The Outer Worlds Review

The Outer Worlds is an amalgamation of 3D Fallout and Mass Effect. Hiking across stretches of monster-riddled open environments comes from the former. But those environments are spread not across nuclear wasteland, but vivid and diverse alien planets, and that’s from the latter.

The setting is Halcyon: a multi-planet colony on the brink of collapse, light years away from Earth, where corporations dictate every facet of the colonist’s lives. The zany evil corporations thing appeals to me greatly as a fan of Oddworld: I half expected to see a Glukkon behind the door of the Halcyon Holdings office.

A smart bit of theft on Obsidian’s part was taking the companion system from Mass Effect and dropping it right into The Outer World’s otherwise Fallout-y core. These are fleshed-out, chatty characters who have personal quest lines, backstories, and who will regularly interject in both conversation and combat. This sets the new franchise apart from the lonely atmosphere that Fallout’s wasteland wallowed in, and gives Obsidian more chances to display their strength in storytelling.

What stands out the most for me after 30 hours with this game is the staggering quantity of writing it seems to contain. Obsidian has certainly not given up on meaningfully branching dialogue like Bioware did. And when I say Bioware, I’m not talking about Anthem: even in Mass Effect, the freedom of the dialogue wheel was largely an unconvincing illusion. In The Outer Worlds, ahuge amount of the conversational depth is real, achieved not with elasticated choices, or smoke or mirrors, but simply a massive amount of writing and a bold lack of concern over what the player might (naturally and realistically) miss. Some of dialogue branches are certainly inconsequential or illusory — but it’s hard to tell which ones, and that’s the art in it.

Here’s some high praise: The Outer Worlds is a AAA videogame with natural sounding conversations. Regardless of which two companions you choose to take with you (out of six), they regularly contributed to the conversations, and even better the NPC would respond just as naturally to your companion. It’s all very human.

Despite the amount of it, the writing, especially the secondary writing, is on average of excellent quality: funny, characterful, and eloquent. Of course, there is inevitably some instances that miss the mark, and a few really disappointed me: the Vicar’s character quest and the introduction of the antagonist were both important scenes that were mangled. But with terminal after terminal filled with surprising or witty tidbits, and even entire side stories, it’s easy to forgive.

On the NPC side, my favourite is the ship’s computer, ADA. While the influences of other cynical, robotic comic relief like Glados and Marvin the Paranoid Android are clear, she still shines brightly. In your first conversation with her she has both a great gag and genuine — if abrupt — emotional arc. Tight.

Much as I enjoy the people, the best characters in the game are the planets. They are smaller individually than Fallout’s wasteland, but still sprawling, and consistently beautiful. Who designed the weird rock formations on Terra-2? I want to buy them a cappuccino. Who designed the trees on Monarch, or the eerie dark sky of Skylla? Who put that picturesque raptidon watering hole opposite the cargo exit of this crashed ship — man, that’s a pretty image.

The planet Monarch is my favourite. Impeccably designed on both a micro level — encounters on the road can be bypassed or approached differently by way of a alternate forest paths — and on a macro level — the main encounters on the planet are arranged in a circle, which you have the pleasure of completing when you unlock a final gate that leads back to one of the planet’s landing pads. The level of artistic and game-design experience that shines through every square mile of these worlds is crystal clear.

I suppose this is where I should put in a word about the controls and combat. Here it is: “fine”. Shooting feels as good as in a budget FPS, which is to say it feels pretty good compared to other shooter-RPGs. I flip-flopped over whether I preferred tactical slow-mo to Fallout’s VATs mechanic, and also whether I was tired of the the canned animation of your partner’s combat abilities (a meager one per character), or if I actually thought they were cool until the end. The shotgun-vicar shouting “I’ll take your confession now!” before he shoots never got old for me, at least.

The only really bad thing about the game is its constant need to be the hand that feeds you. Skill checks are so low that few of the special choices feel very special. Pinpoint destination markers are omnipresent so the thrill of exploration is dulled. And even when there seem to be multiple interesting options in a quest, the game is never hard enough to make you feel like considering the different approaches. In other words, the game just doesn’t have enough bite.

While the game branched constantly in the short term, long term consequences — a faction turning against your permanently, an inhabited area being destroyed, the likes we have seen in the Fallout series — were lacking. When important characters die, the future implications are few — we had most likely reached the end of their story anyway.

Most of all, it is unforgivable that there was no option to destroy a planet in this game. Fallout 3 already did a town. An Alderaan-option seems so obvious, but they missed it. Had this been included I would take back all my other complaints from the previous paragraph.

Some people have accused the game of being philosophically shallow. To me, the game had a good balance, presenting the super-corporations as a comically evil force while still giving you lots of interesting, hard to make decisions which you have to make based on ideology vs practically, the amount of information you’ve managed to gather, your own personal wants and needs etc. All options have pros and cons, and the game asks you to choose the lesser evils. But sometimes it feels like it achieves this balance by making both factions a little stupid. I imagine this frustrates people for whom this means they don’t feel inspired to help either side.

Finally, you should be warned that at about 75% of the worthwhile content here is optional. To demonstrate, consider this glitchless speedrun where a version of the main quest is completed in 13 minutes. But if you go in without hurry and a sense of exploration, you’ll find a tremendous amount to enjoy in these worlds.