Developer Obsidian is eager to create a sequel to The Outer Worlds and turn the RPG into a series, but the team is wary of making the series open-world.

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Talking to Game Informer , when asked about an open-world sequel co-game director Leonard Boyarsky said “Possibly. But I think the franchise leans a little bit away from that. It’s a pulpy space opera where you’re a guy or woman who flies from place to place, exploring a solar system. So to have one giant map defeats that.”

See what we think of The Outer Worlds in the review above.

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Echoing that idea was narrative designer Nitai Poddar, who added “I’m always skeptical of this idea that seems to be going around in AAA development that open-world is the standard. That if you’re going to have a very big budget game that it should be open-world.”“I think it’s very easy to get burnt out on open-world games because they tend to be so sprawling, so massive, that every open-world game you play tends to be the kind of the same thing,” Poddar continued. “Go here, collect that, see that landmark. I think there is a lot of value in having an open-ended game that is still structured around individual discrete levels.”The Outer Worlds has large areas, but is not an open-world game in the sense of something like Fallout. Each of the numerous planets you visit are seperate, unliked areas that you travel to via a map menu. So while moment to moment the game feels like an open-world game thanks to the size of each planet map, it’s technically not an open-world game. Poddar likens it to Mass Effect, which made its galaxy feel huge despite actually being a series of levels.Boyarsky also noted that Obsidian, while hoping for a larger budget on any potential sequel, would like to keep The Outer Worlds as a somewhat smaller project, with manageable staff levels. That naturally means clever use of resources, and open-worlds tend to be very intensive on that side of things.The Outer Worlds is one of the year’s best RPGs according to our own IGN review . If you felt burned by Fallout 76, The Outer Worlds is the ideal game for you

Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Entertainment Writer. You can follow him on Twitter