‘The Outer Worlds’ is Good, But It’s Missing Something

Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds may be this year’s best reminder of how good storytelling can be in video games, but something has become abundantly clear to me a few dozen hours into the game: it’s suffering from a scarcity of atmosphere. The world doesn’t quite match the depth and intrigue of its characters. Most buildings are empty aside from a pile of uninteresting loot, NPCs hardly move from one spot to another, and the world building is designed entirely around dialogue or text-based terminal messages. It’s actually quite amazing how well The Outer Worlds manages to tell a story in spite of all that. Still, the game is missing the ambience that its influence in Fallout was always so full of.

And maybe it’s unfair to compare The Outer Worlds with Fallout. Especially when the former does so many things better. Its role-playing systems are deep and meaningful, its choice-based dialogue is the best I’ve seen in a western RPG since Fallout: New Vegas, and its characters are fascinating. Not to mention, The Outer Worlds is in its first iteration and was created with a fraction of the budget of Obsidian’s New Vegas. There is little doubt that as the potential franchise gets more time (and money) to develop, it will surpass the microtransaction-fueled design of current Bethesda titles, but it’s still missing a little magic. It’s just hard to ignore the obvious: The Outer Worlds is clearly designed under the influence of Fallout and to ignore that would be a disservice to the conversation. 

One thing lost in the conversation of comparisons between the Outer Worlds and Fallout, is that the latter franchise is drenched in atmosphere. Some might argue that the greenish-brown aethstetic is unpleasant, but it paints a picture of a world that has lost its complexion. In Outer Worlds, much of the world is packed with color – which seems to be one of the game’s many answers to complaints of Fallout fans everywhere (seriously, The Outer Worlds does just about everything it can to quell concerns from the Fallout playerbase – from developing a silent protagonist to providing a plethora of role-playing mechanics and skills). Unfortunately, those colors rarely mean anything or tell me anything about the world. And given some post-release information about how the game was neatly designed to accommodate people with color blindness, maybe that should be less of a concern than it has been for me. And I don’t doubt that I will be alone in missing the drab colors of Fallout, especially when Outer Worlds is almost always the prettier game to look at. The skies sparkle, the plant life is abundant, and the whole world doesn’t look like mud. But it never finds an identity that matches what is happening in the game’s world, and that’s an issue. 

A lack of really memorable areas doesn’t help, either. One of my favorite spots in Outer Worlds is the docked ship “Groundbreaker,” but it’s lined with shops and sections that largely look uniform to one another. This could be representative of the game’s larger critique against capitalism (in so far as everything is monopolized and looks the same), but the resulting feeling is that no specific area bothers to differentiate itself. Compare it to something like “The Strip” from New Vegas, which owns several full-blown casinos that all look different in a tacky kind of way that fits the world. The Strip feels alive, and even the best areas in Outer Worlds blend together into an amorphous blob of color. 

Part of the lack of atmosphere could very well be attributed, at least in part, to the absence of groovy tunes accompanying me as I silver tongue my way out of dire situations. In fact, the game even jokes about it’s lack of a soundtrack by playing its only tune when the protagonist asks to hear his or her favorite song: a little jingle that plays after you purchase something from a vending machine. The subtle score may have sufficed if there wasn’t so much time spent wandering the overworlds of ‘Halcyon’, but I sure do miss the likes of “I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire” and “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall.” These tracks helped build Fallout’s universe, and Outer Worlds relies much too heavily on its dialogue systems and (very well-written) terminal entries to build its world. 

If games like Dark Souls and God of War have taught us anything about storytelling in video games, it’s that the surrounding structure of the game’s world is just as important to building a world as a script is. The lack of a radio show, or just an ongoing track of music, is an absence that good writing alone isn’t enough to account for. 

There is little doubt that The Outer Worlds is already one of my favorite games of the year. Its writing is slick, funny, and impactful. I love just about each and every character that I’ve come across, and I’m even more attached to some of my companions like the insecure Parvati, who stumbles over words every chance she gets but always makes the most of her lousy circumstances. But it certainly isn’t Fallout yet, and even though I know it’s not totally fair to compare the two, it’s like not mentioning The Godfather when talking about Goodfellas. The lack of immersive atmosphere is a hole in this particular Fallout fan’s heart, and with Bethesda’s current direction and The Outer World’s recent release, I’m afraid it will be a long time before it’s filled.  

Thank you for reading. Your Patreon support keeps our community entirely Ad free.