The Outer Worlds is being made by the same minds behind the original Fallout games and Fallout: New Vegas. Those games, unlike the Fallout titles made by Bethesda Game Studios, allow players to kill every single living being. Whether you think this is a good or bad thing is up to you and your god, but there are certainly folks who enjoy that level of moral freedom in their video games.

But with that freedom comes a major pain in the ass: actually making it work. It’s a major development challenge for a game that is fully voiced and offers handfuls of ways to solve every quest. How much of a challenge? Polygon spoke to Obsidian senior designer Brian Heins to get a better sense of the minefield the developers have laid for themselves.

“It is insanely hard,” says Heins when I ask him about the development side of being able to murder everyone. He goes on to explain that the ability to murder everyone actually adds more complexity than anything else in quest design. “Any NPC that is critical to a quest or some information, we have to have backups for the player.”

Heins lays out a specific example:

“Anyone you see, you can kill, [so] there’s got to be a way to get whatever they were going to give you, whether it’s a terminal entry or you can loot something off of their body or there’s a chest in their office that you would now lock-pick to get the information from. We gotta start figuring out all of those.”

But that’s not all.

“When we’re looking at the quest itself, we have to now have updates that will fire to show, ‘OK, you got this information by doing this,’ and make sure that the [dialogue makes] sense,” says Heins. For example, you can’t have an NPC saying that you bought an item from someone when you ripped it off their cold, dead body. “So that adds complexity [and] also the localization budget goes through the roof.”

With so many variables, how is it possible to make sure every possibility is accounted for? Heins explains that it’s a slow, methodical process.

“We start off with the area designers creating a general stub for a conversation. Like, ‘Here are the various options we want to make sure are accounted for and [are] covered by the NPC. And we try to include all the various death states in there.”

From there, the conversation goes to the narrative design team, which fleshes out the details into a full-length, human-sounding back-and-forth. “Usually what happens at that point is then QA finds bugs. ‘Oh, we gotta have this whole other branch of conversation for this [possibility].’ So a conversation that they started out writing as very compact and concise now starts growing much bigger, because they have not had to handle a lot of other states.”

Heins admits that the team is “not perfect at it,” and he’s sure some bits will slip through the cracks, but he says he’s hopeful the developers have accounted for most of it. It’s a ton of effort, though, and makes me wonder if the team is interested in taking it a little easier on choices with the next game it makes.

“When we’re in the middle of bug fixing, everyone wants to make an easier game,” says Heins. “But as soon as we start pre-production, we start talking about like, these are the games we love. So as much as we regret it — what we’re gonna have to do with all the bugs — I don’t think we’d want to make anything else.”