‘The Outer Worlds’ is a Universe Worth Caring About: A Review
What The Outer Worlds lacks in style, it makes up for in stakes. Every mission’s success or failure is reflected in the characters of Halcyon – their words, their expressions, and their tones. In my adventure, I led companions to impossible romances, replaced inept government officials with salt-of-the-earth citizens, and rid an entire city of its major drug epidemic. If I were to play the game again, I could just as easily have done it all differently – which I’m entirely sure would have been equally satisfactory. Despite the backdrop of a much larger problem, the more focused moments that zero in on the characters of The Outer Worlds are when it excels. In spite of lackluster atmosphere and combat, The Outer Worlds is one of the most uniquely written games in years, and its ability to create meaningful stakes make it one of the best role-playing games of the generation.
Smooth Talking, Smooth Sailing
At the beginning of Outer Worlds, I was tasked with assigning a myriad of available points and skills to my character. It’s almost overwhelming how much there is to choose from: you can choose to role play as a dumb brute that loves to smash enemies into pieces with melee weapons, a dorky scientist with no social skills but knows how to handle an energy weapon, or as I played it, a smooth-talking leader who knew his way around a grenade launcher. My character was just intimidating enough to make imposing threats when needed, and witty enough to make a joke when the situation called for it. It does seem like no matter the choice, Outer Worlds makes itself plenty easy to navigate toward the finish line. While there were certain side quests that would have better suited a weapons specialist or a stealth artist, I found that most missions could be solved by talking things out. And perhaps that plays right into the game’s strengths, as the dialogue is almost second-to-none.
There are a variety of ways to tackle each mission, as well as the conversations within those missions. I can recall a particular instance with an elderly woman who happened to be overseeing a stock of drugs I needed to access. After making creepy and uncalled for advancements on my character, I cut the conversation short and intimidated her into giving me access. It seems just as likely that I could have flirted my way to that access, but The Outer Worlds is all about letting me play the game the way I want to play it. It never made me wish I had chosen something different, though there were a variety of instances I would have loved to see play out differently. Instead, The Outer Worlds hooked me into the identity of my character – so much so that even days after finishing the game, I miss that presence.
The Outer Worlds doesn’t just establish a strong sense of identity with the protagonist, however. Alongside the protagonist are six companion characters, two of which can be selected to keep company outside of ‘The Unreliable’ – a hunky ship the protagonist captains and uses to traverse the galaxy. The companions each have a function in gameplay, with specialized abilities like a slow-motion shotgun pull or a hammer drop that stuns enemies. Though, it’s their constant presence as it pertains to the storytelling that makes the largest impact. Depending on which companions you choose to bring with you off of The Unreliable, they will chime in during certain missions, giving you their opinion or further informing the situation. Each companion has special knowledge, particularly in regard to specific areas in the game that serve as their hometowns.
My favorite of these companions is Parvati, an awkward engineer that has a near stockholm-syndrome relationship with her hometown, Edgewater. Not only did Parvati frequently serve as a voice of reason among my protagonists brash decision making, she had her own set of interests that existed entirely outside the goals of my character. Her major quest line is largely personal and totally forgoes any kind of violence or coercion. Instead, after meeting a gruff, talented engineer by the name of Junlei, Parvati develops a love connection that builds lost confidence and restores faith in her own abilities. To help her along, I was tasked with doing things like boosting her social skills by taking her out to a bar for a drink and finding a soap that might help her woo Junlie. And while I may have led Parvati to one too many drinks and a soap that gave her date an allergic reaction, the quest felt personal in a way that I hadn’t experienced since Mass Effect. Each interaction was memorable because the writing in Outer Worlds is so strong and effective. It serves as a reminder that games are at their best when developing a world that is worth caring about.
Joyless Combat
Unfortunately, many of the same quests that feature excellent dialogue and storytelling also mandate traveling to new areas, defeating enemies, and looting. None of these elements of The Outer Worlds deliver in even remotely the same stratosphere as the writing. These three issues really suffer as a combination of one another, since looting is reliant on exploring, combat is reliant on looting, and exploring is reliant on combat. Unexplored areas are uniformly filled to the brim with enemies, most of which have already been encountered within the first hour or two of the game. The enemies can be boiled down into three different categories: robots, creatures, and humans (or marauders, in most situations). Of the three, creatures tend to be the most interesting, as they each have a small number of variants and sizes.
Dispatching enemies isn’t very difficult in The Outer Worlds, even if you’re like me and didn’t put too heavy of a focus on combat statistics. The most fun method of combat is melee, which has an almost Dishonored like flow to it. You can block, dodge, swing quickly, or swing powerfully. There was potential for the combat to really help separate The Outer Worlds from its influences. Unfortunately, weapon variety is baby-pool shallow. There are only a handful of melee weapons available in the game and they all swing just about the exact same way. There are a handful of weapon brands, similar to Borderlands, but none of them have interesting branding nor design. They all wind up feeling the same, and the lack of truly unique weapons is a major strain on weighing whether tackling a side quest was really worth it.
Alongside the combat are a couple of additional features that will feel awfully familiar to anyone who has played a Western role-playing game in the last fifteen years. Despite not being able to see the protagonist from anywhere but the menu due to the first-person perspective, The Outer Worlds does offer some stylish-looking armor. From a practical perspective, armor can give minor defense bonuses and skill bumps, but nothing worth seeking out a new set after finding a good one. What does feel almost totally useless is the ‘Tactical Time Dilation’ (TTD), which slows down everything, including the protagonist’s actions. While there is a perk or two to enhance the speed of the protagonist’s actions during TTD, it frequently just served to prolong easy fights. Though, TTD does add a little flavor to the combat by providing a text-source of information about the aimed-at enemy. Weirdly, there never felt like enough time to read through the text because the slow-down was so brief.
Most of the available perks are useful, like the ability to run 25% faster or carry additional weight before becoming encumbered. Still, these perks are hardly interesting – especially when this feels like a perfect opportunity for The Outer Worlds to flex its creative muscles. While the stat boosts and perks are uninspired, the numbers behind Outer Worlds prove to be meaningful. Whether I was finding a highly-functional weapon or a suit that upgraded my stealth, blowing through enemies (or sneaking past them) because of the stats on my character felt increasingly satisfying – even if that satisfaction was just a result of having to spend less time in combat, and more in the dialogue trees.
Empty Worlds
The Outer Worlds is a beautiful game. It features sets that are alive with color and characters that are rich with detail. The skies are luminous and filled with stars, and the grounds range from full grass meadows to boiling pools of bright green sulfur. Despite all of that, however, is a game that seems far too large for its own good and an atmosphere that doesn’t feel coherent nor lived in. Most of the buildings scattered in the overworld can’t be entered, and some areas inside of the major cities have no particular function. For instance, there is a barber shop in Edgewater (the game’s first major city) and yet there is nothing that can be done to alter the main character’s appearance. For all of the engrossing identity that exists within the characters of The Outer Worlds, the world itself is sorely missing a more pronounced personality.
Part of this problem is the lack of original music. There are no radio stations, and there is a distinct lack of variety in the score – which is quite good if you can overlook its repetitiveness. One of the primary premises of The Outer Worlds is that a large number of Halcyon’s finest scientists have been frozen and put out of commission, thus leaving the world without some of its brightest solution-based minds. With the way the game is designed, with its lack of architectural interest and in-world music, I would have thought that it was all of the creative artists who were frozen over instead.
Again, this all becomes a snowball-like problem that builds on itself. Areas became less interesting to explore once I figured out that I was essentially looting the same places over and over again. Especially when I had gathered enough of the finite supplies like ammo and lockpicking materials, I found myself totally ignoring many of The Outer Worlds smaller areas. Most of the major quests took me through the more interesting villages and cities anyway, many of which did have unique identities told (again) through the Outer Worlds’ incredible ability to build its world through text – whether it be dialogue, found letters, or terminals with personal entries.
It’s incredible that in the midst of all the things that Outer Worlds doesn’t do well, its writing is so good that if it weren’t for this review, I’m not sure I would have cared. The characters are so deeply interesting – especially the companions, which are paired with wonderful performances by Ashly Burch (Parvati), Mara Jonot (Nyoka) and Dave B. Mitchell (Vicar Max) – that every ounce of effort to move forward with their quests felt worthwhile. Soaking up every word, exhausted sigh, or relieved smile made even the mundane tasks of taking out lifeless enemies or looting barren buildings totally bearable. By the end of my time with The Outer Worlds, I wasn’t ready to leave the characters. In spite of a satisfactory conclusion that helped detail the lasting impact of just about each and every decision I made, I couldn’t help but feel like just one more conversation with my companions wouldn’t have been wonderful.
The Outer Worlds is one of those experiences that does some things so well that it’s easy to forget how critically it fails in other aspects. At no point was I ever impressed with the combat, atmosphere, or exploration. But while all of those things were failing to grab my attention, I was too busy thinking about what decision I was going to make next or in what way I could make the people of Halcyon a little better off than I had found them. The intricate writing and series of meaningful choices make it so easy to care about The Outer Worlds, if only because it is so close to being exceptional that its shortcomings can be maddening in hindsight. The Outer Worlds can feel really empty on its surface, but by digging into the characters and each of the words they have to share, it’s one of the deepest experiences the genre has offered in years.
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