After the much beloved Fallout New Vegas, people have been clamoring for another big open-world RPG from Obsidian. So when the original The Outer Worlds was announced, many saw it as the next big thing. Finally, someone is going to do a massive Bethesda-style RPG and beat them at their own game. It came out, and it was fine. The setting and bones are great for a potential sequel to really work with. Well, The Outer Worlds 2 is here. Is it the game everyone was hoping for?
The Outer Worlds 2
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment
Price: $69.99
Platform: PS5, Xbox, PC (reviewed)
MonsterVine was supplied with PC code for review
It’s good!
Not amazing, but good! Better than the original in every way, but still feels like it’s missing something special.
The gameplay is a massive step up from the original, with the gunplay feeling much better and less floaty. Snapping onto targets and letting loose feels good now! Whacking dudes with weird space hammers feels as great as ever, and the new gadgets add a lot of fun options to combat that suit various gameplay styles.
Leveling and perks are better. There are now twelve skills to choose from, and it never feels like you have to get one to max rank to get good use out of it. Allowing for some experimentation throughout your playthrough, but not much. Speech is king as always. Perks do a lot of weird and interesting things, like you’d hope. My personal favorite makes enemies cower in fear when you kill one of their friends. They potentially shape the entire way you play in interesting ways.
And the game gives you a lot of options to utilize whatever your build is. There are always two or three ways to solve any problem in the game, and you rarely feel locked out of anything for that. That said, it’s a shame that in most cases, most problems lead to the same solution.
The setting is also much more interesting than the original. Set in the Arcadia star system, you find yourself contending with three factions for the fate of the galaxy. There’s a lot of back and forth between the hyper capitalist Auntie’s Choice, the authoritarian Protectorate, and the pseudo-religious Order. A lot of it is as on the nose as you can imagine, like corporate soldiers talking about how much freedom they have compared to the authoritarians, only to complain about the multiple decades they have on their contracts. But there’s a lot of subtlety too, such as the people of the Protectorate having a strong sense of community belonging that the other factions lack, which keeps them from just being faceless drones to kill.
The Outer Worlds 2 Companions Steal the Spotlight
The overarching story is, of course, a pretty boilerplate space opera, with an interesting setting, lots of ups and downs, and bad guys to talk down with a high speech skill. The faction intrigue is far and away the most interesting part of the game; it’s a shame that it never feels truly alive. You can work on all sides more or less, so you always end up on top, and there is never much punishment for it. There’s a faction affinity system that tracks your standing with all of them, and it mostly just goes up. You can only really decrease it by killing people or stealing, but never by helping out one faction’s sworn enemies.
Where the game shines is the companions; there’s one for each faction in the game, giving you some interesting insight into what’s happening in the story. And each one has a pretty good storyline that breaks them down in interesting ways. A big shout-out to Inez, who is a corporate soldier wronged by her corporation and embarks on an interesting path of self-discovery. What’s disappointing is that most of these have great starts and middles but disappointing endings. There are no substantial changes in most of them, and while they might pay lip service to character changes, their dialogue and story content do not reflect those changes. It’s disappointing when most of The Outer Worlds 2’s contemporaries are making great strides with story content like this.
I think fundamentally the game plays itself too safely. There are never any moments where the game feels completely out of my control. Everything feels like an RPG checklist with an optimal path to completion that the game spells out for you. Every quest has one ending, with various degrees of completion, rather than choices.
This extends to the world design as a whole, with multiple large maps offering almost no reason to explore. When you first land on a planet, you’re greeted with an empty map with buildings peppered throughout. Great! Except that the distance between most of them is substantial. Fine, plenty of stuff to see along the way, right? No, just empty roads and legions of aliens or bandits to fight. There are next to no emergent quests to be found in the hills of The Outer Worlds 2, just barren shacks on the way to the next town. These few moments of discovery are quickly soured by the lack of an appropriate skill check. Which would be fine, but when you do have the right skill check, you see that it’s rarely anything worth finding. Nearly every piece of content worth doing is located in the faction settlements that then push you into the world to chase after waypoints.
Say you do explore before heading to town, then you’re at risk of completing quests before accepting them. Which is usually no problem, save for a few quests with multiple optional steps, that you’ll be locked out of because the quest auto-completes when you talk to the quest giver. So from then on, you’ll follow the golden path laid in front of you lest you receive your punishment for exploring again.
This also extends into the dialog system, which, like all previous Obsidian games, is great except for one glaring flaw. For some reason, when talking to people, the game includes all dialog options tied to information that could’ve been found earlier, as x’ed out options at the bottom of the screen. Taunting you with options you’ll never be able to pick unless you load a save and search for that information, then start the dialog all over again. It feels like the game is grading you on your commitment to looking over every nook and cranny of a building before talking to someone. It spits in the face of emergent storytelling, because now all you can think about isn’t what to say next, but what you could’ve said instead.
In some ways, that can be a good feeling. I’m a huge proponent of locking the player out of options or setting up consequences for player decisions. One of the great joys of Baldur’s Gate 3 was wondering how differently your playthrough could have gone if you made different choices, especially when you compared it to what happened to your friends. Here, it doesn’t feel like I’ve made a choice that colored my playthrough, but that I’ve been locked out of options for playing it incorrectly.
All that said, The Outer Worlds 2 is still good. It plays fine, the story is good, and the companions are good. If you like modern Obsidian games, you’ll like this. But I can’t help but feel like it pales in comparison to most of the studio’s greats and where the world of RPGs is going. It’s stuck in space, unsure of itself and holding back from what it could truly be.
The Final Word
The Outer Worlds 2 is a serviceable RPG held back from greatness by playing it too safe and small. Too afraid to alienate players and make big swings like the setting deserves.
MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
