The Outer Worlds 2

Though I deeply loved The Outer Worlds upon its initial release, I’ve not been able to return to Obsidian’s humorous capitalism-gone-awry open world epic in any meaningful way. I was initially enraptured by the franchise’s promise of new Fallout-style adventures, and the ability to creep through new environments, picking up loot and sniping baddies while fulfilling quest checkpoints, all of which more than met my qualifications for what I considered to be a new classic. But as time went on, the sheen on The Outer Worlds tarnished—just a little bit, but noticeably.

I dipped back in to review The Outer Worlds’ DLCs when they dropped, but starting a fresh save always felt a bit daunting. Something about the tone of that original felt off-putting. The content that I originally found to be light and amusing became like garlic to my gaming vampire; it was just a bit too goofy, slightly overly smarmy in its take on what would happen to our culture if our collective consumerism was pushed to its logical conclusion. The characters felt more like caricatures, there to recite lines of propaganda in service of world building, but without any core of humanity. As a result, I’ve bounced off the game every time I’ve tried to reengage with it.

The Outer Worlds 2 offers a major course correction. It is clear that Obsidian has done a lot of work refining the tone of their game world. It’s still funny and fun, but whereas the characters in the first game felt like they were wearing Outer Worlds mascot costumes representing the world’s various factions, now they feel like human beings caught in systems larger than themselves. I came out of the original game clear about the point of the thing, but with little memory of the story, characters, or factions. The Outer Worlds 2 has put all of that lore and characterization front and center in this game, giving the player many more hooks to hang onto, which makes the Outer Worlds universe feel less like an amusement park and more like a real, lived-in place.

Anyone that has played a Fallout or Elder Scrolls title (or the original Outer Worlds, or Avowed) will feel right at home here. After a brief introductory mission, players are set free on the first of several semi-open worlds to explore. Along the way, side quests and a wide array of characters are introduced. It’s possible to rage through the primary quest line, but you’ll be doing yourself a disservice if you don’t poke around the various settlements and structures on each planet, as some of the best content (and rewards) are tucked off to the side for intrepid explorers.

The Outer Worlds 2 has pivoted in location to Arcadia, a system of planets on a doomsday countdown. Through a series of mishaps (and some malfeasance) at the beginning of the game, the entire system is filled with rifts, unstable folds in time/space that threaten to destroy everything in the vicinity. The player character is, of course, tasked with finding a way to avert this eventual cataclysm and save Arcadia’s inhabitants.

Unfortunately, three politically powerful factions in the system insist on using the current crisis to jockey for power. Auntie’s Choice (the conglomerate result of a hostile takeover between two company/factions in The Outer Worlds) represents the first game’s runaway consumerism. Auntie’s devotees are committed to advancement up the corporate ladder through hard work and dedication, though they are all quite blind to the fact that Auntie’s Choice would grind them up in a hot second if it meant greasing the wheels of commerce.

But that’s where the original game’s obsession with consumerism winds down. The Protectorate, a militaristic and authoritarian faction that came to power via its founder’s invention of the Skip Drive, represents a different cause for Arcadia’s inhabitants to get behind. These folks ruled Arcadia with an iron fist before Auntie came swooping in and invaded the place, resulting in an ongoing conflict.

Then there’s the Order of the Ascendant, a group of semi-religious nutjobs that use the power of mathematics and the “Universal Equation” to attempt to—sometimes successfully—divine the future. This results in some rather vague, but sometimes eerily close-to-reality, predictions. Unlike Auntie’s Choice and The Protectorate, the Order of the Ascendant seem to be fairly benign, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t subject to the same sort of temptation and corruption as the other two.

In addition to the big three, there are a couple of other cults and crime organizations floating around, but all are introduced in a way that allows the player to keep it all straight in their head. By adding in the new factions and pivoting away from the warring corporations of the first game, Obsidian has given this new system unexpected depth. Though most characters do blindly follow whatever faction they belong to, not everyone is beholden to a corporate master. The variety in jingoism is extremely welcome—the factions in the original game pretty much blended together in my mind, whereas these are much more well-defined. This makes dealing with the faction members among your companions much more nuanced and interesting.

Not to spoil too much, but it’s probably no surprise that over the course of your adventure you do end up picking up a gang of malcontents made up of interesting representatives from each of these factions to drag along with you as you bounce from planet to planet in Arcadia. Each of them, of course, comes with their own set of values and prejudices, though they do seem to repress these somewhat when joining your crew. I was particularly amused when dragging my Protectorate buddy through the holiest of holy sites for his faction, listening to him do logical cartwheels trying to justify and reconcile my behavior while I shot the place up and stole everything in sight, while still remaining faithful to his core beliefs.

I played The Outer World 2 half on Xbox Series X and half on PC. Gorgeous either way.

The usual set of side missions comes along with each of these companions, which is one of the primary drivers for my upcoming second playthrough. In addition to breaking bad (my first playthrough is almost always as a good guy), I plan to go back and complete more of these folks’ requests; there was simply too much to do and see to get to all of it the first time around.

Further replay value can be gained by the amazing number of choices you have when both creating and developing your player character. As usual, I find it amusing that these games offer the player a visual character creator at the beginning; more than ever before it made me laugh at how long I spent on this pointless activity, as I so infrequently saw my character in the game without armor that I can’t even remember what they looked like. But beyond physical appearances, the player has a ton of other options with which to create an avatar that will make their experience unique.

I went with a stealth/sniper build. Every level gained gives the player a few skill points to invest in a fairly sizable skill tree, but there are only 30 levels and zero chance you can max out more than one or two of the 20-or-so skills, so some tough choices must be made early on, or you’ll end up with sad clown that isn’t good at much of anything. Every other level, you get a perk point, which can further stack your build in the direction you are looking to go. 

I gotta say, I did find some of these perks to be underpowered and inconsistent. It didn’t help that my favorite—Serial Killer, which added permanent HP buffs for killing non-hostile Arcadia citizens—was nerfed during the review period. But I was still able to use these perks and some judicious equipment modding to eventually create an invisible, silent death dealer. By the time I finished the game, I moved much faster when crouched than I could standing up, and my weapons were doing 900%+ damage when fired from stealth. It took me a fair amount of time and some careful planning, but I was eventually clearing entire camps without once pulling aggro from baddies. The Outer Worlds 2 also keeps track of the way you play and periodically offers you "Flaws," which are like perks but you also have to take a penalty. For example, my character has "Overprepared," which gives me +50% magazine size on all my weapons, but a -40% damage penalty for eight seconds if I let my magazines go empty. That's just a mild one. Some of these can wildly alter your playthrough, which makes them fun but also dangerous. 

Gear choices are wide and varied but still streamlined enough to be manageable. You are essentially just dealing with a weapon, a single piece of armor, and a helmet that gives a few stat bonuses. But all of the above can be modded, and the game contains scores of mods for each weapon type. So, you can take that shotgun you love and add shock rounds and a silencer to it and create your own super-monster. I played through a huge swath of the game with a plasma pistol I had modded up, forgoing a lot of the flashier unique weapons I uncovered just because they weren’t as effective as my own creation.

As in the original The Outer Worlds, the game world is scattered among several planets and space stations in the Arcadia system. You can feel the creative hands at work behind each of these environments—there is zero procedurally generated nonsense here. All of the worlds are clearly hand built and distinct, while still imparting a continuity to the overall Outer Worlds universe. However, in a game with so much space to explore, there was one design choice that I found myself chaffing against.

Though the worlds are vast and fun to explore, the spaces between settlements feel a bit barren. There are a few wandering characters scattered about, but for the most part the wilds are sparingly occupied by wildlife—which is fine. However, The Outer Worlds 2 is one of those games where, once you kill something, it is gone for good. If you clear a cave or a settlement of scrappers, it is empty forever. Nothing ever respawns in this game. While this is understandable, it does have the effect of rendering large swaths of the world kinda boring once you have passed through them once. As someone who rarely uses fast travel, I found myself leaning on it heavily, as there was little point to creeping through endless fields where everything was already dead. I imagine that next month sometime we will start seeing YouTube videos entitled “I Killed Everything in The Outer Worlds 2.”

Still, that is a minor quibble in a sequel that has been so dramatically improved over the already great original. Redundant legacy systems have been streamlined, and the rest of the game has been expanded in meaningful and fun ways. Obsidian’s sense of humor is intact, but the jokes and story beats are less one-note, and many arrive as character moments as opposed to the first game’s relentless condemnation of consumerism. Combat is more varied and fun, and the ways you can customize your character are deep and effective.

This is a sequel that solidifies The Outer Worlds as its own viable franchise, pulling it from the shadow of the open world games I mentioned at the beginning of this review and refining its identity as a leader in this space. By pulling back on the ridiculous nature of the first game and making the game feel more human and identifiable, The Outer Worlds 2 feels more welcoming and approachable—a world that I will indeed want to revisit.