The Outer Worlds Critique | More like Fallout 1 than New Vegas

The Outer Worlds is the game you get when the original Fallout and Deus Ex have a baby. In space. Crucially, The Outer Worlds is not Fallout: New Vegas in space, which some people were expecting and understandably hoping for. The comparison was always going to be made with Obsidian going back to its first-person RPG roots and it makes for snappy headlines and catchy thumbnails. While the comparison ends up being unflattering, The Outer Worlds is a damn good game and a hell of a lot of fun. It’s a refreshing palette cleanser in amongst a sea of games that are designed around trying to please a “community” instead of a “player,” because God forbid anyone play a game by themselves these days, and those that want to dominate every waking hour of your life. The Outer Worlds offers two fairly different story routes that see you working for different sides with contrasting results in a way that reminds me of The Witcher 2 and... not many other games to be honest. Okay, also New Vegas, but I really am trying to keep those comparisons to a minimum after having said that the two aren’t inherently all that similar. What’s more, the writing and voice acting are excellent, with a bunch of charming characters and light humor scattered throughout most conversations. The whole game is polished and relatively bug-free. It also stands up to scrutiny from even the most extreme of playthroughs. You can kill all the NPCs, including major ones, and future dialogue and events are adjusted accordingly. In terms of story, I was never able to properly break the game, and I tried. The Outer Worlds uses a lot of skill checks in conversations, something significantly lacking from recent Fallout games. Every situation has options to resolve the issue, from those skill checks that rely on everything from specific scientific knowledge to simply the ability to lie convincingly, to things like hacking, lockpicking, or bribing your way through. Or of course, you can sneak past people sight unseen while pickpocketing keys you need or kill everyone for the hell of it. In this respect, The Outer Worlds almost feels like an immersive sim, hence the Deus Ex comparison. I appreciate that other games, yes including New Vegas, did similar things years ago, but the way so much of The Outer Worlds is linear, as opposed to open-world, means the situations you encounter are more structured and the developers were able to design levels and quests around giving you the most options possible. Best of all, The Outer Worlds doesn’t outstay its welcome. My main playthrough came in at just shy of 30 hours, which was the perfect length for the story and world on offer here, and I jumped straight into another playthrough to see how things would change if I made different choices. The length of this game seems to have generated some controversy, but I don’t understand why. Or rather, I do understand, I just don’t relate. Very few single-player games justify crazy run times in the region of 50 to 100 hours. I once again have to name drop New Vegas--so much for that plan to keep comparisons to a minimum--and Baldur’s Gate 2 and The Witcher 3 come to mind, but the list is incredibly limited. Those games are the exception, not the rule. However, runtimes of over 50 hours are fast becoming the expectation, so much so that I have seen countless people say they are not buying The Outer Worlds because it’s too short or specifically too short to be a $60 game and that it should be $40. I straight up do not understand what world these people are living on. Most lengthy games are open worlds full of absolutely asinine filler content that no-one in their right mind would choose to do for fun were it not to fill up some completion meter or clear icons off the map. Obviously, you are free to do with your money as you choose, but please be aware that every time you make purchasing decisions based on arbitrary play length estimates and completion criteria, you’re contributing to the next Assassin’s Creed Odyssey or Fallout 4. Games full of stuff to do, but little of it interesting. And don’t be scared off by people saying that The Outer Worlds is a 10-hour game or any of that nonsense. I didn’t realize there were people who bought RPGs and then mainlined them as quickly as possible solely to complain about the length but trust me, there are. You should expect around 25 hours from The Outer Worlds, assuming you do all the companion quests and most of the side quests, and you likely will because there isn’t a great deal of filler content. There is some, but not much, and the side content fits in well alongside the mandatory stuff. And then, of course, there’s that second playthrough. Mind you, if you do like to take your time and explore every nook and cranny, play with multiple builds, and play on the highest difficulties for the ultimate challenge you might be disappointed because The Outer Worlds doesn’t have the depth to reward such an approach. It’s on those subsequent playthroughs, if not the first, that the experience starts to feel a touch shallow. It usually takes me a few playthroughs with an RPG along with a lot of reflection and playing with builds to determine how well a game holds up to higher difficulties and build varieties, but it only took a few hours to realize that The Outer Worlds simply doesn’t offer the flexibility and depth you might hope for. For starters, it’s way too easy. My first playthrough on hard was an absolute cakewalk, rarely requiring me to put any thought into buffs or even the slow-time system known as Tactical Time Dilation, basically the equivalent of VATS. The supernova difficulty has a long list of extra hurdles to deal with, but as I’ll discuss later, they don’t add enough to the experience to make it worthwhile. It’s far too easy to create borderline broken builds due to the way the skill system works and, if anything, it’s hard to create builds that have interesting limitations. Even though The Outer Worlds is split into discrete regions instead of just one big playspace, the regions are fairly big, a couple of them anyway, but there’s not enough incentive to explore them. There’s simply nothing to find beyond more ammo and currency. This is probably the major reason my playthrough was 25 hours or so and not closer to 40. I didn’t have any motivation to explore every inch once it became apparent there was no point in doing so. Finally, the story ends up being a touch disappointing. It’s decent enough, but most of the major points are made in the first five hours and the rest of the time is spent repeating them. There’s not a tonne of backstory to dive into either; things are very much as they appear to be. So yes, The Outer Worlds is a bit shallow. But it’s also entertaining and doesn’t take itself too seriously. It has some great characters and an important, albeit simple, message at its core. It’s the video game equivalent of a Marvel movie and I enjoy most Marvel movies, even if I don’t remember much about them an hour after they’ve finished. Ironically, given the staunchly anti-capitalist message of The Outer Worlds, Obsidian absolutely nailed the marketing for this game. I suspect the messaging was much more deliberate and carefully considered than anyone would like to admit, but I don’t blame Obsidian. It’s not easy to launch a new franchise without financial support from a huge publisher, as Remedy just experienced with Control, and Obsidian took every advantage it could get. First of all, Obsidian allowed, and likely encouraged, early comparisons to Fallout New Vegas to ensure the hype train left the station more crowded than, well basically any train in the UK at peak hours or off-peak hours come to think of it. Too much hype can be a bad thing, however, so nearer release Obsidian made sure to point out that it was merely a small team scraping along, just trying to do what it can with limited resources. They only had one computer between five of them, and during the winter months, they had to huddle around that computer for warmth. That kind of thing. Obsidian expressly stated that, despite those early rumors, The Outer Worlds would not be on the scale of New Vegas. At this point, it’s kind of like being on a train and being told that actually the safety checks weren’t as stringent as usual and the destination is now Birmingham instead of London. It’s ironic that much of Obsidian’s messaging for The Outer World’s was that it is good, but not the best, because that’s essentially the logo of one of the game’s major corporate groups: spacer’s choice. It’s not the best choice, it’s the spacer’s choice. This little ploy to simultaneously get New Vegas fans on board while also doing its best to make sure The Outer Worlds couldn’t be criticized for not being as good as New Vegas absolutely worked. I try to go on a media blackout as much as possible when I know I’m going to do a video on a game, but I couldn’t resist sneaking into a few forums while I was still working on the Control video and eagerly awaiting booting this game up, and I saw a bunch of people defending The Outer Worlds against any and all criticism using thinly veiled excuses like “it’s a double A game, so you can’t judge it like a triple A game” or “they always said it would be inferior to New Vegas,” etc etc. I shouldn’t need to say this, but given that we live in a world where people genuinely believe there is such a thing as objective criticism of art, I will state for the record that I don’t much care what developers or publishers say about their product when it comes to criticism of that product. I will add that I think people selling stuff should be honest and outright lies should not be acceptable. Honesty helps consumers spend their money wisely and should be encouraged. However, it does not mitigate criticism. Otherwise, I could promote this video by saying that it will be monotomous, lacking in any interesting nuance, poorly editing, rushed, and inferior to Joseph Anderson’s videos in every way and you would therefore not be able to criticise the video for any of those reasons. And don’t even get me started on video game remakes. I don’t care how faithful a remake is or how accurately it recreates the feeling of playing an old game like Banjo-Kazooie. If it ain’t good, it ain’t good. End of. The whole reduced budget and double A thing is a bit weird anyway, because firstly, The Outer Worlds is being sold as a $60 title and therefore can be judged as such. Second, Obsidian supposedly made New Vegas in around 18 months, whereas The Outer Worlds had three years development time. And finally, my criticisms of The Outer Worlds aren’t necessarily budget-related. Or at least, not as closely related to budget as something like a decision to use an isometric viewpoint instead of a 3D world would be. Still, fair play to Obsidian for somehow convincing people that they shouldn’t expect a $60 game made in three years and released in 2019 to be as good as a $60 game made in 18 months and released in 2010. The Outer Worlds was also published by Private Division, a subsidiary of Take Two Interactive, one of the biggest video game publishers in the world. Obsidian is also now owned by Microsoft, although I completely accept that that takeover was too late to make much difference to funding here and Private Division already had full publishing rights. Obsidian’s other masterstroke was in the design of the first world which feels handcrafted to get critics singing its praises all over social media. It’s review bait. I’m loathe to talk crap about other critics, so I’ll keep this vague, but a fair few reviewers fell for this bait hook line and sinker, and likely showed up the fact that they only know about New Vegas through word of mouth, not through actually having played it. The opening five hours of The Outer Worlds is like a greatest hits collection of New Vegas’ finest moments. There are competing factions that you must choose between, a lot of speech checks, and the big decision even comes down to who gets to use a major power supply. NPCs will even comment on your uniform early on if you change into raider gear and Obsidian has admitted that these lines were added because it knew most players would change over into the new set of gear at this point because it’s the only one they have at this stage. Given how critics, including myself by the way, are encouraged to blurt out their opinions as early as possible, while also wanting to stick to early game content to avoid spoilers, it’s not a giant leap to imagine that this opening world might have been a touch front-loaded to help fuel the hype train. Or perhaps games just tend to have stronger openings and get weaker as they go on due to time constraints. Personally, I prefer the conspiracy theory that it was all done to maximize hype, and I genuinely don’t think it was done in a mean-spirited way. I kind of admire how well Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, in particular, have controlled the message around this game. It also doesn’t hurt that Bethesda has destroyed the Fallout franchise so severely that even if the IP had been locked up in a vault it wouldn’t have survived the fallout. Despite having already mentioned New Vegas about five times, the comparisons are largely wide of the mark and a little frustrating because the true comparison is Fallout 1. If you don’t know much about the first Fallout game then, luckily for you, I’ve already done a video on it. The comparisons will become clearer once we’ve discussed the story, but at a high level, both games had discrete locations you travel to instead of an open world, both had you helping a struggling town early on where you had to help one of two competing factions, both have an old man task you with tracking down a rare resource to save a group of other people stuck in a remote location, and both end by changing the focus to another more significant problem that threatens the nature of humanity as we know it. Hell, those big issues even have three-letter acronyms: FEV in Fallout and LEP in The Outer Worlds. Oh and of course, both are the first games in a new franchise, but I think that’s beside the point. And look, I get why people would rather make the New Vegas comparison. New Vegas is newer and more relevant to today’s gamers and it also uses a first-person perspective. The similarities are more obvious. However, I personally find the similarities to Fallout 1, which was also made by Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, before Obsidian even existed, to be far more interesting. Making these comparisons serves a purpose, or at least proves a point, and that’s to illustrate how safe Obsidian played it with The Outer Worlds. It may not sound like it on the face of it. We don’t have many single-player space-based first-person RPGs to choose from after all, and frankly, if you haven’t played New Vegas, this game is going to feel like a minor miracle. Even if you have, it’s still remarkably refreshing to return to something fun and familiar, like hooking up with an old partner after some time apart. All the fun, none of the tedious arguments and time spent with in-laws. The play it safe attitude first becomes apparent in the character creation screen, which seems to present a lot of options, but when you dig a little deeper, it actually hinders any attempts to create weird and wonderful builds. You start at the attribute screen which doesn’t stray far from the SPECIAL formula. Strength, perception, and intelligence return, as do charisma and agility except they’re named charm and dexterity now. There’s no endurance or luck, but temperament is a new one. All six attributes, which annoyingly don’t come with a cool acronym to pronounce them by, start at average, and you have 6 points to spread around. There are five different levels for each attribute so you can lower them to below average and raise them all the way up to very high. This immediately struck me as a little limiting. Past Obsidian games have let you create some cool builds by min-maxing your stats from one to nine and doing fun things like low intelligence runs, but here the worst you can be at anything is “below average” which isn’t all that bad really. I aspire to below average. In some cases, the below-average level comes with a punishing drawback, such as having no passive health regeneration at all if you have below-average temperament or doing no extra damage for hitting weakspots for low perception, but those are the exceptions. Other attributes simply make things slightly harder for you like worse durability on weapons or slower regeneration of tactical time dilation. On my main playthrough, I was able to max out intelligence and charm, while also buffing perception, and all I had to do was lower strength to below average which was an easy choice given that I didn’t plan to go the melee route with this character and I would be bringing along companions to compensate for the reduced carrying capacity. With this relatively simple and obvious setup, I felt like I’d already won and I hadn’t even reached the skill page yet. All six attributes affect specific skills, most of which are as you’d expect. Perception helps identify weakspots, dexterity is for sneaking, charm is closely related to speech skills, etc. The temperament attribute feels more than a little forced though. It’s linked to health regeneration, so in that respect it’s most akin to endurance, but it is also linked to melee, lying, sneaking, and engineering for some reason. In the end, all of the major skill groups are represented twice across the attributes, which is why it’s so difficult to create builds with significant drawbacks. Take melee for example. Strength is obviously the most important attribute here and it is useful because it provides a straight damage buff to melee attacks. However, even with below-average strength, like I had in one build, you still get melee skills from temperament, which you might be using for your stealth or science-based build. You could do your best to create a nerdy and weak protagonist, and yet still be competent with a tossball stick. Engineering also pops up in perception, although I’m not sure why. I was trying to create a character who was good with long-range guns and perception is useful for its link to weakspots, but for some reason it also provides benefits to heavy weapons like flamethrowers. Each attribute applies to six skills, so that’s 36 buffs in total and there are 18 skills; two buffs for each skill. The only challenge here is making a build with actual weaknesses. The way the skills are allocated to multiple attributes means you’re going to be swimming in skill points once you’ve chosen your attribute spread, especially if you picked some below-average attributes. I especially like how you are rewarded for going below average. If you simply spread the attribute points around to be above average at everything, you will move onto the next screen with a total of 216 skill points already allocated. If you min-max as much as you can, you’ll have over 250. This is a great idea for encouraging riskier builds, but as I said, the attribute system doesn’t really allow you to create anything overly risky in the first place by placing the floor at below average and having skills represented all over the board. After picking out attributes, we get to the beloved skill selection page. Oh how I’ve missed you. There are 18 different skills to choose between and each can be raised to 100. The list will look familiar to fans of most Fallout games, with different skills for different types of melee weapons and guns, speech skills like persuade, knowledge skills like engineering, and there’s stealth, lockpicking, hacking, and leadership abilities. It’s a decent list. Nothing really new or surprising, but given how rare the mere concept of skills are these days it’s still an absolute blessing. You get 10 skill points every time you level up and if it had been left at that, this could have been a really good system, however, as with the attributes, there’s a seeming lack of confidence when it comes to player freedom with their builds. I hate saying this because this kind of language is patronizing and usually used in bad faith, but what the hell, it does feel like it’s been a bit dumbed down to cater to a more casual audience. Which is fine if you are the casual audience. If you’re not, well it can be a problem. The issue is how skill points are allocated up to 50. The skills are mainly grouped into sets of three, so persuade, lie, and intimidate are all lumped together as are speech skills. Stealth, hacking and lockpicking are all categorized as stealth skills and so on. Some are only groups of two, like defense and leadership. When the skills are below level 50, which all of them will be when you start the game, you don’t allocate your skill points to each skill individually, but rather the group of skills lumped together. When a skill reaches 50, you must level it separately, but before then, you effectively get two or three skill points for every one actual skill point available. This felt like a great idea at first. After all, if you are going for a stealthy playthrough it only makes sense to lump some of those stealth skills together. There isn’t much point at being good at sneaking around if you can’t unlock any doors or hack any terminals. Likewise, if you’re good with one-handed melee weapons, chances are you are at least competent with two-handed ones as well. It wasn’t until I was about halfway through the game that I realized how limiting this was, or rather, how unlimiting it was, because it’s way too generous. Most of the value in the skills comes from leveling them up to about 40 and after that point it’s typically diminishing returns. This is because there are skill unlocks at every 20 skill points and the most valuable unlocks by far come at level 20 and sometimes 40. For example, even if your character isn’t the charismatic leader type, you’d be crazy not to put a few points into leadership because that unlocks the special companion abilities that are incredibly useful in combat. Level 20 in hacking lets you sell items to vending machines, which while far from essential, is a huge convenience. 20 in repair lets you repair items in the field. 20 in science lets you tinker with weapons which is basically upgrading them. This is borderline essential on the harder playthroughs. As such, you’re strongly encouraged to become a jack of all trades, before finally settling on a few areas to be extra good at. As with the attributes, you end up not being bad at anything. At worst, you’re below average, and at best you’re practically super-human. The limitation of this skill system is probably best illustrated through my attempt to create a dumb brute of a character who would play solo due to a complete lack of morals and personal skills. I immediately ruled out the guns and leadership categories and also avoided tech even though a few points in there would have made my life a hell of a lot easier for those unlocks at level 20. Obviously, I dumped a load of points into melee, but the problem came when I tried to put them elsewhere. I’ll discuss this a bit more later, but defense is not all that useful given how easy the game is, although I was playing on normal for this second run. Defense also only has two skills within that category as opposed to three, so you don’t get as much benefit for point spent. Intimidation seemed like an appropriate skill for my dumb brute, but I had no choice but to also level up persuade and lie at the same time, making him a lot more silver tongue than I had intended. Likewise, I decided he might as well be good at picking locks, mainly because I had nowhere else to put the points, but that meant he also became adept at sneaking and hacking. My dumb brute character could now not only talk his way out of fights, but also sneak under enemies’ noses and even hack computers. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I simply couldn’t create the character I wanted to create with the skills grouped together in this way. Sometimes, he could even use the special engineering speech skills and once this happened alongside a dumb speech option. It’s also worth noting that while all the skills have significant bonuses when they hit 20, those skills are often a bit detached from the nature of that skill. The speech ones stand out the most. Persuade, lie, and intimidate, all make various types of enemies cower before you. I’m not sure how my incredible ability to lie leads to beasts running away from me or how my being intimidating affects robots. This also creates significant combat advantages for a smooth-talking character which again doesn’t feel quite right. If I’m going for speech skills, I’m specifically trying to avoid combat and my character should be weaker as a result. He shouldn’t get combat buffs. After skills, you can also pick an aptitude, which offers minor buffs to skils, such as +1 to persuade if you accept a background as a cashier and reduced shock damage if you have a background in construction. These little things are a nice touch and remind me a bit of the backgrounds you could choose for yourself in Arcanum, another game with Tim Cain at the helm. They aren’t anywhere near as extreme as the traits in the original Fallout games though. Every two levels you gain grants access to a perk point which are split into three groups. You have to spend five in each group before you can select any from the next. As is often the case with these things, there’s a mixture of the essential, such as extra carrying capacity, reduced cooldowns, extra time dilation and the like, plus a bunch that you’ll never use because they aren’t relevant to your build, which in my case was extra melee weapon damage. I generally stuck to the ones that made life more convenient like being able to fast travel when over-encumbered or reduced weapon degradation, but that again goes back to the game being too easy overall. When playing on supernova difficulty, I found the stealth build to be the best and a few of the perks complement that perfectly to help with the added difficulty. Overall, I’m disappointed with the skill system on offer because while it looks like it offers plenty of choice, it is actually tough to create many truly interesting builds. You can do cool things like focus on science to get huge buffs to science-based weapons but it can’t really be described as a true science build because you’ll have strengths in so many other areas. My low intelligence run wasn’t really a low intelligence run at all. It was a normal melee run that had a few dumb options available in conversations. As with the skill system, the story ultimately lacks depth and doesn’t reward detailed inspection all that much. That doesn’t have to be seen as a huge negative mind you; this is a new IP after all and there’s nothing inherently wrong with keeping things simple. The Outer Worlds takes place in the year 2355. Humans have started colonizing other star systems, with the focus here being on the Halcyon system, a small system with only two habitable planets, some asteriods, and a couple of gas giants. The Halcyon system is not the only human colony although it is occasionally presented that way and we know very little about the others. At one point, when all life in Halcyon is threatened, it’s described by one of the characters as a possible extinction event, even though there are still humans on Earth and in other colonies. Life in the Halcyon system was started by an intrepid group of explorers who arrived on a ship called the Groundbreaker in the late 2200s. A second colony ship carrying over a hundred thousand of Earth’s best and brightest was due to arrive at around the start of the 24th century but it never made it. In 2320, the Hope was found drifting at the edge of the colony and the decision was made to leave it there. The passengers on Hope were all frozen in suspended animation for a trip that was supposed to last around 10 years and were left this way for nearly seventy years. Everyone’s given up on them, assuming they are beyond revival. Everyone that is except Phileas Welles. Welles wants to thaw everyone on the Hope, so that they can help combat the rot that has set in across Halcyon. Welles succeeds in bringing you back to life, and promptly dumps you in a pod, jettisoning you to a nearby planet without so much as an aspirin to tide you over. Welles wants you to gather important chemicals to revive the other colonists onboard Hope. He only had enough for you. That’s pretty much your mission for the entire game. There is a new development near the end that places a bit more importance on your actions, but largely you are just following leads to get the rare chemicals which will save the crew of the Hope. If this sounds like one big fetch quest, then well, that’s because it is. I had enough motivation to keep pushing forward, but I must admit, most of that came from my enjoyment of the characters, quests, and locations on the way, as opposed to any real desire to help Welles or see the end of the story. This is also why I did such a thorough playthrough. I mean, I kind of had to anyway for this video, but I genuinely wanted to meet everyone, read all the terminals, and generally see everything of note, and I was in no rush to reach the end. Besides, you don’t have to help Welles if you don’t want to. Early on, you get a chance to screw over Welles and work for someone else, which leads to a fairly different set of missions and a very different vibe to your work. The Welles storyline is clearly, beyond argument, the main storyline that most of the work went into and that Obsidian expect most people to play. As such, I’ll focus on that story for this video and then just explain how things can differ if you take the other route. You start off on Terra 2, landing near the town of Edgewater. Your rendezvous with Captain Hawthorne doesn’t quite go as planned. At least you get a ship out of it even if The Unreliable can’t take off until you get a power regulator. There are two nearby. One providing power for the town of Edgewater and one for a small group of deserters led by a woman called Adelaide. You can’t just grab a power regulator while there’s power running through it--trust me, I tried--so you first have to reroute the power to just one of these groups, leaving the other power regulator unused. This mission, and your overall experience in Edgewater and the surrounding area, set the stage wonderfully for The Outer Worlds, so much so that you can understand 90% of what the game’s about just from this first set of missions. The most important thing to realize is that the entire Halcyon system is run by corporations and the game presents an extreme anti-capitalist take that I am 100% on board with. Edgewater belongs to Spacer’s Choice, a company that is, in turn, a member of the Board that keeps everyone in check. Spacer’s Choice, and indeed the other corporations such as Auntie Cleos and Sublight Salvage, go well beyond just providing a nine to five job in return for a paycheck, as is demonstrated by some early missions in Edgewater. One of the first characters you meet is a junior inhumer, basically a gravedigger, who gives you a quest to collect gravesite fees from people who haven’t paid up yet. People in Edgewater need to pay for their own graves before they’ve actually died. People who are, uh, gravely ill, will try to cover up the illness to avoid being chased for their gravesite fees. A man in the town recently committed suicide. This is considered vandalism, being damage to company property, and the town now has to pay the fine. However, you can help the town get around paying the fine by discovering that the suicide was actually the result of a drug with depressive side effects. This is considered a win, despite, you know, someone having died. Medicine is strictly rationed and a citizen’s chances of getting any when they need it are largely determined by their place in the hierarchy. This lack of medicine is the reason Adelaide left the town to create her own little group of survivors. Adelaide’s son caught the plague and needed medicine, but Tobson Reed, the man in charge of Edgewater, gave the medicine to someone else instead and Adelaide’s son died. The first companion you meet is Pavarti who grew up with her father. Her mother didn’t abandon her as such, it’s just that she moved to another location to work and ownership of Pavarti was determined by the office her mom worked for when she was conceived. This meant Pavarti was owned by the Edgewater division and had to stay there with her father. Obviously, this isn’t sort of approach subtle in its views but it is impactful and anyone who can’t see the parallels to our own corporate-led culture is just willfully ignorant at this point. The corporation also decides what line of work you will do for the rest of your life and generally keeps the populace in a state of fear. People give you the corporate spiel even when they’re injured or near death and any slight negativity towards the corporations is quickly covered up with a quick pledge of allegiance. Of course, some people seem genuinely happy with their lot in life. You meet people who are content to work their jobs and be provided with just enough food and a roof over their heads. There doesn’t seem to be any way to negotiate peace between Adelaide’s deserters and Tobson of Edgewater so when you divert the power and steal a regulator you have to hurt one group. While the choice may sound easy, the people of Edgewater are as much victims as the deserters. Even Tobson isn’t that bad a guy. He does genuinely seem to be doing the best he can with the resources he has and there are more people living in the town than there are with Adelaide. It isn’t an especially easy choice; no one stands to win out of this. Well, no one except you, because after all, you’re doing this to get a power regulator to power your ship. This part gets a bit lost in the noise. Just before you make the decision, Pavarti says she’s changed her mind and now thinks that the town should get the power because it’s not their fault that they work for a corporation who doesn’t care about them, however, she never questions the morality of you taking the power regulator in the first place. That’s just a given. After all, you have it in your quest log; you can’t not do it. Whatever decision you make, you must head back to the now powerless town or village and face the consequences of your decision. Tobson is more dejected than angry and I was genuinely relieved when I managed to convince him to call off his security. Not because I wouldn’t have been able to kill them, but because I didn’t want to. There was already more than enough misery to go around with the employees all looking on helplessly, not sure what the future has in store for them. On my supernova playthrough when I sided with Tobson, I found out that Adelaide’s group had found a cure for the plague and was able to grow vegetables. After some more investigation, it turned out she was using human bodies as fertilizer, so yeah, the group of deserters is not as sympathetic as they first appear. With the power regulator in hand, you can power up your ship and head to the Groundbreaker, the large vessel that brought in the first batch of colonists. You’re here to get a navkey that will let you land on Monach where there’s a lead for the chemicals Welles needs. The Groundbreaker initially feels a bit like a glorified hub where you collect a load of other missions to do elsewhere, but it’s actually a pretty memorable area. For one thing, this is where you get your first chance to turn in Welles to the board when you talk with Udom Bedford. The choice is presented in a fairly low-key way and I’m surprised you can go ahead and do it here. I wasn’t going to take this route on my first playthrough anyway and when I saw the option I assumed it would lead to a bluff or one of my companions would butt in and stop me dishing the dirt or Udom just straight up wouldn’t believe me. However, you absolutely can grass Welles up and it changes a decent chunk of the game from here on out, but I’ll go through that more later. You need to get the Navkey from a woman called Gladys, however, she demands a steep price; 10,000 bits which is likely more than you’ll have on hand or want to spend in one go. Gladys asks you to help out by doing a bit of corporate espionage in Roseway Gardens, a region controlled by Auntie Cleo’s, and you’ll probably end up chasing these leads, however, if you like, you can just kill Gladys. The slight problem is that Gladys doesn’t have the navkey on her body or in any of the nearby safes. There doesn’t seem to be any way to get it once you’ve killed Gladys, however, if you take this option, your ship AI, known as ADA, will simply tell you that she’s managed to secure a landing at a more dangerous location on Monarch. It’s a decent compromise and not the first time I was impressed at the game’s handling of dead NPCs. Of course, most people will go to Roseway, another corporate hellscape where it turns out the new toothpaste Auntie Cleo has been developing might also work as an appetite suppressant. Not bad for a colony that has a severe food shortage. You can also do a few favors like locating the plans for a special gun or deleting information that an employee doesn’t want to reach his boss and then either pocket the reward or go back to Gladys who pays you for the information which you then give straight back to get the navkey to Monarch. Monarch is probably the biggest planet with the most to do, although you are treading familiar ground. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but there’s a town run by a corporation and a separate group of outcasts making a life for themselves outside of corporate control and just before leaving Monarch you can make a choice that is likely to make one of them very happy and leave the other in limbo. Okay, so to be fair, it’s not an exact retread of the Edgewater story even if it is a little too close for comfort. Your goal is to get information about the whereabouts of the chemicals from the Broker and he won’t help you until you’ve fixed his transmission tower which in turn means you need to convince the MSI corporation and the Iconoclasts to stop using it for their own ends. MSI is based at Stellar Bay and run by Sanjar. MSI is no longer a member of the Board. It was kicked off after Monarch was declared uninhabitable, or more to the point, non-profitable. Sanjar is determined to reverse MSI’s fortunes to make the company profitable again and hopefully regain its seat on the Board. Sanjar is another likable fellow despite his role in proceedings. Since MSI was left to its own devices, Sanjar implemented radical new ideas such as time off for weekends and he generally wants to see his workers treated well. He’s also one of the most bureaucratic characters I’ve seen since Hermes in Futurama. I felt sympathetic towards Sanjar; he’s misguided more than outright ignorant and he improved the lives of most people on Monarch, even if taking them back into Board control might not be the best for them in the long run. Sanjar is using the broadcast system to transmit advertising for MSI and its products, but he can be convinced to shut it down if you help him with a few tasks including retrieving a BOLT 52 form from the ARMS building. It turns out that the BOLT 52 isn’t a blueprint for a new weapon, but rather a legal form that needs to be filled out before MSI has a chance of rejoining the Board. The Iconoclasts stationed at Amber Heights are another group that’s extricated themselves from corporate control. Currently, the Iconoclasts are led by Graham, or gram as some of the American voice actors insist on saying, and like Adelaide’s group on Terra 2 they have struck out on their own with mixed success. As the name suggests, the Iconoclasts want to tear down MSI and everything it represents with a religious fervor. Within that group is the second in command Zora who controls the armed forces who defend the group from beasts and marauders. The Iconoclasts are using the transmitter to spread the word of their beliefs but will shut it down if you help them set up a printing press. While it sounds like a step backwards, you can inform Graham rather bluntly that no-one is listening to their broadcasts anyway and the printed word might therefore be more efficient. There’s some friction between Graham and Zora which comes to a head when Zora, with your help, uncovers proof that Graham led the massacre which wiped out everyone who previously lived in Amber Heights including the innocent families of those working for the corporation. I used this information to help Zara stage a coup d'etat although Graham insisted on going down with a fight. Once you’ve shut down the broadcasts, the Broker gives you the information and you can move on to Byzantium, however, one of the Board’s ship’s crashes nearby and both the Iconoclasts and MSI would quite like you to retrieve the weapon’s system. You can pick sides, but I liked both. The Iconoclasts were a bit heavy on the anarchy for my tastes when Graham was in charge, but Zara seemed sensible and much more likely to listen to reason for the greater good. Likewise, Sanjar was a good guy, and was willing to listen to reason, although ever the bureaucrat, he did insist on seeing Zara’s employee review before considering working with her. I managed to get the two sides together and they worked out a compromise of sorts with MSI agreeing to house some of the Iconoclasts members and provide food and water, while the Iconoclasts would continue to hunt beasts outside the city walls to keep people safe. The last big new region is Byzantium which has more than a touch of the Bioshock Infinites about it. Byzantium is where the mega-rich live. They don’t need to work and rely on robots for most of the labor. The man standing behind the bar was appalled when I asked him for a drink instead of going directly to his mechanical drink dispenser. Byzantium looks spectacular; Obsidian nailed the corporate utopia vibe perfectly, with robots tending to the gardens, small animals roaming around and little touches such as onlookers being disgusted by the mere presence of someone who works for a living. I loved it. Unfortunately, much of Byzantium is locked off. You can’t go inside many buildings here and when you do you often have to go through a loading screen. The area feels like a rush job that Obsidian scrambled to get complete in time. The Ministry of Accuracy and Morale certainly sounds like an appropriate building for a bureaucratic capital, but once inside it’s more like a nightmarish laboratory of the sort you’d find in a Wolfenstein game. I strongly suspect that these areas were going to be on other planets and were then transported over to Byzantium late in the day when Obsidian realized it was short of time. Even the parts that fit within the world feel a bit disconnected from other events. For example, there’s a decent quest where you have to meet with the Minister of Earth, who’s a pretty big deal, except when you eventually do he turns out to be a puppet for Chairman Rockwell of the Board and not much is done with him after that. Given that he gets a special mention in the end game slides, I suspect he was going to have a bigger role at some point. Locating the chemical in question takes you deep into a lab where you find a bunch of humans suspended in stasis. You need all of the chemical to rescue those aboard the Hope, but if you take more than 23% of it, you’ll kill everyone in stasis. It’s up to you whether you take all you need or just the amount that will keep the others alive. The experiments are part of preparations for the Lifetime Employment Program which is explained via a surprisingly amusing video recorded by Chairman Rockwell. As has been intimated throughout the game, the people of Halcyon are starving. Food supplies are getting perilously low because the way food is grown here simply isn’t sufficient to feed everyone. Don’t worry though, the Board has a plan that can be summed up with an Eddie Murphy meme. You don’t need food if you don’t have people to feed. The Board isn’t going to wipe everyone out. That would be cruel. Instead, the entire population of Halcyon will be placed in suspended animation until the food situation can be solved. As for how it will be solved, it’s not entirely clear. There is mention of cycling people in and out of stasis to make sure everyone gets a chance to work on the project, but other than that, I’m not too sure. After stealing the chemical, you’re once again offered a chance to turn Welles in and work with the Board through the second in command Sofia Akande. Assuming you don’t, Welles has you skip the Hope back to his lab so that he can work on saving everyone. This whole skipping the Hope across the galaxy thing also smacks of something that was cut or changed because the motivation is a little flimsy. We were probably on the Hope for another reason originally. If you read the entries on the terminals aboard the Hope you discover that those people paid to look after the ship and the crew during its journey to Halcyon ended up eating some of those in stasis in their attempt to stay alive. Anyway, you move the Hope only to find that Welles has been captured and is being held on a prison planet. You infiltrate the base and save Welles to complete the game at which point you are rewarded with a bunch of slides detailing the consequences of your decisions throughout the game. Yes, the slide shows are back. Oh, how I missed them. The closest the recent Fallout games have gotten to slideshows is when the frame rate drops. A few static images with some text at the bottom may not sound like a lot, but this is a huge feature for me. The sort of thing that should be on the back of the box. Hell, it should be prominently displayed on the front of the box. There’s a lot of them as well. I got 23 on my main playthrough. You’re told how every major decision you made impacted the world and even get the rundown on companions and characters you met along the way. I sided with Adelaide in Edgewater and was disappointed to find out that she refused to help nearly everyone from the town once her group had all the power. I had assumed she would open her doors to those who wanted to join her group, but she was incredibly selective and left many to die. Life on Monarch seemed to progress well enough for most people after my little negotiated compromise arrangement. Unsurprisingly, Welles saved all the colonists aboard the Hope although he didn’t live long enough to see the full transformation of the colony that resulted from the hard work of those he saved. I was a little disappointed that Welle was able to save everyone because back on Byzantium I chose not to take all the chemical available which was supposed to mean not everyone could be revived, but it looks like that decision didn’t have any consequence. The slides don’t hold back when it comes to detailing events far into the future. Whereas most games are more concerned with DLC and sequels, The Outer Worlds is happy to effectively bring everything to an end for all the major players, much like it did in the original Fallout. The only sequel tease is a rather uninteresting mention of how Earth has been radio silent for three years now. Otherwise, things in Halcyon seem to be rather wrapped up. My suspicion, and perhaps hope, is that the inevitable sequel will leave this story well alone and take place in another colony, one that isn’t ruled by corporations. This way, Obsidian will be able to reinvent the main theme for each entry while still having a common history between them. The different colonies would be a bit like the different vaults, each having its own theme of sorts. That’s for another day though. For now, the story of The Outer Worlds is relatively complete and satisfying in its own right. It’s also a little unremarkable. The strong anti-capitalist theme emphasized so heavily in Edgewater and that you’ve no doubt heard people discussing online, just kind of peters out by the end. As I mentioned at the start of this video, it does feel like Obsidian threw in all the big guns early doors and then didn’t quite know what to do after that. Edgewater makes you think of the Board as this big destructive group running the colony, and yet the more time you spend in the colony, the more you realize that the Board’s days are already numbered. Adelaide’s group of deserters were a big deal on Terra 2, but the entire planet of Monarch seems to be getting on okay without the board. In addition to MSI and the Iconoclasts, a group of people have formed a wild west style town at Fallbrook. For around two-thirds of the game, the Board becomes less and less of a threat to life in the colony. The stakes are being lowered, not raised. The Board starts off feeling like the equivalent of the Empire in the original Star Wars trilogy and end up a little more akin to the Resistance in the new trilogy. They start off looking powerful, but they more time goes on, the more it looks like they are there for the taking. I think this is deliberate; a lesson about the failures of capitalism. But just because it’s deliberate doesn’t mean it’s good and the Board’s lack of competence leaves you feeling a bit unnecessary. There’s an attempt to up the stakes in the final third with the Lifetime Employment program, but even this feels a little half-hearted and I ended up feeling rather ambivalent about the whole stasis thing. Using stasis as a way to survive something that would otherwise be unsurvivable doesn’t sound all that bad. I mean, that’s basically what the colonists did when they made the trip to Halcyon in the first place. However, if you get the bad ending, you see that the people of Halcyon go into stasis willingly, but the people of Byzantium then live out their lives in luxury and never solve the problem. I like how this legitimately feels like the natural consequence of an inefficient corporate-led group that only thinks about the well-being of the short term elite. I doubt this was the actual intent. If the Board just wanted to get rid of all the normals, it could simply lie about the stasis program and switch it off once everyone’s inside. Instead, the Board could just never get around to caring about the well-being of others. My main issue with the stasis plan is that it misunderstands the egregious late-stage capitalism that The Outer Worlds spent so long trying to present. The mega-rich depend on the labor of the poor to not only make them rich but to make them feel rich. It isn’t enough to have money; these people need to have more money than nearly everyone else. You aren’t rich if you’re on par with everyone else. The Lifetime Employment Program relies on sending away the masses that the elites currently control. The elites supposedly live out lives of luxury on Byzantium after the plan goes into action, but they were going to do that anyway. The food shortage was never going to affect the likes of them. At the absolute best, the lifetime employment program prevents the uprising that might have happened if the food shortage had continued. However, the cost was effectively shutting down the corporations that made all the profit and luxury goods in the first place. The Halcyon economy needed human labour; it didn’t run entirely on auto mechanicals after all. Those humans must have been creating value for the elites otherwise what would have been the point. Therefore, this stasis plan has caused real harm to the Board and the elites which makes it hard to believe it as a plan they would go through with enacting. Instead of sending all that valuable labor into space, it might have been more interesting if the Board had forced some sort of genetic alterations on the lower classes that would have reduced their need for food, but also caused notable changes to the human race. Shorter lifespans perhaps, or literally shorter people. I know we usually ask for more shades of gray in our stories, but I think in this case I would have liked the Board to come up with a plan that was more horrifying. Like, for example, converting the human race into a bunch of super mutants. Yes, it’s time for the Fallout comparisons again. As discussed, there are a bunch of similarities between the first Fallout game and The Outer Worlds and I doubt that’s by accident. Both games see you plucked out seemingly at random by an older gentleman and sent into a world you don’t know with the remit of finding a material to save those you’ve left behind. One of the first things you do is sort out a dispute between competing factions in a town where doing the right thing actually turns out to be a mistake that you don’t uncover until the ending slides. There are a bunch of fanatical groups and quasi-religions and you travel to a bunch of set destinations. Then, once you do have the material you need, you are forced to confront a much bigger problem that leads to a confrontation with the big bad which can be resolved in a number of ways, including peacefully if you have the right stats. In addition to the LEP being a poor substitute for the FEV, the other major area in which The Outer Worlds falls short is that Sofia Akande is simply no match for The Master. The Master passionately believes in his project for a start and this led to that memorable conversation where you can talk him down if you want to avoid fighting him. You not only need certain speech skills to do this, you also need to have found information that proves The Master’s mutants are sterile and therefore incapable of breeding. You foil The Master’s grand plan through your own diligent efforts and it makes sense. You can talk Akande down as well, but it’s just a straight up skill check and doesn’t seem to be based on any of your previous actions. It’s not an easy skill check to pass. I had 100 in persuasion, but I also needed 90 in engineering and I fell short. You can alternatively convince her with her lying and intimidation skills. The only other way to avoid fighting altogether is to have 100 lockpicking skill and 100 hacking. This lets you basically switch off the final boss. Slightly lower hacking will still make your job a lot easier though because all the little minions will attack him and leave him low on health. Anyway, this whole Akande conversation at the end isn’t all that memorable because the Lifetime Employment Program isn’t that interesting and it never feels like Akande is 100% behind it either. The Master’s plan was exactly that. His plan. The result of decades of hard work and personal suffering. The Lifetime Employment Program was probably the result of a bunch of board meetings, arguments, and eventually a compromise that was unsatisfying for all parties. Akande just happened to be the one charged with implementing it. I also never entirely understood why Akande and the Board were so against bring back the crew of the Hope. There are tens of thousands of incredibly intelligent people on board who were presumably sent out to the colony for a reason and at the bequest of the Board. Why did the Board just let them linger on the edge of the solar system for all those years, and why are they so ambivalent about bringing them back now? There is a quick mention at the beginning of these colonists just being extra mouths to feed, but they might have been able to help with the food shortage. This might seem like a minor issue, but it sucks a lot of the tension out of that final confrontation and makes the whole thing a lot less memorable than Fallout’s equivalent. The Outer Worlds also suffers a bit compared to Fallout when we start looking at the wider worldbuilding, although we have to be really careful when making that comparison because a hell of a lot of the Fallout story and history wasn’t put in place until Fallout 2. My Fallout videos discuss this in far more detail, obviously, but the best example is the whole vault experiment thing which was retroactively added in Fallout 2 and was not part of the original game. Even so, the Halcyon colony does feel a little lacking in worldbuilding. Most terminals and journals you find only contain little snippets about life working for the corporations and while they can be incredibly amusing, they don’t feed much into the history of how the colony came to be this way. The massacre at Amber Heights that you uncover on Monarch is probably the most interesting bit of backstory there is and I don’t know much about that either. The worlds feel rather static, which to be fair, is largely the point. The Board desperately wants to maintain the status quo, but that is inherently less interesting than a world that is changing rapidly such as that of Fallout where society is starting to rebuild after a horrendous war. While I’m happy to make some excuses for The Outer Worlds on account of it being the first game in a new IP, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been better. Just look at the insane amount of information Mass Effect crammed into its first game. In my Mass Effect video, I stated that we will never see a game with world-building like that again, and I think The Outer Worlds perfectly illustrates that point. The writing is so much fun though. The game’s writing shines in its humor, which is light-hearted and charming, perhaps best described as a bit like Borderlands except for grown-ups. Okay, that’s a little harsh, I like Borderlands 3, but there’s no denying that the humor in those games dates incredibly quickly, often before the game has even been released, because it’s so heavily based on pop culture references. The Outer Worlds, on the other hand, is often slightly slapstick; silly, but at least timeless. A bit like a Pixar movie. The humor makes you feel warm and tingly instead of mean spirited. It’s just fun. There aren’t many laugh out loud moments, but you will spend a lot of time with a wry and knowing smile on your face. Right at the start, you are presented with a bunch of visual gags such as Welles struggling to get the escape pod to launch and the moment the camera pans around to show that you’ve crushed the person you were landing on the planet to meet. Remember the foreman on Edgewater who had to pay a fine for destruction to company property because her employee committed suicide? Well, she was on the hook because she was the closest living relative. She wasn’t actually related to him though. She was just the closest living person relative to the body when it was discovered. And then there’s the package delivery service on Byzantium that takes a stringent line against parcels. Even though it lacks subtlety, I do like how the NPCs will often reference the common video game tropes that they are trying to avoid. I was a little disappointed with the lack of dumb conversation options because they never lead to actual dumb conversations, just quickly resolved misunderstandings. There are some good ones though like thinking the junior inhumor was actually a junior in humor. That translates better over text. And when I was able to select dumb dialogue, the NPC response to my comments was often amusing, especially Sofia Akande. At one point, I needed to get into a building in Byzantium and I chose the bribe option because I couldn’t find another way in, however, I then had to admit to the guard that I didn’t have enough money to bribe them and would come back later. The terminals are also a good place for a chuckle, such as an email that explains why employees are being relocated and then explains how they will have to pay for their own relocation package. If you can’t afford the relocation fees, you can apply for a relocation loan. To get the loan, you will need an audit which requires the employee to apply to the Surprise Audit Waitlist, which in turn requires a fee. If you cannot afford the audit fee, you can apply for an audit fee loan which in turn will require an employee audit. Overall, the humor isn’t going to be something that works well as a gag reel or anything. The Outer Worlds is funny because of the little touches, like using your engineering skill to help someone open a door by turning the handle the other way. There’s no bunch of clips I can show you to prove that the game is hilarious; it’s just fun and doesn’t take itself too seriously while also not beating you over the face with a five-year-old meme. I want to give full credit to The Outer Worlds for including two different playthroughs, beyond just whether your character acts like a paragon or a renegade. Unfortunately, the other route, which I’ll call the bad route, is significantly lacking in motivation for your character. If you grass Welles up to Udom, you can go straight to Byzantium where you meet with Akande via a video screen initially and she asks you to prove your worth to her by completing a few missions. This immediately feels a little silly because you could just straight up give her Welles location but she doesn’t want it yet. I guess you could be laying a trap for her, but it feels a little thin. At one point, Akande asks you to wipe out the town of Edgewater by turning the mechanicals against the people and then wiping out the mechanicals. You essentially become her errand boy for a bit. Once you find out about the lifetime employment program, have the motivation of a permanent spot on Byzantium to look forward to, but other than that it all distinctly lacks focus. Instead of kidnapping Welles, Welles kidnaps Akande and you have to infiltrate the prison to save her. Some of the quests feel less developed than those on the Welles side of the playthrough, but there are still some nice touches to put it all in context. For example, that quests where the robots wipe out everyone in Edgewater could only be done because the robots previously had a kill system installed as part of an insurance scam years ago. The insurance case is still being debated in council, but the person responsible was promoted for their ingenuity. The best part of this second playthrough, where I was playing as a dumb character, was when it came to skipping the Hope close to the prison. Unless you have high engineering skill, you should let ADA deal with the calculations, but a dumb character can insist on doing it themselves, much to the concern of the Hope’s onboard computer. If you do this, the skip does technically work, but you end up within the star’s gravity and get sucked in for a game over. It’s brilliant. I love silly endings like this. Other parts of this second playthrough didn’t work quite so well. I opted to play without companions, however, the companions sometimes point out relevant information such as when you need to flick a bunch of switches before you can reroute the power on Terra 2. Without a companion to tell you this, you just get a bunch of new waypoint markers that appear on the screen for apparently no reason. Companions are also good for pointing out nearby spots of interest and you lose something by not having them. I enjoyed working for the bad guys because you can really stretch the game’s systems when it comes to taking shortcuts on quests. Take Monarch for example. You still have to shut down the communications system, except you’re doing it because the Board simply doesn’t want it operating which is understandable. I didn’t need the Broker, so I just killed him. I still needed the Iconoclasts and MSI to stop broadcasting, but I wasn’t about to do a bunch of quests so I killed them too. The Outer Worlds stands up remarkably well to losing all its important NPCs. You can technically kill absolutely everyone, but Welles and Chairman Rockwell are effectively invincible right up until the end. In the good playthrough, Welles is always behind bulletproof glass when you meet him on his lab and rescuing him at the end is the last act of the game. The only way you can kill Welles is to side with Akande and then kill him in the final mission. You’ll meet Rockwell right before this and you can kill him if you like. You can kill Sofia Akande, however to do this, you will first have to side with her by grassing up Welles and then complete a few of her missions before you’re allowed to meet her in person. She’s also heavily guarded and surviving the subsequent fight with her guards is probably the hardest thing in the game. Interestingly, she has a lot more hit points here in her office than she does if you go up against her at the end when she’s kidnapped Welles. If you do kill Akande, then you have to go back to helping Welles, which is why I suspect most people won’t take this route. Chairman Rockwell then becomes the person who kidnaps Welles at the end. You can also kill companions if you like, although Pavarti is effectively invincible because she’s just so damn adorable that I found it physically impossible to take her out. Pavarti will be most people’s first companion and will be the angel on your shoulder throughout most of the game, her strong southern accent being all too reminiscent of Kaylee from Firefly. She’s voiced wonderfully by the excellent Ashley Burch who also did Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn and Chloe in Life is Strange. Each companion has their own companion mission, although Pavarti’s is by far the most prominent, being effectively stretched out for the vast majority of the game. Early on, Pavarti takes a bit of a liking to Junlei, an engineer aboard the Groundbreaker, and she requests your help putting together the perfect date. You travel the solar system to find just the right food, clothing, and even perfume, spending a small fortune while you’re at it, all to make things just right. Of course, Pavarti is overthinking things a bit. No good date will go wrong just because you don’t have Sweetheart Cakes or Chef Raymond’s special dustback casserole, but she does have her reasons for being anxious. Pavarti is asexual and her previous relationships have often come unstuck when the physical stuff comes into play. She’s understandably a little nervous. I must admit, it feels a little cliche to have an asexual character also be so sweet and innocent, the two things are often incorrectly correlated, but it’s tough not to root for Pavarti the entire way. When Junlei eventually came aboard the ship for the date, I popped along to have a little nosey and couldn’t help but smile when I saw that Pavarti had gotten dressed up in the fancy gear we bought on Byzantium, but left her engineering goggles on. I choose to believe this was deliberate and not an oversight on Obsidian’s part. There’s also quite a cool story behind Pavarti because the character was passed over to another writer at Obsidian before the work was finished. She was already established as asexual when the new writer took over and, while no one at Obsidian knew at the time, the new writer was actually asexual as well, and could therefore put a bit of herself into the story a bit. The second-best companion spot has some competition. Vicar Max is a former prisoner become, well, vicar, but he’s not as annoyingly preaching as that description might make you believe. I like his battle cries during combat, but his companion quest is a bit naff. You track down a book and then a translation of the book and it ends with a hallucination scene that doesn’t really make any sense, because you somehow see the hallucination that Max is seeing. I think. It’s not really clear. I generally hate hallucination stuff in games because it’s rarely clear what is supposed to be real and what is fake and what that actually means for the story and the world. Nyoka is an alcoholic who won’t join the crew until you get her some caffeine pills which she is seemingly addicted to. Her companion quest sees you hunting down mementos of her former crew who are either dead, or missing assumed dead. There is one annoying point where you have to go to Scylla specifically to hunt a bunch of beasts you’ve likely killed loads of times already, but otherwise it’s a good quest that ends with you laying her team to rest. SAM is a sanitation automechanical who doesn’t have a companion quest of his own, unless you count the quest to activate him in the first place. He’s great in a fight, especially because acid weapons are seemingly quite rare and he has a never-ending supply. While he doesn’t have much personality of his own, his mere presence brings out a lot from other members of the group such as Nyoka who not-so-subtly asks him about the alcohol content of his cleaning solution, and SAM seems to keep ADA amused on the ship in ways best left to the imagination. On the duff end of the spectrum we have Felix and Ellie. Felix’s only redeeming quality is that his special companion move is to dropkick enemies which looks brilliant. Otherwise, he’s boring and his companion quest results in an utterly predictable betrayal by a close friend. After trekking back and forth between planets, you can find evidence against Felix’s friend stashed a few feet away where he supposedly never found it. Ellie is the spoiled rich kid of a Byzantium couple who was educated in medicine before running off to be a pirate and have adventures. Her companion quest is basic as hell, just requiring you to pop in on a few people for conversations, although I must admit it raised a few smiles. Ellie requests that you pop in on her mum and dad who are even richer now than they were when she left. It turns out that Ellie’s parents pretended she had died after tripping and falling in a pair of twelve-inch heels and they’re still living off the insurance payouts. All you have to do to complete the quest is change the recipient of the insurance policy over to Ellie which is simple enough if you have strong speech skills or can pick up on the not-so-subtle hints about where to find the documentation. Still, I did like how the original lead to the insurance company led merely to a mailbox on Byzantium because the insurance company simply uses that address as its HQ for tax reasons while it does the work in Fallbrook. Ellie’s unfortunate accident even led to a new type of policy covering the risks posed by high heeled shoes. In addition to providing a helping hand in combat, which I’ll discuss shortly, companions also provide buffs to non-combat skills by offering up their own area of expertise. For example, Pavarti gave me a boost of 17 to engineering. Vicar Max buffs your hacking, and Ellie your medical knowledge. When you’re on the ship, you get collective boosts to all the skills, although to a lesser extent than you do out in the field. These buffs do not unlock the new abilities you get for every 20 skill points invested in one skill. I absolutely love this system. It’s great that I don’t have to specifically ask Vicar Max to hack a computer or have Pavarti in charge of the conversation just because there might be an engineering question. Being able to lean on their knowledge when required is excellent. Of course, this all adds to the problem of the game being too easy and makes it even more difficult to create a build that has actual limitations unless you play by yourself, but that’s more of a problem with the underlying system than this particular part of it. Oh, and to make things even easier, the amount of skill points you need for, say, persuasive conversation options, is reduced, along with the prices of items in shops, if the faction you’re dealing with likes you. They are more likely to like you if you have high charm. Every faction in the game liked me on my first playthrough except for Clive because I went out of my way to kill a bunch of his employees. I was even in the Board’s good graces until right at the end. Not everyone will have this experience, because like I said, it’s partly dependent on your charm, but it does add to the slightly toothless feel to the game. The companion skills, together with the generous skill system, means you may not initially notice how much variety the game offers when it comes to the ways in which you can solve quests. In this respect, The Outer Worlds really can feel more like a good immersive sim such as Deus Ex or Dishonored if you make the effort to look around a bit. On my first playthrough, it was far too common to pass the requisite skill check in a conversation and therefore not need to consider my options. Not only had I put a load of points into persuade, and therefore lie and intimidate by default, I also had the likes to Pavarti and Ellie around providing additional expertise. However, on the second playthrough, my dumb character wasn’t quite so fortunate, and as such, I had to look for other solutions and there were typically a lot. Hacking and lockpicking feature prominently as you might expect and stealing is generally fairly easy. I like the stealing system. Unlike some Bethesda games, stolen items aren’t automatically flagged as stolen, they’re just normal, and the rules for when you’ll get caught are fair. Maybe once or twice I was caught when I didn’t think I should have been, but the basic rule is that so long as no one has a line of sight on you, you can take what you like. Stealth is always an option. The guards are always on predetermined paths and even though you don’t have any tools to distract them, it’s rarely difficult to bide your time and sneak your way past. Actually, stealth can be a bit easy as well, and often doesn’t feel like stealth. The one major annoyance is that the whole hiding in knee high grass thing is a lot more annoying when you’re in first person and can’t clearly make out the edges. The game makes a little knowing joke at other games that think the height of disguise is putting on another uniform as if such a thing is ridiculous, but the alternative here is just bizarre. So long as you have the right keycard, a hologram will pop up around you and your companions whenever you enter a restricted zone. The hologram is on a timer that moves quicker if you’re acting suspiciously by running and jumping and the like. However, even if the timer expires and you are spotted, you aren’t recognized immediately and will be questioned. So long as you have even half-way decent speech skills, you will pass the check and the hologram timer will be back to full. You can do this three times and the entire thing resets if you so much as leave and area and then walk back in. The shroud also seems to be a little bugged because friendly people that you’ve already talked to will see through the disguise. For one mission you need to speak to the Minister of Earth who is in a highly guarded building. Getting in there is easy enough--you just need to get one of the guards drunk--but sneaking around inside the building is a bit tougher. However, the guard at the door tells you he’s expecting a delivery at which point the package depot appears on your map. It’s so much easier to walk the short distance, grab the package, and then head back to the mansion which you can now walk around without being stopped by the guards. There’s a bit of an inconsistency in this mission because the drunk guard doesn’t know what the Minister looks like which is one of the ways you’re able to trip him up during the conversation. The reason for this is supposed to be because the guard hasn’t actually started work yet, but the minister later mentions that everyone in the system knows his face because he’s effectively a PR mouthpiece. The Outer Worlds comes frustratingly close to immersive sim levels of freedom, but doesn’t quite go all in and the restrictions end up feeling frustrating. For example, you have very little mobility when it comes to jumping and climbing so vertical exploration is limited although not impossible. The slightly less obvious options are also exactly that; only slightly less obvious. Far too often there would be a locked door and a “secret” opening right next to it. Given the time take to unlock doors it was quite often quicker to use the stealth route regardless of your skills. There are also very few puzzles which is a shame because the ones that are here represent some of the only interesting pieces of exploration in the game. For example, there’s a quest that requires you to find a bunch of fun science weapons. The first couple are obvious, but the rest might see you buying a clue from a vendor and then searching for it when you’re in the nearby vicinity. You can, and probably will, still stumble upon them by accident because they aren’t all that well hidden. Then there are quests for missing engineering textbooks and the like that require you do dig out information hidden on terminals and journals, but these quests are very much the exception and not the rule. There was one instance with an email chain on a terminal where one person made it clear that they shouldn’t do that silly thing where they mention the passcode in a message and the other proposed that the passcode be based on personal information and then listed off a bunch of clues like the month of someone’s birthday, the number of security rotations per hour and the maximum volume of raptidon stomach acid a human can handle. You can find this information out by exploring which would be quite satisfying except they’ve helpfully included the answers to the question within the email. I suspect this was a late addition. Perhaps a couple of playtesters found this a step too far or the devs thought it was too monotonous, but I think it was a good idea. Another possibility is that the character had to be given the answer because there’s no way to enter data like passwords manually. Nor are there lockpicking or hacking minigames. It wouldn’t surprise me if this system was simplified at the last minute and someone went back to this terminal to add all the answers in as a fix. There’s definitely a little too much ham-fistedness when it comes to presenting options to the player. For example, one mission on Monarch has you breaking into Clive’s factory having been given an abundance of ways to sabotage his operations without shedding blood such as altering his financial records or sabotaging the cystypig food supply. This quest would have been a lot more satisfying if we hadn’t been told exactly how to achieve this beforehand. Why not just send the player into the factory without a clue what to expect and have them figure it out for themselves? Other NPCs have a tendency to way overshare personal information such as when you are trying to retrieve someone’s poster and the person who has it conveniently tells you where it is hidden or the insurance agent who tells you where the computer is in case you want to hack the records. I don’t want to sound overly snobby or like I’m trying to gatekeep, so I will say that I can certainly understand why Obsidian wouldn’t want to be too obtuse when it comes to putting roadblocks in the way of its main questlines. However, the optional stuff should be a great place to get creative and make players think a little more. Chances are, if a player has gone out of the way to find an NPC with a side quest, they will have the common sense to explore the same building and look for terminals or locked chests and the like. When it comes to these optional quests, I must admit, many of them are straight-up fetch quests. Some don’t even require you to leave the small region you start in and if you have a player with good speech skills, you can solve a fair few quests just by bouncing around between two NPCs for a bit until the situation is solved. These moments had me feeling like I was on autopilot a bit, although on balance I’m glad the easy speech options were available. Now, that said, I rarely found the side quests in The Outer Worlds to be a chore because the characters and writing are all entertaining enough that even completing simple tasks can be fun, but there definitely aren’t many worth talking about. My favorite was in Byzantium, where you can audition to be in a movie, but my protagonist wasn’t quite able to get in the spirit of things and ended up getting a “don’t call us, we’ll call you.” The movie script even had a bunch of not at all subtle product placement that I absolutely loved. It’s not always obvious which quests you should focus on either. There’s also a bunch of side quests you can do for a woman on the Groundbreaker which end with a big alien conspiracy and may seem like the sort of thing you can skip, but they end up bleeding into the story about the lack of food in the colony and the lifetime employment program. On balance though, despite some good quests, most of the optional content is fairly forgettable, if not almost copied and pasted from other games. For example, there’s a family of cannibals who invite you to dinner but actually want to eat you for dinner which wasn’t exactly original when it was included in Fallout 4 four years ago. It isn’t even the only time cannibalism is an issue within this game. Given the quality of Obsidian’s writing and its sense of humor, I was hoping for more silly, but memorable quests, when what we got was fairly ordinary. There’s also a quest where Ash asks you to find a keepsake that was important to his former crew, but it turns out he was never a part of the crew and was supposed to pick them up before bailing and leaving them to die. I don’t even know what game I recognize this from, but I must have seen it a few times before because I knew exactly how this was going to play out from the first conversation. You also stumble across a dead body and go on a murder hunt which solves itself way too easily. Again, it’s not a terrible quest, it just feels so familiar. A common theme with The Outer Worlds is that many parts of it start strong until fading out with a whimper and the pattern continues with the combat. You can choose between one or two handed melee, handguns, long guns, or heavy weapons, and there are three types of ammo: light, heavy, and energy. The energy cells are for weapons that do alternate types of damage such as shock, plasma, or acid. You need these weapons for the non-human enemies, so shock damage is effective against mechanicals for example, although it can also be fun to electrocute humans. Tactical time dilation slows time which lets you aim at particular body parts so you can cripple an enemy by shooting off their leg or blind them by shooting them in the face, which to be honest, is the least I would hope for in that situation. This mode also reveals enemy levels and how many hit points they have. TTD isn’t essential and I often went hours without using it. When it did, it was more because I was panicking and wanted an extra few seconds to collect my thoughts. Part of this was just the result of my build. I was good with long guns and therefore didn’t really need TTD to slow time and take my shot. When playing as a melee character, you have to get so close that it’s hard to miss their head. I would still cripple people occasionally by going for their legs, but just for laughs. TTD drains a lot quicker when you’re moving and shooting, but surprisingly it doesn’t drain quickly while reloading or using your medical inhaler, providing for good tactical use if you feel you need to. TTD was essential twice but in both cases, that’s because I was playing somewhat out of the ordinary. During my melee build, when I was killing a bunch of NPCs, I decided to kill Akande in her office, plus Zora and Graham of the Iconoclasts. They are all heavily guarded and the only way I could make it through these fights was to quickly whack everyone in the face right at the start of the fight to blind them and TTD helped with this a lot. Otherwise though, it’s just there for fun. I must admit, a lot of the joy I took from combat in those initial hours was in large part due to all the visual effects on screen. While I like to think of myself above such things as damage numbers appearing on hits, I am absolutely not, and gunfights can be a bit of a visual feast, with colorful backdrops and elemental damage thrown in for good measure. While there aren’t many guns, they do look and feel different, and if you’ve played a lot of RPGs with terrible combat, you will be pleased to hear that the combat here is at least servicable. It doesn’t get in the way or hinder your enjoyment. It just might not enhance it much either. Dodging felt satisfying early on when using it to evade enemies rushing in for melee attacks, however, it’s not reliable enough against monsters. Either they’re using projectiles that have seemingly massive hitboxes and are therefore almost impossible to avoid, or they’re rushing in and no amount of dodging will get you out of the way. I eventually gave up trying and just took the hits. Perhaps dodge is more effective once you’ve leveled up, but there was always somewhere better to dump the points. And then there’s the enemy AI which is pretty bad. They will occasionally run and go behind cover but that’s the best it gets. Even then, they tend to end up just standing there waiting for you to come and kill them, and this is distinct from the cowering by the way which is part of the persuade skill. Snipers are ridiculously unobservant and also take strange positions like walking up and down halls instead of taking position somewhere with a good view. No matter how flashy the gunfights may look, they are apparently completely soundless because guards just a few feet away will go about their business as if nothing has happened. You can have a gunfight in one room and enemies in the next room won’t notice it. I remember once taking out an entire building and was wondering around to get all the loot a few minutes later when I happened to stumble upon an enemy casually examining something on the floor. He’d been there the entire time. It’s not like the whole building needs to go on full alert at the first gunshot; however, enemies at a small campsite which is only fifty feet across should probably pick up on the commotion. You can also leave behind enemies at any door that requires a loading screen so there’s nothing to stop you running straight through a big mob and then getting to a door to avoid the subsequent chase. The lack of enemy variety is also a huge problem. The standard human enemies are marauders. They don’t belong to any particular group and are found wandering the world between cities. There are also corporate guards which are harder to take down but more likely to be avoided entirely because they tend to occupy buildings when your best bet is simply to stay out of sight. There are then a handful of beasts: raptidons, mantisaurs, primals, and canids. Obsidian does that Bethesda thing with enemies where the higher level tougher enemies are exactly the same as the ordinary ones except they have a new adjective in their name like the Mega Raptidon or the Primal Brute. And then there are a scattering of the automechanicals which are at least a little more interesting because their weakspots are the bright blue parts, which can be tricky to hit. It’s satisfying to take out a huge soldier in what is basically power armor by shooting out the weakspots at the knees. One type of automechanical has a weakspot in the middle that can be quite hard to hit with melee weapons mind you, although if you have a weapon that does shock damage you still won’t need to worry all that much. As with the guns, the gear sets are limited, only really giving the player the bare minimum of body armor and a helmet. There are no armor sets to speak of so you can’t hunt down cool pieces of gear to put together a six peice that comes with some cool buffs. In fact, you don’t really need to hunt down anything. You’re just as likely to find good armor and weapons on the main path as you are off it and your reward for going out of your way is rarely more than a bit of ammo and currency. You can apply mods to guns and gear and they do provide huge buffs, although I found myself adding some good ones early on and then ignoring them. While the mods are decent, their value as items you find in the wild is limited because of the lack of gear. Once you’ve applied mods to your gear, you’ll likely leave them in place until you get a new piece of gear that doesn’t have any mods. You don’t change gear that often, so you don’t need the mods. I’m not advocating for The Outer Worlds to become a full looter shooter or anything. I just want a basic reason to explore. It doesn’t even have to be with weapons. One of the junk types you can find and sell are tossball cards. This seems like prime material for a quest line but there’s nothing you can do with them except sell them for a pitiful amount of bits. There aren’t that many of them in the world, so they are relatively scarce and the reward isn’t close to worth it. How about instead of just labelling them as junk, the tossball cards could grant you one extra skill point. Just one. It wouldn’t be a lot in the grand scheme of things bearing in mind you get ten every time you level up and you can reach level 30. It would just be a small reward, like the magazines in Fallout 4. As it stands, the game is reluctant to put anything off the main path and all we really know about tossball is that it’s a big deal for two players to be found clean of performance-enhancing drugs. At least we have the science weapons such as the shrink ray, gloop gun, and mind control ray. This is one of the few areas where your build is important because having science knowledge makes these weapons a lot more useful. Otherwise, they do little damage and the enemies don’t stay tiny or mind-controlled for all that long. By the time you’ve pulled out another weapon to do serious damage, they are back to full size. One strange niggle is the decision to only display the base gear stats when you hover over it in the menus. I initially thought you had to equip the gear to see its true value to either you or the companion, and when I say initially, I mean for the entirety of my first playthrough, however, it turned out there was an option to turn this setting off in the menus. I’m just not sure why it was turned on by default. The UI overall is pretty bad come to think of it, with far too many clicks required to outfit yourself and your companions in the best gear. The weapons often have a bit of background as well if you hover over it although you’ll have a job to read it if you aren’t sitting close to the screen. The final piece of the combat puzzle involves companions. You can take two with you into the field and given how quickly you meet them, you’ll likely have two with you nearly the entire time unless you make a concerted effort to go it alone. Companions are outfitted with guns and armor of your choosing and they can handle themselves in combat. Assuming you have at least 20 skill points in inspiration you will also be able to activate companion abilities that are on short cooldown timers. The abilities pull the camera away from the action and snap to the companion for something appropriately flashy. The way it takes you out of the action is incredibly distracting and I wish there was a way to turn it off after you’ve seen it the first time. Occasionally, it was nice as a short rest from the action, like TTD, but more often than not it was a pain, especially because it’s hard to control the timing of these special abilities. In theory, it’s just the press of a button, except it’s rarely that simple. Even when the ability was ready to use, it often wouldn’t activate. At first, I assumed the companion was simply out of range. Pavarti’s attack is a melee attack so it makes sense that she would need to be up close and personal. Except she doesn’t need to be. The attack would often initiate when she was far from the enemy and she would just awkwardly warp over there. So I’m not sure exactly what determined when I could and couldn’t use these abilities. I ended up hammering the buttons until it worked. There are a lot of perks that buff companion abilities, reduce the cooldowns on their attacks, and even transfer some of their gear stats over to you. They are certainly useful, and I say that as someone who quite often plays as a lone wanderer in similar games. You have some control over companion behavior if you’re prepared to play around with the settings a bit. You can change AI behavior to be more passive and set it so that they only attack designated enemies and then stop once that enemy has been killed. I found this far more hassle than it was worth, at least on hard difficulty. Supernova difficulty is a little different because that’s when companions have permadeath and boy will you know about it. Supernova is The Outer Worlds’ hardest difficulty setting with the usual uptick in enemy HP and damage, however, it also comes with a bunch of extra restrictions that make it feel like a survival mode of sorts especially with the three additional meters for eating, drinking, and resting that must be kept topped up. You can only fast travel to your ship and any particularly bad injuries need to be cured by resting which you can only do in beds that you either own or have rented. The big one for me is the save restrictions. You can only manually save in the ship and autosaves are restricted. This last one is the worst part of supernova for me. With very few exceptions, I think restricting save points is about the least interesting way you can make a game more challenging. The implementation of it here also encourages some tedious behavior. You can save on the ship and that’s the only place you can fast travel to. So guess what? You’re probably going to keep fast traveling back to the ship to save which is hardly in the spirit of things. Also, the autosaves kick in right before you enter any area that requires a loading screen which means in places like Monarch which has a lot of separate areas, you can just keep going in and out of buildings or towns to generate saves. As for the other features, well again, the crippled limbs needing bed rest thing means you’re 2likely going to head back to your ship which you can do by fast traveling. The only drawback is needing to retrace your steps to get back to where you were which if you were deep in a building for a quest is going to be a big deal. For me, this just meant that any time I got seriously injured I booted up the last autosave. The eating and drinking requirements are interesting, especially as someone who enjoyed the equivalent settings in Fallout New Vegas, but here they never quite gelled. For starters, there’s no shortage of food and drink so it doesn’t add much to the experience other than a couple of extra steps. But even beyond that, this kind of micromanagement isn’t a good fit for a game where you have your own spaceship and are constantly bouncing between lots of different planets. While I think open worlds are often used more as a selling point than because they fit the story or game, I will admit that this kind of survival aspect is a much better fit for an open world, especially when we’re talking about science fiction. The Metro games are a good comparison. Even in Exodus, the open-world areas were relatively small and you moved between discrete regions, but the survival part worked because you were always fighting against the odds. Crucially, Arteum didn’t pop back to a luxury spaceship between missions. You’re not poor by any stretch and even though there is a food shortage in the story, this isn’t presented in the world. Compare this to Fallout where the world itself is your worst enemy and wants to kill you at every turn. Not only do you have to find food and drink, you have to make sure those sources are irradiated and of course you need to worry about radiation. The Outer Worlds has a few areas with toxic swamps, almost as a half-hearted callback to those Fallout games, but so long as you don’t skinny dip in the ponds of green goo you’ll be okay. And as for those companion deaths, they will happen frequently. It’s incredibly difficult to keep them alive if you also want them to be useful. Sure, you can do your best to keep them out of combat and have them act defensively, but where’s the fun in that? They might as well not be there which to be honest is probably the best approach. There is a perk that lets you effectively resuscitate companions by giving them extra health when you use your inhaler, but this is on a lengthy cooldown and you won’t get access to this perk for quite a few hours, at which point the hardest part is done. On supernova difficulty, I found a lone playthrough focusing on stealth and long guns to be the easiest way to play. Yes, you lose out on the companion benefits, but at least you aren’t constantly worrying about them in combat. With the right combination of skills and perks, you can do a hell of a lot of damage from positions of stealth and you don’t actually need to kill anyone at all. People have already completed no-kill playthroughs. I must admit though, the stealth really isn’t all that fun either. I never did complete my supernova playthrough, which was my third one, because it simply became boring. I’d already seen a lot of the stealth options such as hacking robots and releasing a bunch of prisoners to cause chaos and I wasn’t getting anything new from the experience. This goes back to the unfortunate lack of interesting builds. So what does supernova offer? Well, mainly a lot of inconvenience for the small added benefit of some slightly harder enemies. Really, the whole of the supernova difficulty needs a rework so that those added restrictions are actually interesting. However, there’s a much easier solution. The difficulties just need renaming. Story mode can stay the same. Normal should be renamed to easy and hard should be renamed to normal. Take the enemy HP and damage from supernova and make that the hard mode. Supernova is then the same difficulty as hard in terms of enemy challenge, but with all the new restrictions in place. It’s crazy how rarely The Outer Worlds presented any challenge. I went back through my notes and found a couple of encounters early on that I couldn’t beat but that’s because I was trying to do them way too early, such as the marauder camps that you can encounter before even entering Edgewater. A couple of animal packs also presented a challenge such as the mantiqueens on the way to Devil’s Peak although you can actually avoid these by taking a route through the caverns that Nyota points out. When I initially went up against them, I was shockingly low on ammo and had the wrong types of guns for the encounter so I went back to town and resupplied. It was still a challenging fight though, so I opted for the cavern route. The invasion of the prison at the end of the game would have probably been tough had I not helped out loads of other factions. They all pop up at various stages to help you out which I thought was really cool. Then there was the final boss against a massive robot and three swarms of helpers that appear during various phases. I died a lot here and it’s not a fight I’d want to do again in a hurry. Your companions are really helpful here because their special abilities typically stun the enemy which presents one of the only times you will get free aim at the weakspot. Unfortunately, I could never keep them alive all that often. Playing on normal with a melee character, and missing out on a lot of quests because of my attitude, there wasn’t a challenge at all unless I went out of my way to be silly like charging head-on into packs of beasts I wasn’t prepared to face or killed important NPCs like Sophia early on when she was surrounded by guards that look straight out of Emperor Palpatine’s throne room. I haven’t even mentioned the potential to create powerful concoctions in your inhaler because I’m not entirely sure when you’d need to use them, outside of that final boss battle perhaps. You start with a standard inhaler that delivers a quick dose of healing, but depending on your medicine skill, you can also add in various other drugs and even alcohol and raptidon meat if you so desire, to get added benefits such as quicker health regeneration and more TTD. The game’s lack of difficulty makes this feature redundant and the medicine skill is a bit of a dump stat. Visually, I like how the game looks, although I do wish there was a little more variety. Three of the major locations are all on Terra 2 so understandably they all look similar, but there’s no reason Monarch has to be the same. Scylla is the only location that really stands out as being different and it’s effectively just a bland asteroid. All the bright colors certainly give The Outer Worlds a style of its own although Obsidian could have done with toning down the chromatic aberration a bit. There’s no separate slider for chromatic aberration in the settings, so if you do want to turn it down, you’ll have to adjust other screen effects as well which are all lumped together. One thing Obsidian really nailed was the introduction to each new area which was always done in the most scenic way possible. There’s the moment Edgewater comes into view, the first time you see the bustling merchant region onboard Groundbreaker, and the epic skyscrapers of Byzantium. There are certainly some lovely views. I was a little disappointed with the NPC character models because they all look much the same. Everyone has the same body shape and seems to be roughly the same age. For bodyshape, you could argue that since everyone is on a strict diet, there wouldn’t be overweight people but that’s a bit of a stretch. At least on Byzantium, you’d expect to see a few slightly rotund people. Haircuts might all be short by corporate mandate I guess. The female NPCs are especially generic, especially the faces. By complete coincidence, I created a character who looked incredibly similar to Nyota, but everyone has that similar facial structure and a general lack of any distinguishing features. The world ends up feeling a little less lived-in and there were so few old people that when you do meet one they really stand out. There are also no children, presumably because you’d be able to kill them. As we’ve seen, Obsidian played it too safe with The Outer Worlds and the end product lacks a little spark as a result. One of the areas where it did try something new was in the flaw system. During the game, if you do certain activities too much, you will be offered the chance to accept a flaw that lowers your attributes in certain situations in exchange for a perk point. My first encounter with the flaw system was excellent and everything I had hoped it would be. You see, I had a tendency to take a lot of fall damage. Partly that’s not my fault; you do take a lot of fall damage from fairly limited heights. But I didn’t exactly use an abundance of caution either and because I had passive health regeneration, it rarely mattered if I took a bit of damage, especially aboard places like the Groundbreaker where there are few enemies. After one fall too many, I was offered the flaw Acrophbia. Basically, a fear of heights. Whenever I was up high, a couple of my stats would be reduced. I took this flaw, firstly because it didn’t seem that punishing. While I liked exploring vertically, I often didn’t do much while up high other than look for ways around. However, it also seemed appropriate as part of my roleplaying. If you fall and injure yourself a lot, it’s only reasonable that you develop a fear of heights. It’s not a necessary requirement of course. I’m terrified of heights and I’ve never had any significant falls. I’m just a coward. But anyway, it made sense. There’s also a flaw for drug addiction if you use too many chemicals in the inhaler. Unfortunately, far too many of the flaws were both overly punishing and kind of inappropriate. For example, there are flaws simply related to your constant encounters with beasts or automechanicals. This felt a bit cheap because it comes up while simply playing the game normally. Whereas my previous exploration and the subsequent falls had been optional, getting into fights is the standard way to play. Second, while I suspect the flaws are related to damage taken, I found they had a tendency to pop up at the end of encounters, so I would beat a huge hoard of robots and suddenly the game says, “hey, we think you’re probably scared of robots now,” whereas in actuality, I’d just beaten them fairly easily. If anything, I would have less fear of them. Finally, the punishment is far bigger than the reward in these cases. Accepting a flaw against enemies, and robots in particular given that final boss fight, puts you at a huge disadvantage and the reward, a simple perk point, is nowhere near enough to make this tempting given how mediocre the perks are. I know that accepting the flaws here would have made the game a bit harder, but it’s not exactly all that interesting. These could have been a bit more fun. How about instead of reducing damage dealt to robots, your character suffers from a shaky aim when they are close, or randomly throw up during encounters? Credit must go to Obsidian for producing such a relatively bug-free product. The only major issue I had was when I needed to talk to Pavarti on the ship about her date when for some reason the quest popped up as failed during a conversation with one of my other crew members. Except I was able to have the conversations about the date with Pavarti, the quest was just officially dead. I had to load an old save to solve the issue. I also noticed a few times when I would get ahead of a quest and the game wouldn’t quite know what to do. For example, I found a dead medic and the game told me to go and speak to her surviving crew and placed a waypoint on the map even though I hadn’t met them yet and didn’t know they were looking for the medic. On the plus side, there are lovely little touches like how your cabin gets decorated with mementos from your adventure and how your companions’ voices are muffled if they happen to be wearing the big moon helmets. Not a big deal obviously, but enough to endear you to the experience if you’re already having a good time. My videos always end up being incredibly critical. It’s a personal weakness that I find it much easier to talk about things that I don’t think were done right and mention how I’d like to see them improved than to point out what works and why. However, there is a difference between taking apart a game because of all the ways in which it is bad verses banging on about all the ways in which it could be better, and The Outer Worlds fits firmly in the latter. Obsidian fell short in nearly every major area and yet just because something falls short doesn’t mean it’s not also a lot of fun. Contrast that to recent Fallout entries which are often just flat out broken or not at all what I’m looking for. Fallout 4 didn’t need to tweak its story; it needed to reinvent its entire approach to storytelling. I’ve seen The Outer Worlds described as a breath of fresh air, and it’s an apt description. When we think of palette cleansing games, we often think of mindless shooters like Call of Duty or some fun little indie titles that can be played between big releases. We rarely think of RPGs because they generally require a lot more effort to get invested and those that don’t are generally worse off because of it. The Outer Worlds is the rare RPG that can work as a fun palette cleanser. Some light relief between titles that demand more of your time and attention. This isn’t meant as a criticism as such; it just so happens that when it comes to distinguishing between games that are really good and those that are great, I do tend to rate the deeper, longer-lasting experiences more highly. There’s nothing wrong with a really good game though. The best thing about short games is that they don’t outstay their welcomes and I’m already up for more. Fortunately, The Outer Worlds also has a lot of sequel potential beyond that light cliffhanger about Earth going dark. I’d love to see Obsidian explore more colonies each with different themes backing them up in a similar way to Fallout’s vault experiments. Alright, that’s it from me today. If you enjoyed the video, please hit like, subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already, and consider sharing it to the appropriate places. I have a patreon where you can get your name in the credits and a Patreon role in my Discord server for just a dollar a month. The discord server is open to all and it’s fairly active, so come check it out. The next major video will likely be on The Outer Wilds, although I do have a couple of smaller ones in mind as well. Okay, until next time. Cheers.

Channel: Chris Davis

Views: 309,037

Keywords: the outer worlds, outer worlds, outer worlds review, the outer worlds review, the outer worlds critique, the outer world analysis, the outer worlds story discussion, the outer worlds story explanation, the outer worlds story spoilers, outer worlds story, the outer worlds in depth review, outer worlds character creation, outer worlds ending, outer worlds ending discussion, obsidian, fallout, fallout new vegas

Id: W_Tnz17r_KI

Length: 97min 8sec (5828 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 21 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Ildiad_1940]

Well, that was kind of the intention, and they said from the beginning that this would not be a huge open world game like New Vegas. They also brought on the original Fallout creators.

[u/revlayle]

Yup, Fallout 1 was a relatively short game - but really fun

[u/Sardaman]

*More like KOTOR than New Vegas

[u/rubberduckgillespie]

Well hopefully it's just the first installment of a new series of games and we'll all be able to play space cowboy/cowgirl for many years to come!

[u/DisgustingNekbeard69]

Yea. After the initial loves where off its pretty shallow. Bummer. Was amazing for a few hours.

[u/AneriphtoKubos]

I’d say it’s more about KoTOR except no Star Wars

[u/alkanens]

This is borderlands, not close to fallout