I played the Steam version of the base game, with no DLC. I did not play the Spacer’s Choice “remaster” as it has a reputation for being broken and poorly put together. I played the game to completion on normal difficulty, completing most of the side quests, spending time with all my companions, and trying to get the most out of one playthough.
The game begins as a derelict colony ship called the Hope has just reached the Halcyon system, the setting of the game. The system had already been settled years earlier by a sister colony ship, but due to setbacks the Hope was decades behind schedule and presumed lost by the colony. The original ship apparently contained too many middle managers for its own good, as the human colonies have become the fiefdoms of various corporations who can’t think beyond short terms profits. The appearance of the Hope, containing thousands of frozen scientists and engineers could provide a boost in the chances of human success (assuming a way to bring everyone out of stasis without killing them is found), but the corporations don’t know how to handle the novel situation. A rogue scientist unwilling to sit back breaches the corporate blockade and manages to grab one frozen passenger from the Hope before fleeing. The player is of course, that lucky person who is freed. Already the game’s conceit of a person chosen at random from among thousands lends itself to a wide variety of character types. While the overall goal of the game is to help the rest of the people left behind on the Hope, it doesn’t railroad the disposition, background, or personal goals of a character in the same way that for example, a parent looking for a child might.
I made a character that had high speech and engineering skills, as I wanted to take advantage of as many unique solutions to problems as I could. That turned out to be the right decision. The game has many skill checks for medical, engineering, perception, and other character traits to allow alternatives to violence. I always appreciate having dialog or skill options open to me.
What I found while playing was that combat was easy to the point of tedium. The Unreal engine and the excellent animations of the guns made the gunplay itself feel well enough, but the enemies were uninteresting both in variety and in tactics. For a short time, I increased the difficulty, but that did not solve the issue of enemies being boring, it only made the boring combat last longer, so I continued the game on normal difficulty. A large variety of feral beasts which I never really changed up tactics against, and then a smattering of bandits and corporate guards, which might occasionally require taking cover as they enclosed on me while firing, but never did anything more made up the bulk of combat. The game lacks throwable grenades, which is small but once noticed feels like a strange omission. Projectile weapons are fed with either light or heavy ammunition. This may have been done to ensure players can use a variety of weapons, but in practice I found that it made me just use whatever had the highest damage per second. When pistols, shotguns, and miniguns all share the same ammo pool I don’t feel the need to switch between them. The lack of ammunition variety is contrasted with the bewildering amount of aid items. By the end of the game my inventory was filled to the brim with variation upon variation of aid item. All all of these items could only be used by assigning them as addition effects to my health recharging inhaler. For some reason I could inhale aerosolized meat and alcohol but I couldn’t just eat or drink it.
Companions in the game are fantastic characters and I had a lot of fun listening to their banter. Once again however, strange design choices cropped up. In battle, every companion has their own special attack. I couldn’t tell the companions to do these attacks on their own, but had to specifically order it every time which felt like too much micromanaging. When the attack happens there is a mini-cutscene. It was really fun…the first time I saw it. Then I realized that every single time the companion did the attack I had to watch the cutscene, disrupting the flow of combat. Turning off the cinematic camera doesn’t stop this. I got to the point where I just stopped having companions do their special attacks.
In similarly bizarre fashion, companion quests forced me to travel across multiple planets for every quest. For some like Vicor Max’s pursuit of religious truth, this felt appropriate as it was a long term kind of goal. However for another companion I had to get her ready for a date, requiring me to traverse two planets and a space station. The interactions were cute, but the setup was tiresome. The same quest could have all been condensed into running around one of the hubs instead of three, and been better for it.
What makes the game stand out is the tremendously well realized setting. There is a strong vision of a Gilded Age aesthetic and corporatist tone, which is combined with space opera trappings. There is a pessimism infused into the world in everything from low level workers tiredly reciting company jingles upon meeting me, to the slowly dawning realization about why diet toothpaste is so important. The game manages to play absolutely absurdity with a straight face, in a way where it all manages to come together. In many RPGs I find myself wondering how a quest hub settlement manages to survive without imploding. The Outer Worlds has thought about my questions and answers them, though often the answer is that the settlement is imploding.
While the game was often advertised as a followup to Fallout New Vegas, in truth it has different DNA. The lead writer and co-director, Leonard Boyarsky didn’t work on New Vegas, but was a designer on the first Fallout, and later wrote the main story of Fallout 2. The other half of the co-directing duo on the Outer Worlds was Tim Cain, who similarly had no hand in New Vegas, but had been the lead on the original Fallout. If you are familiar with the sensibilities of these two, the similarities to the tone of the original Fallout come into focus. The differences between the Boyarsky/Cain writing and New Vegas are subtle but unmistakable. While the writers of New Vegas probably would reject the idea of a vendor wearing a giant mascot head as too silly and the writers of Fallout 3&4 would lean into it being extremely silly, The Outer Worlds presents the corporate mascot and then shows that the man under the mask is suffering as part of his company mandated role. A blend of wacky and dark, of outrageous with thought out.
If you want a pared back but well written adventure in space, and you don’t mind putting up with a bit of ho-hum combat, this game is for you. It doesn’t having the sprawling width of Fallout 4 or Starfield, but it has a vision that it does everything in it’s power to realize.
Also posted this on my blog. (I have other stuff too!)
The Outer Worlds has always struck me as something of an underrated game. I certainly liked it enough to play through it three times; once just the base game and two more times with the DLCs. I do agree that one of the highlights of the game are the companions. They were all unique and it was fun to pair up different companions and listen to their banter. Well, except for the robot who had fairly a limited set of lines.
I will say the DLCs added a lot to the game. I recall being mildly disappointed in how brief the base game was but after adding the DLCs it felt a lot more fleshed out. Not quite like a Fallout game, but enough to satiate.
Yeah the DLCs made it feel like a full game. The base was a fun proof of concept, the the DLC fleshes that out. Both made me excited to see what version 2 with more time and funding could accomplish.
I hope they build on the more unique systems like the Holographic Shroud and give those systems more opportunities to shine.
While the ending slides were mostly nothing special, I did actually audibly laugh when the SAM’s ending slide was an advertisement.
I’ve always loved this game and been surprised by the negativity most users have towards it. The writing is excellent, the world is well realized, and it’s the only game I’ve played in a long time that actually lets me kill whoever I want, and continues the story around those decisions. New Vegas did it, and Baldurs Gate 3 recently, but it’s sadly an exceedingly rare thing.
I also loved how all skills could impact dialogue, again similarly to New Vegas. It made every skill worthwhile, and made exchanges with npc’s feel more unique to your character. It’s once again one of the only games where skills like speech or barter actually feel worth it, and is the only game I’ve ever played, outside of New Vegas, where you can simply talk your way through the final boss fight.
I get that it’s not for everyone, especially not if you’re looking for a Bethesda open world game, but it’s a great linear RPG that imo is very underrated.
It’s once again one of the only games where skills like speech or barter actually feel worth it
I think the Fallout games doing it still makes it “one of the only games”.
Damn I wish modern Fallout took more inspiration from the originals.
I also chat my way through the Outer Worlds. You could easily beat the game with just high speech checks. Although with the final boss, my speech check wasn’t high enough.
Honestly I found beating Rockwell with speech to be underwhelming.
Give up.
No.
Give up!
Ok.
It was a big step down from the Master in Fallout 1 which could be beaten with dialog, but only if the player had prepared with enough evidence to convince the Master of the argument the player was making.
I did find the battle against the RAM to be one of the best of the game, only because it was the only battle with a shield equipped enemy. That made me mildly have to think about what I was doing. Not the most inventive factor ever, but compared to the rest of the enemies it stood out.
I really wanted to like this one. On paper it sounds like exactly my jam, but it just didn’t grab me. The whole game felt tedious. Mediocre combat, very little weapon variety (just different tiers of the same kind of gun). Finicky and overcomplicated skill system that still somehow didn’t feel like it made any impact on core gameplay, and I found the humour kind of simultaneously weak and overdone. The satire is heavy-handed, and the wackiness falls flat. I haven’t enjoyed a fallout game since 3 either though, so maybe my taste has changed without me realising.
The issue I think is that every single thing is setup for some punchline. The world isn’t taken seriously. It’s all a basis for a joke. Fallout NV was taken seriously. It had humor, but the world felt consistent and well thought out. That’s why it works, and it’s also why the humor hits better. If everything is a joke then almost nothing is funny.
This line from New Vegas is my favorite line from any game in the series.
So hilarious given the additional context and dialogue in the game.
Yeah, that one is great in FONV. In The Outer Worlds literally every conversation is like this one though. It works well as one character, but not when it’s everyone.
Yeah, I think you got it. The humour in Fallout is subtle, it’s satire. OW borders on farce.
You say you stopped at FO3. Have you tried FNV?
I always preferred the story of 3, but the gameplay of NV had quality of life improvements and way better gun-play.
I’d definitely recommend giving it a shot if you haven’t.
No, I said I haven’t enjoyed one since 3. I tried NV because I really wanted more FO3, and I’ve seen enough videos to get why people like it, but I just didn’t. The crafting system and changes to combat mechanics felt too complicated at the time. Like, I had to go gather three different materials to build the ammo just to break one guy’s tank. I didn’t have any issue with the plot or writing, it just felt like busywork. Likewise with FO4, it’s a mile wide but an inch deep. There’s a ton of stuff to do, but very little reason to care about it. Like, yeah, some asshole stole my kid but I’m just gonna go spend however many hours building out this gas station. FO3 just felt like the perfect balance between grindy RPG mechanics and plot driven missions.
I have the same issue with a lot of modern RPGs. Like in Cyberpunk 2077 there’s all this narrative pressure because you’re dying and it seems like that should be an urgent problem to solve, but the only way to get the “best” ending is to spend as much time as possible doing unrelated sidequests and levelling up. FO3 just felt like there was always a reason you were doing what you were doing.
I 100% agree with you. I was downvoted a lot of times years ago saying about as much on reddit. I like the iron-sights and some mechanics of NV that 3 didn’t have, but the storyline in 3 was so much better.
In 3, there was a tremendous core story that you played a pivotal role in and had a grand sense of purpose. But in NV, you’re just a random courrier doing random tasks and just kinda meandering around for “revenge” which comes and goes pretty anticlimacticly. And then you get to decide which factions to support in a battle that’s going to happen regardless.
In NV, it feels more like the player character is a side-character in the main story’s plot. In Fallout 3, you were the main plot.
You hit the nail on the head for me. I tried to like this game, but it felt lackluster time and again. And I enjoyed Fallout NV and to a lesser degree 4. Outer Worlds just did not do it for me.
This game has the best asexual representation I’ve ever seen
I found the corporate greed jokes overdone and the humor and commentary very shallow. The skill progression was boring (just numerical stat increases mostly), itemization basically nonexistent (just one overall outfit armor slot, also with minor stat increases?) and the combat was tedious. Maybe the story gets better later but I wasn’t a fan of the overall lore or the way dialogue choices were written either.
I really wanted to like it since usually I’m a sucker for “own a spaceship and explore the world with your crew” stories and games but I bounced off OW so hard. Glad to hear other people had more fun with it but it’s definitely not for everyone.
I found the 1919 Union worker aesthetic amazing. So much better than the 1950s Cold War capitalism Fallout shit.
The anti capitalism jokes are just as relevant and funny today as they were back than.
The anti capitalism jokes are just as relevant and funny today as they were back than
I agree they are just as relevant today, probably even more so, however I didn’t find them that funny since they are just making the same “joke” all the time. They don’t really say anything or go deeper into the situation beyond “haha corpos are cartoonishly evil”, over and over and over again, there was no nuance and I expected more out of an obsidian game. It’s all just a themepark with throwaway jokes.
Again, maybe it gets better later and I didn’t get there, I only visited one or 2 planets after the first one and I couldn’t stand it anymore so I never finished it.
Heard the same from my partner. She loves Mass Effect, Starfield, liked Elite:Dangerous and No Man’s Sky for a while and, ironically, Outer Wilds is her favourite game now. Outer Worlds didn’t click.
I was so immensely bored playing OW, I just remember something about space gorillas on a moon being my walking away point. I also could be misremembering, that game didn’t stick very well.
I struggled with The Outer Worlds’ really ham fisted centrism. While it’s been awhile, I remember the best result on every major planet was to find compromise between the two factions. It’s done so clumsily that it makes none of the factions feel authentic in any way.
I agree with this, and it contributed to my losing interest. I also found the gameplay way too stale and stopped playing when I was almost done with the 3rd world.
I didn’t feel invested in or care about any of the companions or their story arcs either. They didn’t feel relatable or like real people.
I had high hopes for the Outer Worlds, but it just felt generic and boring to me. It felt like a cross between Fallout New Vegas and Borderlands, but without the charm of either franchise.
Loved this game, the focus on a more linear story was a good idea. The companions were great, the side quests were great, the combat was mediocre but it was salvageable, and the environments looked pretty unique. Overall a good game if you go in not expecting it to be the best scifi game ever made and just want a really well crafted RPG.
Reading through this and the other comments made me remember how much I think the New Vegas Team really would do better just working off of Bethesda’s engines. Bethesda tends to do weak storytelling, where Obsidian struggled with a bunch of things in the Outer Worlds.
I would love if they did a “Starfield: New Vegas” and fill in each others weaknesses.
I’m still not sure why The Outer Worlds is thought of as the same team as New Vegas. It had different leads and writers. The marketing for the game heavily pushed the connection because of Obsidian, but the individuals (at least the ones most important in steering the game development) involved are different.
I did not know that. Thank you for the clarity.
I’m still not sure why The Outer Worlds is thought of as the same team as New Vegas… The marketing for the game heavily pushed the connection because of Obsidian
I mean, you kind of answered your own question. Lots of old school Fallout fans were annoyed with the direction that Bethesda was taking the series, in an attempt to appeal to a wider market of FPS players. These fans remembered the days before the series was heavily focused on combat, and yearned for more of what Obsidian had done with it. So when Obsidian announced their own RPG, fans of New Vegas went wild. They were basically expecting a spiritual successor to New Vegas, because they had seen what Obsidian was capable of.
I’m not sure starfield can be fixed. the concept is fundamentally flawed imo.
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I haven’t played much of this game, but what I have played just felt kind of bland somehow. I’m sure I’ll circle back to it one day, but I was underwhelmed initially.
I’m 49 hrs into my first play, about to start final mission.
I absolutely love this game. I can’t remember when I last was so invested in what a game was giving me.
I smashed it out 3 times in a row, it’s such a phenomenal game.
Played it this year and yeah it’s good. Wasn’t very long either, felt like a nice side project.
I tried playing Outer Worlds but my main complaint was that I was constantly being overwhelmed by just how garish and visually busy the game was. The area that I was exploring was a bit too colourful, a bit too cluttered, and enemies didn’t stand out well enough for me to differentiate them from the background visual elements. I got frustrated with the number of times I wouldn’t notice an enemy until I was right on top of them.
Another issue I faced was a classic dissonance seen in most RPG/FPS blends - it’s where you can equip a high powered rifle and shoot an enemy in their unprotected head only to watch them shrug the shot off with ease as their HP bar drops by a measly 10%. It ruins immersion for me, just reminds me that I am not actually an adventurer exploring a strange new universe, I’m just a guy playing a video game.
Apart from that, there was a lot to like! I liked the story that I got to experience, the characters seemed cool, the quests were interesting. I just couldn’t push past the things that bothered me to see more of the stuff I liked.
The combat was a low point. I spent most of the game up through the finale with a MK2 light machinegun. It was tinkered with and upgraded. My character had no points at all put into gun skills and I still chewed through enemies with ease. Whenever ammo ran low I switched to a MK2 heavy assault rifle.
Even the finale sub-boss robot was pathetically easy to kill.
I think they underdeveloped the science weapons! I started using some too late in the game but some encounters definitley felt “different” to the normal gunplay.
All of the weapons and weapon catoegories felt undercooked. The lack of ammunition differentiation and lack of any real reason to take one type of weapon over another was a problem. The science weapons could have been a lot more.
This is one of those games that I started playing and put down and went back to and played through entirely. I really wanted to play it because I loved The Stupendium’s song “The Fine Print”. I was recently diagnosed with ADHD and medicated, I didn’t think this would effect how I play games, but it allowed me to stay focused on the game and actually play it all the way through. I was able to thoroughly explore the game without getting distracted by picking up items, getting lost, forgetting the plot or quest line.
My favorite things about the game were the silly jingles and overall style of everything. The slogans and stylized art really made it feel retro-futuristic and dystopian. Everyone knows the companies are bad, but it’s all they have, so they have to put on a smile and deal with it. The choices you face make you think about the consequences (what’s right vs corporate greed, mostly). In my play-through I tried to do all of the “right” choices and stay on everyone’s good side, be the “hero”. I did every side quest and companion story line, so it took a while to complete, but it was nice to completely finish a game for once. The next time I play, I think I’ll do a more “evil” approach to see more story lines. I really enjoyed all the mementos and trinkets you collect for the ship, it was nice to read little snippets about them and the companions. I really think it was the little things about the game that I enjoyed the most. Fighting enemies wasn’t hard, especially with companions. I didn’t use their special abilities, (I don’t think I knew how to) so I missed out on the small comment scenes you mentioned.
Unfortunately, I played it on PS4, so the worst thing was load times. Every loading screen took forever. The further into the game, the longer they took. At one point the game crashed and I had to re-download to get it to work again, luckily this didn’t effect the save game. But it happened a couple of times, which was worrying. Hopefully I can get the PC version for my next play-through. I played on easy mode because I’m horrible at FPS and I have to say, the amount of ammo you’re given is excessive, even for easy mode. I had thousands of rounds of ammo for all ammo types. I don’t think I reached the storage limit, but it was close.
Great review, you summed up the story line and game style very eloquently! I agree that many quests were tedious fetch-quests, this was very annoying and obvious playing on PS4 with the load screens. I didn’t realize it was advertised as a follow up to New Vegas, but I had heard that it was made by some of the people that worked on it, which you point out is not exactly the case. Regardless, they did a wonderful job on this game and while it’s not perfect, it is a great story that I enjoyed! Coincidentally enough, I started New Vegas last night and expect to enjoy it as much as this game, if not more. I’d always heard amazing things about it, but never got around to playing.
I found the game’s political message a bit ham-fisted, with the core problem being that the setting was effectively a company town (or several) and the criticism being of under-regulated capitalism as a whole. That lead to there being some contrived or unexplained ways real-world problems had managed to come up which could have just been an inevitable consequence of a slightly tweaked setting.
I think if someone played the game who didn’t already agree with its politics, they’d have a very easy time dismissing all its arguments as strawmen, and feel more confident voting against regulation or shared ownership.
I did like the discourse around cystipigs, though.
