

But even without that gag, the Moon Man main menu makes for a memorable and unique part of The Outer Worlds 2’s identity. “I think it was really awesome that Brandon stuck to his guns on that and he saw the vision,” said Singh.

During our interview, Boyarsky also mentioned that The Outer Worlds 2 was going to have its own Caesar’s Legion evil faction at one point in development. If you’re not sure if the game is for you, you can check out my review of The Outer Worlds 2⁠—I really dug it.

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