(Editor’s Note: I received a review copy of The Outer Worlds on Playstation 4. Given I have an Xbox Game Pass subscription and would have had access less than 24 hours later anyway, this has not changed my opinion on the game)
Why are you reading my review of The Outer Worlds? You can literally get access to this game right now on PC/Xbox One for $1 as part of the Xbox Game Pass trial subscription. Get the game, download it, play it, maybe read my review while it downloads? Buy an ewin racing chair using the MMO Fallout discount code (that’s promotional humor, please don’t kill me).
Those of you who read MMO Fallout may be aware that my passion for video game stories has, shall we say, waned a bit in recent years. I’m currently loving The Division 2 even though its plot is rather thin, but I play a lot of massively multiplayer games and that means that the story is pretty threadbare. It also doesn’t help that a lot of AAA games have gone toward the open world sandbox where you’re basically spending dozens of hours taking out bad guys you didn’t know before the mission and don’t care about after. Not all games, obviously, but enough that I have found it difficult to get engaged in stuff.
I have really been missing a good Obsidian-built world.
If you haven’t left this page and started downloading The Outer Worlds, let me just sum it up in one line: The Outer Worlds manifested itself when you were taking a bath and said “gee, I wish they would make a modern Fallout: New Vegas that wasn’t jank as hell.” I’d also like to sum up the humor of the game as taking the absurdity of Borderlands and stripping the memes away. Yea, it’s like that.
The Outer Worlds takes place in a futuristic science fiction world where the universe has been colonized and mega corporations run everything because William Mckinley was never assassinated and the United States did not legislate antitrust laws at that time. The game beats you over the head and neck with this narrative from the beginning where you create your character in a way that looks like you’re literally buying them from a store. You are part of a colony that was cryogenically frozen and for purely bureaucratic reasons your ship was never thawed out, left to become a myth as your people float around in the deepest recesses of space. You are rescued by an anti-corporate activist of sorts and land on a planet to start your journey pissing off the big corporation.
I made the comparison to Borderlands because The Outer Worlds is clearly an absurd story about intergalactic corporations and it knows how silly that concept is. The first person you come upon is a slogan-spouting corporate shill who gets angry if you try to heal him because he’s not allowed to use a competitor’s product. Your first experience with one of the megacorps is my personal favorite; Spacer’s Choice whose slogan is “it’s not the best choice, it’s Spacer’s Choice.” Spacer’s Choice sells products that are cheaply produced, low quality and prone to breaking, but very cheap to repair. There’s some dark humor, like how employee suicide is considered a crime of destroying company property.
One aspect of Obisdian storytelling that I love in The Outer Worlds is that choices are not specifically good or evil. Without spoiling any details, I had to think long and hard about the first major choice in the game. Your starting zone is a town based around a Saltuna factory (try the white chocolate saltuna!). You have numerous side quests that you’ll take on while helping out in the main story, but the gist of the conflict you find yourself in is that you need a power regulator to get off of the planet. The town has one and so do the deserters who left because they were getting screwed by Halcyon’s (the big umbrella megacorp) policies. The power generator cannot properly fuel both groups, so you need to act as arbitrator and figure out the best outcome.
Gameplay in The Outer Worlds is handled as a first person shooter. You can explore the multitude of indoor and outdoor areas, utilizing your various skills to hack computers, loot all the goods, and chat up the locals. As you would expect from an RPG made by Obsidian, there are many situations that you can either fight your way out of or, if your character has high enough speech skills, talk your way out of. Want to be a rootin-tootin bandit shootin desperado? You can do that. Want to go in with your sword and beat your enemies to a pulp? You can do that too. Want to be a smooth talking friendly type or intimidate your opposition into giving you what you want? Check and double check.
One aspect of The Outer Worlds that I can appreciate in theory but didn’t find much attachment to are flaws. Flaws are sort of a unique new feature that pop up once you have done a certain thing enough times. For example, getting hit with enough plasma damage will offer a “plasma weakness” flaw that has the effect of increasing plasma damage by 25% while also offering you one perk point. It’s an interesting idea, but your payout is always one perk point and frankly those just aren’t valuable enough to outweigh the detriments you receive. The game also doesn’t do a great job of explaining some of the more nuanced flaws, like a fear of heights decreasing your perception score while high up.
Loot in The Outer Worlds drops like someone’s making a profit off of it. It isn’t as excessive as it is in Fallout where you’ll find every piece of armor on a person’s body, but you do get plenty of resources and equipment from each person that you kill. Equipment can be tinkered with, modified, and broken down into its components to use on other items.
New Vegas players will love the breadth of freedom that you get for roleplaying in The Outer Worlds. There are dialogue choices out the wazzoo, and you’ll see indications for perception, science, medicine, persuasion, intimidation, and all sorts of options to talk your way through a situation. Want to be a corporate foot licker and do everything for the greater good of intergalactic capitalism? You go for it. Want to stick it to the man and eat the rich? You can do that too. The game gives you the opportunity (although I didn’t take it) to just rat out the guy who saved your life, since he’s a wanted criminal on the run from the greedy Board that controls the universe. You can do that, the game lets you, and apparently it takes the plot in quite a different direction.
Specializing in various skills unlocks a ton of information about the world. The barber? He just kinda prepares the dead for burial. The Saltuna factory whose workers are dealing with the plague? It’s not quite a plague and their remedy isn’t exactly medicine. In many games that I play, I tend to skip through a lot of the side characters commentary because it’s usually very unimportant to the overall plot. Whenever I get into a new area in The Outer Worlds, I am like a Presidential candidate going around and making sure I talk to everyone and see all of their dialogue choices.
Your character has access to a few tricks to survive, including time dilation which is a natural sequel to Fallout’s VATS. Activate time dilation and you’ll have a small period where time slows to a near crawl. Level up and that time increases. The shooting is not great; it is a marked improvement over the jankness of New Vegas but The Outer Worlds won’t be winning any awards for its combat system. Still, it’s more than serviceable despite it being occasionally difficult to keep track of your health in the middle of a fight.
Speaking of which, you may have noticed from the screenshots that The Outer Worlds has some very deep contrasting colors. For the most part they are beautiful. There are some points including one I have shown above where these colors make the game quite painful to look at. Literally. My eyes hurt after some segments where the screen blows out with bright neon colors.
The Outer Worlds is a beautiful game. I played it on a Playstation 4 Pro system and it worked fantastically. I plan on having a piece up once I find some time to start playing on PC.
MMO Fallout 