🔗 Share this article

Bigger isn't always superior. It's a cliché, yet it's also the truest way to describe my feelings after spending many hours with The Outer Worlds 2. Developer Obsidian added more of everything to the follow-up to its 2019's science fiction role-playing game — more humor, adversaries, weapons, characteristics, and places, everything that matters in games like this. And it works remarkably well — at first. But the weight of all those daring plans makes the game wobble as the hours wear on.

A Powerful Initial Impact

The Outer Worlds 2 establishes a solid first impression. You belong to the Terran Directorate, a do-gooder agency committed to restraining corrupt governments and corporations. After some serious turmoil, you wind up in the Arcadia sector, a colony fractured by war between Auntie's Selection (the product of a union between the first game's two large firms), the Protectorate (collectivism pushed to its worst logical conclusion), and the Ascendant Brotherhood (similar to the Catholic faith, but with math in place of Jesus). There are also a bunch of rifts creating openings in the universe, but currently, you really need reach a transmission center for pressing contact purposes. The problem is that it's in the middle of a combat area, and you need to determine how to reach it.

Following the original, Outer Worlds 2 is a first-person role-playing game with an main narrative and dozens of side quests scattered across various worlds or regions (big areas with a much to discover, but not sandbox).

The first zone and the task of getting to that comms station are spectacular. You've got some goofy encounters, of course, like one that includes a rancher who has fed too much sweet grains to their beloved crustacean. Most direct you toward something helpful, though — an surprising alternative route or some new bit of intel that might open a different path forward.

Unforgettable Moments and Missed Chances

In one notable incident, you can come across a Guardian defector near the overpass who's about to be eliminated. No task is associated with it, and the sole method to locate it is by investigating and paying attention to the background conversation. If you're swift and alert enough not to let him get defeated, you can save him (and then protect his runaway sweetheart from getting slain by beasts in their hideout later), but more connected with the current objective is a power line obscured in the grass nearby. If you trace it, you'll locate a hidden entrance to the relay station. There's an alternate entry to the station's sewers stashed in a cave that you could or could not observe based on when you follow a specific companion quest. You can encounter an simple to miss person who's essential to preserving a life much later. (And there's a soft toy who indirectly convinces a team of fighters to support you, if you're considerate enough to protect it from a danger zone.) This opening chapter is packed and exciting, and it appears as if it's brimming with rich storytelling potential that rewards you for your curiosity.

Fading Hopes

Outer Worlds 2 fails to meet those opening anticipations again. The next primary region is organized similar to a map in the original game or Avowed — a large region dotted with key sites and secondary tasks. They're all thematically relevant to the conflict between Auntie's Selection and the Ascendant Order, but they're also vignettes separated from the central narrative narratively and location-wise. Don't expect any contextual hints guiding you toward new choices like in the initial area.

In spite of pushing you toward some tough decisions, what you do in this area's optional missions doesn't matter. Like, it really doesn't matter, to the point where whether you allow violations or guide a band of survivors to their end results in merely a passing comment or two of dialogue. A game doesn't have to let all tasks influence the plot in some big, dramatic fashion, but if you're compelling me to select a side and giving the impression that my choice matters, I don't feel it's unreasonable to hope for something more when it's finished. When the game's already shown that it has greater potential, anything less appears to be a compromise. You get more of everything like the developers pledged, but at the expense of substance.

Ambitious Ideas and Lacking Tension

The game's intermediate phase endeavors an alike method to the primary structure from the opening location, but with clearly diminished style. The idea is a daring one: an related objective that extends across multiple worlds and encourages you to request help from assorted alliances if you want a smoother path toward your goal. Aside from the repeat setup being a slightly monotonous, it's also just missing the drama that this sort of circumstance should have. It's a "bargain with evil" moment. There should be tough compromise. Your connection with any group should matter beyond earning their approval by performing extra duties for them. Everything is absent, because you can simply rush through on your own and clear the objective anyway. The game even goes out of its way to give you ways of doing this, pointing out alternate routes as secondary goals and having allies tell you where to go.

It's a byproduct of a larger problem in Outer Worlds 2: the anxiety of permitting you to feel dissatisfied with your decisions. It regularly exaggerates in its attempts to ensure not only that there's an different way in many situations, but that you are aware of it. Locked rooms almost always have various access ways signposted, or nothing valuable inside if they fail to. If you {can't