Now Playing: The Outer Worlds

If you’ve read my initial impressions of The Outer Worlds you’ll know that, despite liking the RPG mechanics and finding a lot to like about its setting and style, I wasn’t really enjoying the way the game structured its quests, and I wasn’t finding myself particularly engaged by its narrative or characters. I was hoping that, as the game progressed, The Outer Worlds would finally draw me in and make me care about this world and the people within it. Unfortunately, The Outer Worlds never quite managed to do so.

I don’t want to spend this entire reviewing dunking on The Outer Worlds because there is a lot I like about it. As I said in my First Impressions post, the way the game handles the various player skills and ties these into both dialogue and quest choices is very impressive. I love how many options the game gives you as to how you can go about completing the various quests. I also really like the dual nature of the main quest line which is essentially split – if you’ll excuse the simplification – between the ‘good guy’ and ‘bad guy’ path.

As disappointed as I am by The Outer Worlds it’s still a game I might return to again in the future to play through that ‘bad guy’ path and see just how much I can f**k up the game world. I liked the little ‘epilogue’ scenes at the end which give you a sense of how your choices impacted the future of the Halcyon colony and, perhaps more importantly, the people you met along the way. Purely from an RPG standpoint of choices and consequences, I can’t really fault The Outer Worlds. It has some of the best quest variety determined by player choice / dialogue / skills I’ve seen in a long time.

The real problem with The Outer Worlds is that, despite the cool, Firefly inspired ‘space western’ setting, the impressive RPG systems and the solid, if not particularly inspired combat, very little of it is interesting to play from a narrative standpoint. It is, to put it simply – kind of boring.

Although I like the setting and the humorous approach to characters and quests, it results in a story that you can’t really take seriously because the game never really takes anything seriously. It’s far too glib for its own good. Firefly was a show full of humorous touches and characters who could see the funny side of serious situations. But it knew when to tone down that humour and casual approach because, like The Outer Worlds, it was, at heart, a pretty dark setting where bad shit goes down more often than not.

 

The Outer Worlds lacks that serious, darker edge that would really complete and make this a world worth believing in and – more importantly – fighting for. It’s just so tongue-in-cheek about everything to the point that if the game doesn’t really care, why should you?

The quests, as I described in the FI post, typically adhere to a repetitive structure that doesn’t really evolve from one world to the next. And the game doesn’t break quests down into sub-objectives the way it really should, instead preferring to create separate quest entries based around a single location. This isn’t a major issue, more of a reoccurring annoyance, but it results in a situation where you stop caring so much about the content of a quest objective, and instead just want to clear it in order to reduce your ridiculously expanding quest log.

 

The crew you can recruit on your travels are a pretty bland and disappointing bunch. They ain’t the crew of the Serenity, that’s for sure. You only really get to work with and know two of them prior to their recruitment but the rest just kind of join you because . . . well, just because, I guess. None of the companion quests are really any good either. I wouldn’t say they’re bad, but they suffer from the same problem as so many of the quests in the game – they’re just so by the numbers and bland.

In terms of quest narratives, there’s nothing here you haven’t seen and played before. Do you recall that mission I talked about in my FI post? The one with the missing worker? Even before I entered that damn house I knew it was cannibals because of course it f**king was. It always is. The Outer Worlds never surprised me. It never really took a risk or presented me with difficult choices. It was all too obvious, too clearly structured and too damn easy.

The Outer Worlds feels like a real missed opportunity. The underlying RPG design and combat works well and I like the setting as a whole. But the game doesn’t strike the right narrative balance, it relies far too heavily on safe and familiar quest design, and it doesn’t do enough to connect you to this world or the people within it. You never really care about what’s at stake or who might live and die because the game doesn’t really seem to care, either.

 

As a result, you just run through it, disconnected from the narrative and the choices you’re making. I can appreciate the underlying systems and mechanics, but when the narrative aspect of the game is so damn dull, that doesn’t really count for much.

I’m certainly not going to write off The Outer Worlds as a bad game. It’s not. And, like I said, I might even give it another shot in the future and try out the other major path. It might be a lot easier and more enjoyable to play as a ‘bad guy’ who doesn’t care about the world, people or consequences when the game doesn’t seem to either. Hell, maybe that’s the way it’s intended to be played.

Overall, The Outer Worlds is a mixed bag of solid mechanics and an interesting setting, let down by tired, safe and predictable quests, rather shallow characters and a real lack of a darker edge that would prevent the world from feeling like a pointless joke. I’d still recommend checking it out (on sale) if you’re really into choice driven RPGs, but otherwise, give it a miss.

5/10