The Outer Worlds 2's senior narrative designer, Joe Fielder, has worn a lot of hats in his 20 plus years in the industry. "I've been a level designer, I've been a puzzle designer, I've been a producer and a director," he tells us. "Sometimes, in the games industry, you take on the job that's offered to you." And that's how he ended up working for Irrational, as a producer on BioShock Infinite.
"I was an art producer and narrative producer for a while on BioShock Infinite," he says. "I'd come in on that as somebody who had also recorded and directed and whatnot. But at a certain point, there was a blind writing test because they were looking to expand their writing team, and I contributed."
Fielder completed the writing test, and then he waited. "This may be an apocryphal story, but apparently they read over everyone's samples, and they were like, 'OK, bring this person in.' And they looked up who it was, and they were like, 'Well, that'll be easy, it's Joe, he's in the next room.' So I was pulled in to work on that.
The new gig meant he worked on combat dialogue, along with "a lot of worldbuilding elements, which was something Irrational knew very, very well".
He still remembers the first piece of writing he did for BioShock Infinite: "If you played BioShock Infinite, the initial walk into Columbia, where everyone's talking about their perfect day. And it's like the dream of a summer's day—for them, at least. That was my first [time] writing for the game. Those little conversations. So that was fun.
"It was very fun to do that sort of non-expositional writing. A lot of games are just like, 'We're gonna give you a briefing, and here's all the facts about this society.' In this case, you wandered around and you soaked it in. You heard people talking about their day as if they assumed that everybody already knew the context of everything. You could kind of glean it."
While the critical path contained snippets of things that would teach you about the society you're exploring, Fielder made sure there was even more off the beaten path. "If you were kind of the game archaeologist and wanted to explore, you could wander off the path and those people would be talking about things that would give you hints at things you might hear later. Or just deeper elements of the lore, or humour. Hopefully humour."
The humour was particularly important to Fielder, though BioShock was demonstrably not a comedy, unlike his most recent project. "I've been trying to sneak humour into games for years," he says. "The Outer Worlds 2 is the first game where I'm actually being paid for it."
The Outer Worlds 2 and BioShock Infinite are not worlds apart, though, both being games that, in their own way, present and explore different political and economic ideologies. And long before Fielder joined Obsidian, he was sneaking comedy slogans into BioShock's in-fiction brands.
One of them was for cigarettes. "Just little bits of propaganda or humour, like the Minor Victory brand cigarettes," he says. "That was one of the things that I worked on—'The only brand of cigarettes designed especially for kids.'"
The Outer World 2's capitalist caricature, Auntie's Choice, would have been proud.
