Baldur’s Gate 3 has certainly changed the conversation on sex in games, from the breakout viral moment around its bear sex scene to the way it turns intimacy, rather than sex, into the end goal of many of its relationships. Our RPG roundtable from this year’s Game Developers Conference, now available on the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast feed, touches on the topic of sex in games—but it also spawned an incredible anecdote from Obsidian game director Carrie Patel from her time as a narrative designer on The Outer Worlds.
Here is, as far as I know, the never-before-told story of what would have been a wild hidden ending in The Outer Worlds, if it hadn’t been cut before release:
Carrie Patel: “I worked on a secret ending to The Outer Worlds with Dan McPhee who was another narrative designer on the project. Fairly late in development I was writing the flavor terminal stuff for Chairman Rockwell’s office, which you can encounter midway, maybe ⅔ of the way through the game. For all of the terminals we’d have some flavor entries that would say something about the character, the world, just kind of fill things out.
“We’d been working on this game for awhile at that point, and you know, everything is about capitalism and brands. I remember thinking: ‘Man, all these corporate guys love their brands so much, what if they were literally horny for it.’ So I wrote this entry on Chairman Rockwell’s terminal that was locked behind a skill check or two, so you had to work for it. But it was a transcript of his weekly dom session with a Moon Man impersonator. It was very fun to write, because it was all this wordplay, with all of this business speak like ‘maximizing growth vectors’ and ‘end-to-end optimization.‘
“There was even a bark for one of the guards where you enter that office. You pass through a security checkpoint, and if you walked by him with a Moon Man helmet on—I don’t know that it ever got recorded, but there was a [written] bark at one point where he’s like ‘I guess it must be a Thursday.’
“I remember talking to Dan, because Dan was writing the showdown at the very end of the game. He was writing the Tartarus prison sequence. And I was like, hey, can we do a callback to this? [Because] at the time it was still in there. So we looked at it together and came up with the idea that if you faced Charirman Rockwell at the end of the game, and you were wearing a Moon Man helmet, he would get a little weak in the knees. And if you’d read that terminal, you could really take control of the situation: ‘Moon Man doesn’t ask, Charles. Moonman tells.’
“You could basically talk him into getting into one of the cryopods—’assume the position, Charles‘—and that was how you’d defeat him through dialogue and get him out of the way for the ending you wanted to choose.”
At this point everyone on the roundtable was dying to know why the ending was cut, but the answer was unfortunately straightforward. “You asked earlier how horny is too horny?” Patel said. “I think there was a concern that it was maybe too horny, so it didn’t see the light of day.”
Perhaps in the post-Baldur’s Gate 3 era, the upcoming Outer Worlds 2 will feel emboldened to let its freak flag fly.
You can check out the rest of the 80 minute RPG roundtable in the YouTube and Spotify embeds here, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.