The Outer Worlds is crafted with care by Obsidian who again prove themselves to be experts of their craft. A unique science fiction world driven by choice kept me returning for its humor and dedication to player freedom.
The Outer Worlds takes no time in forcing players to love it. From the onset, Obsidian Entertainment’s first-person RPG is a deluge of charm and humor, instantly warming itself up to players like a much needed balm. Mentioning the legacy of Bethesda and its Fallout series feels like a necessary evil when speaking of The Outer Worlds in the context of a review. After all, Obsidian momentarily took over the series’ reigns with Fallout: New Vegas. But I think most fans of the expansive, choice-driven games like Fallout have a bad taste in their mouth in recent years. Yet The Outer Worlds succeeds not just because it is something fresh, but because it feels like the natural evolution of this genre, much in the way The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt transcended the open-world games space.
Players start The Outer Worlds as a blank slate. Eccentric scientist Phineas Welles has found his way to the Hope, a colony ship that had a skipdrive malfunction and has been stranded in space. Welles searches for our eventual player character among the cryogenically frozen crew of the Hope like a man sorting through a filing cabinet. Players are asked what kind of character they want to make but the robust cosmetic customization is the least interesting aspect. First, we must choose how to invest a small pool of points into the mind, body, and personality. Adding or subtracting points from these stats influences a whole other subset of individual skills that players will also invest in. Being below or above average in these core stats will give players bonuses or debuffs such as increased carrying capacity, slower time to naturally heal, or better control over eventual companions.
The amount of time players can spend agonizing over the minutiae of what kind of person they want to be is large. I spent at least a half an hour weighing the pros and cons of point investment and eventually dictating how I wanted the rest of the game play out for me. But it isn’t enough that The Outer Worlds features such an in-depth character sheet, it’s that it has fun doing it. As you manipulate the menus to fit your desired tastes, Welles tosses in little bits of commentary based on your actions. Set a character with below average strength and you will hear a quip. Select your former career (coupled with its own humorous description) that grants an additional stat bonus, you hear a piece of dialog.
It’s Obsidian’s not so subtle way of making this crucial choice feel somewhat tangible in the game. And it’s also damn funny. In fact, I spent extra time creating a character and tinkering with the stats just so I could hear everything Welles had to say. The more you try to change up your character, the more Welles has to sort through the cryo pods looking for his match. That extra bit of flair makes the process feel more special, as your character isn’t just a random stranger who lucked into this role. Instead, you are carefully selected based on your strengths and weaknesses.
The Outer Worlds is an expertly written game, a fact which takes little time to realize. Games which use humor as one of its chief ways of storytelling live or die on squeezing laughter out of players. Obsidian barely has to apply pressure. It’s been years since I’ve laughed this hard and this consistently at a game, something I wish Borderlands 3 had managed a lot more of. The tone of The Outer Worlds‘ humor is universal, not relying completely on one-liners or crude jokes. The writing washes over players with dark humor, environmental gags, high-brow comedy, and more.
Take, for example, the opening moments of actual gameplay. Players are meant to meet up with a ship captain named Alex Hawthorne who will presumably take us off the planet we crash landed on in an escape pod. Seconds after stepping off the ship, players see that the pod has actually crushed Hawthorne to death, Wizard of Oz style. It’s so ridiculously absurd that you can’t help but laugh. But Obsidian continues the joke and the character crafting by allowing players to lie about their identity when asked, claiming that they are Hawthorne. After all, the real one isn’t going to complain.
As much as I love to laugh, the writing knows better than to constantly barrage us with humor. This is, of course, a game where you can kill just about anyone you want and be a complete jerk to people who don’t really deserve it. The player is allowed to engage with a number of emotional beats based on the kind of person they want to be. When players come upon Hawthorne’s ship, they can interact with its human-like AI system named ADA. You can treat ADA like a simple, talking computer or attempt to comfort her when she laments the death of Hawthorne. Humans and robots alike in The Outer Worlds never feel like a farce. Though they may talk or act in extremes, they are written in ways to justify their actions and emotions.
Regardless of how players have built their character, The Outer World‘s moment-to-moment gameplay won’t change drastically. I chose to build my character around dialog, science, and technology skills. And like any good RPG, including the ones Obsidian has become known for, talking your way out of a situation is just as viable as shooting. Main missions and side quests contain a hefty amount of actual combat and dialog and, based on the player’s strengths, they will lean into one more than the other.
Combat isn’t burdened by overly complex mechanics and prefers to keep its fundamentals quite simple. With bladed weapons players can slash at alien beasts, metal death machines, and fleshy humans and block attacks. A surprisingly large range of gun types make ranged combat viable for different levels of engagement. Grenade launchers cause splash damage, snipers shoot from afar, and pistols fire fast. Whether shooting or swinging, combat doesn’t have a weighty feel but connecting with a target is still pleasant. As a result of being in cryo stasis, players can drastically slow time for a few moments to either move around or attack. It’s no VATS system but gives players enough space and time to size up a fight. The ability to crouch and hide in tall grass or behind cover is great for sneaking past a sticky situation but can also allow for critical hits when attacking something by surprise.
Obsidian doesn’t want any player build to feel left out of fighting, however. One of The Outer Worlds‘ greatest strengths is the balancing act in making sure a singular option seems most viable. Players can improve armor and guns by adding mods to them and tinkering with them to upgrade their stats. A player who has built their character up with strength stats and gun damage is likely not hurting for actual damage absorption and dealing. However a dialog-focused player like me is thankful for the cheaper cost of item improvement and the ability to break locks more often for mods. During the first hours, combat was a little hairy for me because I did little weapon damage and was very squishy. After a few upgrades and the help of a companion, situations became a lot more manageable.
If there is one complaint I have with combat as a whole, it’s that after awhile it becomes easy to settle into a pattern. Eventually, players will come across Mark 2 weapons that have increased base damage, making their investment on weapon tinkering feel a little dated. For several hours I was content with the four weapons I had equipped on my character and never strayed from them. I was constantly repairing my armor and weapons to ensure their stats weren’t affected, feeling like it wasn’t worth it to start the process over again just for a small boost. Cosmetically, weapons and armor look great but they pale in comparison to the Science Weapons found over the course of the campaign. These weapons are experimental tools that have unique properties. The one I will spoil is a shrink ray that does just like the name implies. It pays to search for these guns and experiment with them.
Obsessive collectors will also come across consumables and junk scattered around the Halcyon system. Money never really becomes a problem with the amount of stuff that can be sold. However, I felt that the consumables were a bit lackluster. While players can consume a can of saltuna or drink some alcohol in their menu, the effects of most of these items last only seconds, making them very situational. Instead, you’re meant to load these items into a medical inhaler that can be huffed on the fly, filling your lungs with these benefits and detriments. Though it might pay to come up with a concoction that temporarily boosts a desired skill, players need to invest a lot of points into their medical skill before unlocking all four slots on the inhaler.
As players progress through The Outer Worlds, they will level up and be granted ten points to invest in the following core skills: melee, ranged, defense, dialog, stealth, tech, and leadership. Each of these core skills influences the other skills found inside them. For example, the ranged skill also contains the handgun, heavy weapon, and long gun skills. When a player puts a point into any core skill, the skills inside that core also gain a point. But once a lesser skill hits level 50, players can’t level up the core skill anymore and will have to decide where to allocate the points further.
Every 20 points put into a skill will grant a perk to players, capping out at a master perk for level 100. Based on how a player built their character at the start, many of these skills may be near level 50 already. I thought about investing some of my points into melee and gun skills but realized it would greatly detract from my strengths. While the perks won’t drastically alter your playstyle, they supplement and improve your character’s natural skills during The Outer Worlds. Even dialog-heavy skills have an influence in combat, such as causing humans and animals to retreat or cower in fear. Every two levels, players are also granted a perk point that can be used to give a permanent boost or benefit. From increased carry capacity, better damage with science weapons, or a permanent armor boost, selecting perks can be an agonizing choice. Players can also choose to be inflicted with permanent status debuffs for a perk point. Whether taking too much damage from robots or falling from too great a height, players can accept these flaws and take situational stat losses. Encountering robots or being inflicted with plasma damage may have your strength and agility drop a couple points. It’s up to players to weight the costs.
Though Obsidian’s devotion to making The Outer Worlds a game about character sheets may feel daunting, it is all in service of a highly customized and replayable experience. Mission design in The Outer Worlds is not wholly unique, as players are still tasked with going from point A to B in a fairly basic manner. But it’s the execution of the story and all the sections in between that make the game magical.
Halcyon is a system of planets and stars that is ruled over by corporations. One of the first NPCs you meet is hesitant to be healed by you because you aren’t using Spacer’s Choice brand medicine. If there were a theme to the game it would be “Capitalism kills.” But Obsidian does not beat players over the head with this message. The insidious nature of corporations and their thirst for profit is definitely the reason many of the characters in The Outer Worlds suffer, but the writers manage to extract the humor and heart from dire situations and humanize them. In this futuristic society people espouse brand loyalty and fight for independence. It’s all done against a backdrop of Western influences and cheesy low-budget sci-fi movies. The colorful aesthetic of the game overall and the way a corporation stamps its legacy on individual planets means that each new location is a sight to behold. I would scour every possible location and quest in a zone before I traveled on to the next one just out of a sheer desire to see and do everything. Every character and landmark has a story to tell, no matter how small.
As I mentioned, The Outer Worlds is a game that can’t be played just once. Obsidian estimated upwards of 40 hours for a playthrough and bottoming out at about 20 hours. Those calculations seem to be based on a person who plows through the critical path without doing much sight-seeing. Players will meet six companions during the game and each one of them are exceptional. Sure, a companion is great because they increase your weight load, attack enemies for you, influence your stats, and execute special attacks. But companions are incredible because their relationships are palpable with the player. Parvati, the first companion you come across, is a tech savvy girl who is a bundle of nerves. When you take her across her hometown of Edgewater she talks about a memory from that place and the player can confront her to know more about her past. Before you make the game’s first big decision, she will talk to you and may change your perspective. Over time, you will work with her to improve how she talks to people, maybe even setting up a date after a rowdy night of drinking.
These companions are influenced by your actions but also interact with each other. I loved the banter between various combinations of companions and wondered how each character would respond differently. They may butt in during a conversation with a quest giver or provide a conversational out if things get hairy. Plus, each companion can be equipped with weapons and armor that can make up for any stat gaps you may have. Becoming attached to your ragtag crew is one of The Outer Worlds‘ biggest draws. Then again, you may just want to be mean to all of them and kick them off your team. But if you do that, you miss out on lengthy loyalty missions that unfold in heartfelt ways that provide even more depth to characters who had no lack of it in the first place.
The Outer Worlds is a game that benefits from players becoming invested in choices. The first major choice players are given is determining how they will power Hawthorne’s ship to get off the planet they have been stranded on. Two locations have the power source needed, the struggling town of Edgewater and a camp where former Edgewater citizens have retreated to. Edgewater is ruled over by Spacer’s Choice whose cheery jingle claims “it’s not the best choice.” Edgewater’s citizens are overworked to the point that a sickness is beginning to overtake the town. Of course, the corporate bigwigs claim that working harder is the cure for any ailment. But a small band of citizens got tired of being ruled over by Spacer’s Choice and decided to set up shop at a nearby botanical labs. Players can hear out both sides and complete missions that reveal the larger picture of what is going on in Edgewater. But ultimately, someone is going to suffer. After a side mission implied that Spacer’s Choice corrupted some robot AIs to kill human workers so they wouldn’t have to be paid, I decided to make Edgewater suffer. The saltuna cannery would be shut down and some people may be unhappy but I felt that eventually, the hardship they suffered would be worth it to live a life free of the corporate overlords. After talking to some friends about their choice, I actually found out the repercussions of the other decisions and why they came to it and was surprised that I may have missed a line of dialog or two that shed some light on the rebels at the geothermal plant.
Regardless of any decisions made in The Outer Worlds, know that Obsidian has justified them. This is a game that is confident with itself. It is in no way small. Featuring some of the strongest games writing I’ve witnessed in years, it’s hard not to want to dive back into this world as a completely different character and tinker with the story just to see how it attempts to gel with player choice. For awhile, I thought this genre was nearing life support. Now, I’m confident that the community will embrace The Outer Worlds to the point where Obsidian has to give us more of this universe. It’s so well-realized, so lovingly crafted. It’s the best choice.
