[Spoilers] 'The Outer Worlds' Review: Not Exceptional But a Lot of Fun.
- Mathew Hunter
- Oct 4, 2021
- 9 min read
Updated: Dec 5, 2021
With the announcement of The Outer Worlds 2, let's take a look back at Obsidian's much loved orginal, The Outer Worlds.
The Outer Worlds (2019), developed by Obsidian Entertainment of Fallout: New Vegas (2010) fame, was released to much applause: selling two million copies in the first fifteen weeks and over four million copies sold as of today and receiving many overwhelmingly positive reviews from Gamespot and Game Informer. My opinion of the game echoes those above but I believe the game has some prominant problems that need airing.
Plot
The Outer Worlds’ Halcyon system is a solar system of colonised planets, each one of them filled with terrifying alien creatures and each ruled over by a series of corporations that make up the Board. The scientist, and would be saviour of Halcyon, Phineas Wells boards The Hope, a lost ark containing all the brightest minds frozen in cryostasis , and defrosts your character to aid him in setting the rest of the colonists free and saving the colony from corporate rule. In your journey you'll meet factions that you can either befriend or destory, as the game uses a reputation system, and explore strange and wacky places in the sci-fi frontier.
Similar to the Borderlands series, the game is filled with lots of funny and over the top satires of corporation’s advertisements and the cult like followings that companies generate. The game makes a point of presenting these corporations as ridiculously greedy and cruel by making one of the first side quests about helping a gravedigger collect payments from people to build and upkeep their graves. Yes, in this world not even death is free. In addition, every loading screen (of which you see a lot off) and wall in every settlement have massive corporation adverts, advertising ridiculous and grotesque products that must seem appealing to the settlers of these terrifying worlds.
My favourite example of this exploration of corperate nature is the Spacer’s Choice trader Martin Callahan, who, when you press him to talk freely, reveals that he is contractually required to wear a Spacer’s Choice mascot helmet for the rest of his life. This is a factious presentation of the corporate world and does provide some levity in between the RPG fetch quest and the like.
But through the game's over the top satire it fails to carry a subtly that makes the world believable and thus it fails to make its world more believable and pack a greater punch. As Eurogamer's Edwin Evans-Thirlwell stated 'the satire is more often cute than cutting. The game tries sporadically to explore the question of a corporate-run dystopia in earnest[...] But much of the time, the portrayal is too reliant on clichés.' I would largely agree. The satire feels very surface level and beyond the comedic value it provides there's little to sink your teeth into, similar to the childish and gratuitous satire of GTA V (2013).
The First Hour
The Outer Worlds opens somewhat unlike other RPGS. You're not just some random person sent out into the huge expanse of the world, like you are in Skyrim. You're a functioning character in the world than a blank slate, you're are someone who has strong ties to the plot from the get-go; whereas in Skyrim, although you're a chosen one, the actual character you play as has little connection to the world around them. I think The Outer Worlds creates a much stronger opening and more interesting premise for entering this world through this more plot-orintated opening.
After the character creation, which I can assure you is expansive and detailed, the game takes no time in getting you on your way. There’s a directness in the action of the plot, going from The Hope to a planet, learning the combat system and gaining a ship, while feeding you enough story information and dialogue options (it’s an RPG after all) to make sure you’re not getting lost and confused.
The opening area is a microcosm of the game’s combat and gameplay features. You’re given the option of playing loud or stealthy and get the experiment with what works for you on the easy marauder enemies nearby. And you get a little example of how the quests in the game will play out, being given the option to request or deny help from some local authorities, and choosing if you want to lie, intimidate, persuade, or attack them when they get angsty. But there is little large story beats in this first hour aprt from you aquring a ship from the unlucky Captain Alex Hawthorne. And from there your journey into the Halcyon begins.
Gameplay
The Outer Worlds offers an enjoyable yet limited range of interesting gameplay options.
I chose a sneak sniper build which put me at a disadvantage in the beginning areas but slowly progressed until I was, to put it lightly, a one hit killing God of the unnoticed kill. The game involves all the rudimentary combat mechanics you might expect, such as weapon degradation, upgrades and moding and a whole array of various stats on each weapon to either confuse or entice you depending on how much reading you want to do. The game also includes a 'flaws' mechanic where you can ascribe character flaws to yourself for perk points, which is an interesting addition to traditional RPG mechanics although I did not play with the system myself.
The combat is floaty and easy to get to grips with, using a system of dodges to add movement and variety to the encounters, and a TTD (Tactical Time Dilation) system to combat Fallout’s V.A.T.S system. TTD added really useful combat advantages, giving you options of how to tackle a group of enemies and the chance to create very fun slow motion action sequences. However, the combat is limited to these features and because of that it became very samey very quickly. Not only that, due to there being far more animal encounters than human encounters which are not as enjoyable, combat encounters got very samey, and very dull, very quickly.
The game also has a stealth mechanic where you can take on a holographic disguise in restricted areas. However, these stealth moments are few and far between and went largely unused in the game even though I was playing a stealth based playthrough as they only appear in main quests. If the mechanic was able to be used at any time in game it would have gotten a better airing.
Onto the HUD. The menus took a little while to understand. I got many icons on my HUD during gameplay and when I went to check them in the menus, I found little to no explanation as to what they were or what was going on. Even now after finishing the game is still have no idea what the little gun icon at the bottom of my screen meant. Other than that, they were ok to get a grip with after a few hours, and thankfully had very little confusing stats or text overlays on each menu screen.
The biggest issue I had with the gameplay however were the locations and the fast travel system. Each location that you visit is a self-contained little open world map and because of this self-containment the locations felt very empty and lacking certain qualities that would have made each area memorable. They were, like the combat, very samey experiences with very similar designs and environments. I understand why this was done, to not have a massive map that stretched the games designs very thin, and to keep in line with the game’s planet hopping plot, but more interesting environments would have been desirable. And from the planet hopping plot, another issue is borne: the fast travelling. Many quests in the game need you to go between many different locations and planets and to do this means you have to go to your ship’s landing pad, wait, enter the ship, wait, select the planet to go to, wait, land, wait, and then wait even more when you fast travel to turn in a fetch quest, and all that means a LOT of time waiting in loading screens. Nearing the end of the game I must have spent more time in loading screens than the game itself.
Like many RPGs before it, The Outer Worlds includes many companions. The companions are: Ellie, a wisecracking loner Medic, Felix, the hot-headed youth, Parvati, a nervous engineer with a good heart, Vicar Max, a priest with a dubious past, Nyoka, a gun loving, beer drinking, belching hunter, and SAM, a vicious cleaner bot and worlds best boy.
Very similar to any other RPG, on normal difficulty the companions cannot die, they give you perk boosts and have loyality missions. This is a mechanic that encourages little enthusiasm in me. The companion’s system has never really enthralled me in games like Skyrim and Fallout. There’s a similar story going on in The Outer Worlds, but it did entice me a little.
I spent most of the game playing alone but when I did play with companions, I enjoyed their dialogue and reactions to events. They will give interesting and varied responses, some quite hard hitting when you disappoint them, and, very endearingly, they’ll speak to each other in funny and interesting ways if you travel with two of them. I found myself trying to match every pair together to get the best interactions, my favourite being Parvati mothering the lovable cleaning robot SAM.
Spoilers Ahead
The Outer Worlds has a very big issue near the end of the game however. The final act sees you being forced into destroying the town of Edgewater and its inhabitants in service of the Board’s misguided attempt to save resources. The game presents this mission as an unavoidable act and gives you a yes or no answer when accepting the quest. Say no and you get immediately attacked, and probably killed, by the Board guards so you have to say yes. The game sees this response as you enthusiastically wanting to kill a town of civilians, regardless of your coerced decision. The companions think you whole heartily want to do this too, leading to a very sad telling off I got from Felix. There is no option, as far as I could find, to finish the mission without killing the innocents. So, for a game that sells itself on narrative choice it's jarring of it to force you into this situation. I understand the game wanted to force you into a morally dark situation for the sake of drama, but this was done in a way that is so glaringly against how all the other quests in the game worked that it was out of place and frankly annoying. The only way to avoid doing this heinous crime is to either ignore the mission entirely or to kill the Board members, botching the mission, which is what I did. I would have preferred a cleaner ending to the mission though given the pathos that was set up in the many hours of gameplay.
The Outer Worlds tries to do a The Last of Us style morally dark situation, but the mechanics and storytelling mechanics just fail it in this regard. The Outer Worlds suffers from poor narrative construction making a story that doesn’t function within the world and mechanics it previously set up.
A Game Break
The final act wasn't the only time The Outer Worlds ticked me off though. When finishing the mission ‘The Chimerist’s Last Experiment’ which tasks you with tracking down a scientist working for the Board, the game, depending on your choices, will make the Board guards in the room aggressive and force you to shoot your way out. This results in your reputation with the Board plummeting so low that all Board guards will shoot you on sight. This is a problem for you immediately as the mission culminates in Board guard central Byzantium but its also a much larger problem as it can fully block off massive parts of the game. You see, most missions here on out are given by members of the Board and they will attack you on sight after this mission so even getting a mission from them becomes an impossibility. This happened to me right upon entering Byzantium for the first time and meant that all missions there, main story, and side quest alike, became unavailable. And with no quick saves or manual saves to save me I was stuck. Thankfully, after some research, I found out that after finishing the story quest ‘The City and the Stars’ I could reset my reputation with the Board back to zero, and letting me do the side quests i wanted to do, but this meant doing an entire mission without being seen, in the most populated map in the whole game.
A few hours later and thankfully I managed to finish this main story quest and reset my reputation. Although quite a unique and somewhat enjoyable experience that threw me back into a difficult area after my accession to RPG God like status, I can't help but feel sorry for those poor players who experienced the same game breaking quest with no chance of escaping it. This was just my experience and I know that similar things can happen with any of the factions. I understand the game wants to create a world where your actions have consequences, but if this consequence literally blocks off huge chunks of the game then that doesn’t seem fair. The game is literally blocking content that you paid for. The Outer Worlds is enjoyable but this bad game design puts it further down in my own estimations.
Verdict
The Outer Worlds is a great source of enjoyment for all those Sci-Fi fans. It scratches the itch of those who loved Fallout: New Vegas and serves as an interesting and funny way to sink your free time. If the story beats were more thought out and the mechanics all worked together without issue, this would be up there on my list of the best RPGs I’ve ever played but it isn't anything genre defining or exceptional. I'll probably pick up the sequel a few months after launch but its not on my wish list. Recommend if you want something to sink lots of hours into.
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