The Outer Worlds Review - Page 2
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Speaking of companions. Up until The Outer Worlds, I haven't played a game from Obsidian where I didn't like the supporting cast. The Outer Worlds bucks this trend and presents you with a cast of seemingly random people (and a robot) who mostly exist to provide you with skill bonuses. They have very little connection to the overarching story, their reasons for joining you are shaky at best, and their personal quests are nothing to write home about. Almost feels like the game has companions just because some ancient tablet somewhere in Babylon decrees that a game like this should have companions.
And the worst part about it all is that you can clearly see what Obsidian was going for here. Every once in a while, a certain character or interaction manages to hit the right tone, like the Moon Man vendor, or the propaganda outtakes you stumble upon at some point. Or take the loading screens that document your adventures, pulp magazine-style. They tend to be quite neat and suggest a certain atmosphere that unfortunately doesn’t exist in the game.
Essentially, imagine if someone watched a bunch of Monty Python and decided to make a video game out of it, but then they staffed the team with clueless interns too young to know what a monty python is, and just to ensure they couldn’t produce anything worthwhile, gave them a tight deadline to boot.
And now that we’ve established that the entire game is a mess, you may be wondering what’s it about and what your role in it is?
Well, you play as The Stranger - a blank slate of a character who was among the frozen colonists on a ship bound for the Halcyon colony. Only due to a malfunction, your ship takes a scenic route and ends up arriving a couple decades too late. When that happens, the colony's bigwigs decide to keep you and your fellow colonists in stasis forever, because of course they do.
This is where a rogue scientist manages to unfreeze you, letting you loose upon the colony. After a brief introduction, he sends you after some chemicals you can use to free the other colonists. And that's essentially the main quest.
It’s structured in that very annoying way where wherever you go, people seem incapable of accommodating your very reasonable requests, and so in order to get them to help you, you have to perform various tasks for them.
The whole thing is one big fetch quest where you jump between a handful of settlements, solve their problems the best you can, and move on. Like I said before, it’s a pretty standard hub-based fair rife with opposing factions, double-crosses, side-quests, and plenty of locked doors and containers you can persuade open by various means.
But because of the game’s unimmersive nature, all of it feels like a chore. At all times you are painfully aware you’re playing a video game, one that does everything in its power to waste your time and gives you nothing of value in return.
The one bright spot in all this mess is the way the game integrates companions into dialogues and how it reacts to your skills and attributes, but that too only serves as a painful reminder of what could have been.
And even among all this mud, your character stands out as a particularly grimy splotch. Apart from the instances where you can side with one faction over another, the lines you get to choose from mostly tend to express the exact same thing, you’re just choosing how big of a dick to be about it.
Now, those of you who know your RPGs will be aware that real reactivity is a rare and precious thing, and that for the most part, games offer merely the illusion of choice. But rarely is it so transparent as it is in The Outer Worlds.
It’s like the developers completely forgot why you would go for a non-voice-acted protagonist in the first place because the things you get to say are usually short, to the point, and just one step above something you’d see dangling from a dialogue wheel.
I really don’t understand why we’re even creating a custom protagonist here, as the game gives you so little room to express any personality. My idea for the character in The Outer Worlds was this kooky mad scientist type who goes around zapping people with ray guns. But did I get a chance to be one? No. The best The Outer Worlds could do was recognize my high Science skill every once in a while.
You add to that the fact that you constantly seem to oscillate between being a clueless outsider and someone intimately familiar with the colony’s ways, and my earlier joke about interns starts to ring dangerously close to home.
