Later choices won’t appear in-game at all, only manifesting in the pre-credits slideshow at the end. The first planet you visit will exhibit some surface-level differences depending on which faction you choose to support, but they feel canned and sterile-and that’s the best case scenario. Worst of all in a game this reactive: Change is described, but never really manifests. Locations too are wrung out and then discarded. Secondary characters are glorified quest dispensers, and have nothing to offer once they’ve fulfilled their purpose. The inventory system is a mess, and stores are functionally pointless. You can steal practically anything with zero consequences, walk into random homes without comment. For all the depth Obsidian’s built into its story beats, wandering the world is still remarkably frictionless. That said, The Outer Worlds is still a Fallout-style game and the interstitial tissue is underwhelming. The system could stand to be more creative, as most flaws are just “Take more damage from certain sources.” It’s another way in which the world feeds into your character though, which I appreciated.
Here, the more you screw up the more you’re prone to fail in the future, a calculated risk that’s offset by gaining more powerful perks. It’s like the inverse of The Elder Scrolls and its “The more you use a skill, the better it gets” leveling system. Take a lot of damage from plasma weapons for instance, and you can earn a permanent weakness to them-if you want. Throughout the game you’ll be presented with the option to take negative traits in exchange for more perk points. “Flaws” contribute to this feeling as well, albeit in a more mechanical way. With fewer quests and a tighter focus, Obsidian was able to spec out all sorts of strange edge cases that wouldn’t make the cut in other games, be it for budget reasons, or time, or et cetera. That’s what makes The Outer Worlds interesting, I think. And sure, it’s perhaps not hard for Obsidian to predict that the player might murder these two characters after talking to them and plan accordingly-but many games wouldn’t. She said something like “Hey, I didn’t like how things went down either, but did you have to go and kill them?” In other words, she reacted to the specific circumstances at hand. I expected her to react, sure, but the way she reacted felt more realistic than I expected. I won’t spoil the specifics, but her parents are jerks and the meeting goes sour. They’ve been estranged for years, and she wants you to tag along and make her seem like a badass adventurer in front of her folks. IDG / Hayden DingmanĪnother great example: A little more than halfway through the game, one of your companions expresses a desire to reconnect with her family. Make a character with low intelligence, you’ll see just as many-or maybe more. Make a smart character, you’ll see relevant dialogue options. Every game has a few, but The Outer Worlds is chock full. I already narrated the armor anecdote above, but it’s just one of many instances where I realized Obsidian had predicted a course of action and preemptively reacted to it. The Outer Worlds has a remarkable capacity to surprise you, as well. And that still holds true! It’s a space-age take on the 1950s, and leans more into the anti-capitalist rhetoric than Bethesda-era Fallout, but otherwise The Outer Worlds consciously mimics the New Vegas aesthetic, from the way dialogue trees are presented to the fact you can slow down time in combat.
When we saw The Outer Worlds at E3, I said it looked more like Fallout: New Vegas than I expected. Obsidian gets to explore these ideas in the garb of a traditional Bethesda-style RPG though. Inkle’s entire Ink engine is built around lots of small choices that aggregate into larger story branches (see Heaven’s Vault), and I just brought up the same phenomenon last week when discussing Disco Elysium. It’s hardly the first to subvert that doctrine, of course. It’s a repudiation of the 100-hour grail, of the long-standing belief that more equals better, and that every player needs to see everything. Again, we’re still far from Spector’s ideal, but The Outer Worlds is nevertheless an interesting contrast to other RPGs of this generation, particularly Fallout 4. Rather than spreading the same half-realized mechanics over ever-larger environs, Spector postulates that there’s an alternative path games could take, smaller but more reactive.Īnd it’s this latter approach that informed The Outer Worlds. But I bring it up because the key to the “One Block” dream is depth. I’m certainly not going to say that The Outer Worlds is Spector’s vision made reality.
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