The Outer Worlds 2 is Bigger and better Than the First

I played The Outer Worlds earlier this year and enjoyed it enough (review here). I had some issues with it feeling a little light in the interesting story department and with how finicky the game was as a whole. I had also played Avowed earlier this year (review here) and I adored that and loved so many of the QoL features and the simplicity of a lot of the world while still having some complexity in the parts that I actually cared about.

Because of Avowed I was rather excited for Outer Worlds 2, hoping that the same things I loved about the former would appear in the latter. But did it? Did the game show that Obsidian is capable of not just producing kickass more refined and smaller RPGs, or is Outer Worlds 2 simply the poster child for how companies with 2 teams really shouldn’t release 2 games of the same genre within 8 months of each other? I have a lot to say on the topic, both positive and negative, so let’s dive in.

The Premise

You are an agent of the socialist government known as the Earth Directorate that is known for liberating different solar systems across the galaxy and now you’re on a mission to the system of Arcadia. There you are working with an Ancient who has already infiltrated the local government and science facilities and you’re there to help her with a mission. When that mission goes very wrong, and it takes an unexpected direction that ends with the destruction of the entire space station, you get launched out in an escape pod. There you end up in cryo sleep for almost 10 years. Once you wake up, the system has changed, corporate mergers have taken place, and massive rifts have emerged around the system threatening to destroy not just Arcadia but the entire universe. With you being awake, it’s time to find the agent who infiltrated the facility that exploded all those years ago and maybe find out why the mission went so wrong and even why the rifts exist in the first place. And possibly influence the ideology of those around you.

The Good

The gameplay is genuinely the best done in sci-fi version of this genre, it feels so good to go around shooting enemies with all of the different types of guns. It does take some time to really find the best feeling weapons in the game but even in the prologue you get a great little pistol that feels fantastic to run around and shoot. It’s smooth, the reloads are quick and have great animations, and just overall it’s a great feeling game. Obsidian has done something amazing this year where they took a genre where both the sci-fi and fantasy versions had underwhelming gameplay and made them both have fantastic gameplay. I mean the gameplay in the most well known games of this genre (the Elder Scrolls Games, Fallout and Starfield) have gameplay that is only fixed when you introduce mods, while Obsidian managed to make the base experience something that feels good and is, at its core, incredibly fun. Even if both Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 have issues overall, the fact they accomplished this is truly something special.

Okay, the companions in this game had a lot to live up to and personally, i think they delivered. I was far more interested in all of them than in the first game where it was really only 2 or 3 I was interested in. I did all of the personal quests here and it felt fantastic to both learn more about the characters and to disillusion them with their respective faction, moving them towards the Socialist Earth Directorate that, despite it’s issues, was still the better option. Particularly, Inez, a former contractor for the corporation Auntie’s Choice who was experimented on by getting a graft of a creature on her that unfortunately failed, was so so so pro-Auntie’s Choice and pro-ultra capitalism at the beginning. But then, after the developments of her story and my poking and prodding, I was able to move her away from that. I was able to pull her away from being an Auntie sycophant to her finally understanding that the corporation she dedicated her life to is kinda fucking awful and has lead to so much suffering. Of course it isn’t just her you’re able to do this with, being an ideological influence on your comrades is such an interesting experience and one that I cherish as I’ve done some similar things in real life but none have been as easy as it is in Outer Worlds 2 (since one is a videogame and the other is real life).

The general quest design and writing is also rather well put together. While there are plenty of moments of choices that are interesting and sometimes morally ambiguous, I think many of the best moments in the game come from smaller, more human character moments. They come from the characters reacting to something you said, to an implication, to your annoyance, or even to your intelligence (or lack there of). Those moments make a lot of the writing to me because it makes it feel more real. If my character said something really dumb, sure you can just ignore it and move on. Other times you can move on after unnervingly acknowledging it happened and that it was kinda awkward. Of course these moments are often centered around the very ideologies the characters each represent. Auntie’s Choice characters will react far differently to your snide anti-capitalist comments than The Order will. These seem pretty obvious that they’d be like that but I think what really sells it isn’t that it happens but the outlandishness of it all.

For instance, there’s one quest on Auntie’s Choice ship where you help a former Spacers Choice employee get back at the assholes of the new mergered Auntie’s Choice. You sneak into a PA room and put a tape in for it to be played ship wide. It rips into Auntie and how terrible the company is, but it blatantly does so outlandishly and without regard for how Spacer’s Choice was pretty fucking dog shit as well. While I would have liked for me to be able to do something more with this, like challenge the former employee’s ideology, I think it wasn’t necessarily needed. It was more of just a wish.

Back in November I reviewed Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 (review here) and I kinda hated how so many quests boiled down to running back and forth across the map. Obviously, Outer Worlds 2 did this much better, but it is just so apparent how much better they did it when you’ve played a game that felt so bland besides the fact that running around was really fun. So again, I loved the quest design in Outer Worlds 2 not just because of how great it is in general but also because of how great it is in comparison to many other games I’ve experienced recently. Even the original Outer Worlds had me bored during many of the quests because the writing felt more one dimensional with how everything had to be a joke and critique on capitalism and capitalism alone. Instead, here in the sequel, we see not just a base line dissection of Capitalism with a post-merger mega corporation that bought up a competitor (gee I wonder who that makes you think the situation is based on, certainly not Obsidian’s Parent company) but also critiques on the issues with blind fascist monarchy and belief in a higher power to the point of destruction for the people around you. Or, one could say, a critique on Fascist Monarchy and religious driven Monarchy. And, make no mistake, despite The Order being so fixated on “the plan” and science and math and shit, they are fundamentally a critique on those who believe in religion blindly and, instead of seeing something that contradicts their understanding of their beliefs as something that should make them question their blind faith, they bend over backwards to provide some kind of reason to the thing their beliefs didn’t predict.

Actually, speaking of, one of my favorite parts of the game comes on your second planet and it’s a fight with a guy who is trying to coup up The Order. He claims he, through his tremendous skill in math and science, has predicted everything. That he knew how you would act/react and therefore it showed how he must be the best and the one who is meant to lead The Order to greater heights than ever before. But then, at least for me, you don’t fall into his predictions. Instead you are incomprehensible and there is no rationale for you. This moment happens when you are chasing after him and are then given a choice, either save some hostages from being crushed or continue chasing after the guy. I chose to spend the time to get the key to save the hostages. But then I specifically pulled the lever to crush them. Because I was curious if it would let me. When I told this to the guy he begins to talk about how he knew I would save the hostages but pauses mid sentence and says “wait, you did what?”. To which I reiterated what I did and he just angrily expounds on how I am nothing but a ball of uncertainty and how fucking annoying that is.

That’s something amazing, that you as a character are actually breaking the idea of the plan even being a thing. Even if you aren’t ever actually able to convince people to stop believing in the idea of there being some known plan that must always be coming to fruition. The best thing about our world is the chaos that exists in it that allows us to choose who we want to be as people, but that’s far more philosophical than I’m interested in getting into.

Finally, I of course loved the Flaws System even if I didn’t choose to take most of them, the very idea of having your actions in the game be taken into account to determine what kind of flaws you get offered is a novel idea that Outer Worlds 2 really excelled at, far more than the original. Above are some of the flaws I was offered during my playthrough, some funnier than others. I didn’t take all of them but I could feel the game judging me every time I had one offered.

The Bad

Since I’ve covered the positives of the hub world design, let’s cover the flaws. One of my biggest issues is that I feel like the hub worlds are just too damn big. I know people like worlds that feel expansive but, to be honest, I felt drained with having to run everywhere in such large hubs. Eventually, because of that, I was just fast traveling everywhere because it was easier and less draining. To me this is frustrating because, in Avowed, the hub worlds felt like the perfect size. There, I was able to run around and always feel like I could find something new, something interesting. While in Outer Worlds 2 I simply feel bored. As if the only thing I could find is either emptiness or clusters of enemies with little purpose to be there. It felt like, because of Outer Worlds 2 coming out a mere 8 months after Avowed, they were unable to learn literally any lessons from it. They didn’t learn that one of the best parts of that game was feeling like the world wasn’t empty, like it had things that were important or useful everywhere. The Outer Worlds 2 failing at this core aspect made me really miss Avowed and feel like what made it so great was that that team was up against the wall having to develop the game with, likely, less budget than Outer Worlds 2, and less time in full development given the reboot in early 2021. I think Obsidian does their best work like that and it’s why I enjoyed this part of Avowed so much more than Outer Worlds 2.

The size of the hub worlds also just make it a pain to run around in. Again, in Avowed the world’s didn’t feel too large, there was never a moment where I picked my quest marker on the map, went out of menu, and then felt like it was so far away. While that was constant in Outer Worlds 2. It came to the point where every time early in a new location where my quest marker was over 900 meters away I just rolled my fucking eyes and started the trek. Sometimes, I did manage to find some interesting things but most of the time the only thing standing in my way of getting there were mountains (oh so many mountains) or some enemies. This sucked and was another reason I ended up fast traveling everywhere, something I only did very late in my time in an area in Avowed.

Also speaking more about Avowed, in Avowed they had this perfect QoL feature where you didn’t have to be looking exactly at something to be able to interact with it. You could be looking just pretty close to it. Like here for instance.

Notice how far away I am looking from the bush? Well here in Outer Worlds 2, let’s see how close you have to be.

See? It has to be almost exact. This makes for a lot of tiny tiny movements when you’re trying to pick up a lot of things right next to each other while in Avowed you could just tap the interact button multiple times to pick up things close to each other. I genuinely don’t understand why the Outer Worlds team would not make that small QoL feature a thing in this game. One of the worst parts of the first game for me (which I mentioned in my review) was that annoying exactness that Obsidian just didn’t change and that fucking sucked considering Avowed did it perfectly.

Something I got really tired of in the game is that I didn’t really have a ton of ability to push Arcadia towards the Earth Directorate. It was more just dealing with the ideologies there as opposed to spreading my own throughout the system. There definitely were some times but most of those were off hand comments. Like the time where I told a fascist something to the effect of “the only thing I hate more than capitalistic shills are authoritarian bootlickers like you.” There’s influence of the socialist origin of your character but, at least for me, there weren’t truly socialist decisions to make. Which I thought was sad since it seemed like the game wanted to critique capitalism, monarchism, fascism, and even a little bit of socialism, but then for the last one refused to dive super in depth on it. Even the Protectorate, the fascist faction that rules much of the system of Arcadia, gets a ton of detail about the goings on of their internal world and their history, even if we don’t get a ton of their motivation. I think part of this is that we, specifically the main character and Niles, are literally the only socialists from the Earth Directorate in the entire system. I basically just wish I had been able to find another solution to a lot of my choices that weren’t just capitalism or monarchism.

The closest I got to have a more socialist influence on an entire quest line was one side quest where i was tasked with breaking a strike of Auntie’s Choice employees. The Auntie’s Choice characters didn’t even know what a strike was (they thought the employees were literally attacking people), I was given the task by this horrible manager of, essentially, “negotiating” between the workers and the manager of the plant. But once I saw how the manager of the plant didn’t even seem to regard the workers as humans, viewed them as merely a stepping stone for ascent of the corporate ladder, I called her a monster and she basically said “okay? Now go get the workers back on shift, break some bones if you have to” (telling me to Pinkerton the place up). So I did break some bones. Hers. I shot her and the workers immediately went back to work and thanked me for changing the management and such. Now I don’t know if they managed to get a better person in charge, I kinda doubt, but that little amount of resistance felt pretty good and the workers were obviously very grateful. I wanted more of this, instead, this kind of situation was unique.

Now, this one is more complicated as there was a patch halfway through my playthrough that impacted it. Essentially, there are so many skill checks in this game and, at least for the first half of my time with it, they were just too damn high. Even after they were lowered the amount needed, it frustrated me that I felt like I had the game discouraging me to spec into more than 2-3 skills. Part of this was because you didn’t get as many skill points as I think you should have per level up but also just because you can’t re-spec. If you were allowed to do that whenever you wanted that would change this entire experience from a negative to a positive. It’s very possible this will be changed either through patches or through DLC. But right now? The game needed the ability to re-spec.

The Ending - Detailed

As with all of these types of games, there’s variations with endings and with the impact of prior choices you made in the game. This is purely my experience with the ending and yours will vary slightly, although, obviously, some core parts will remain the same. Anyway. This is how my Outer Worlds 2 playthrough ended.

**Start Spoilers**

After unlocking the archive and letting it process your rift data and getting the Order and Auntie’s Choice to work together, Horizon Point reappeared! Yay? That’s the center of the rift problems and as the Protectorate swoop in to control the area so they can research the rift to harness it for authoritarian purposes, you and your allies go there as well to fight back (doing the great circular narrative here of ending where it all began, but, this time, the environment has changed). Except it’s been morphed by the rift, torn apart and is filled with past dead enemies who have been reconstituted by the Rift, all of whom have lost their very sense of self and see everyone as a threat.

After a bunch of firefights, finding De Vreis and one of the original crew mates from the prologue that died in the fire talking together until she goes crazy and attacks all of you, getting resources from both The Order and Auntie’s Choice, you find a ship to fly up to the Protectorate Ship. There you do more firefights, but this time Auntie is there with her fancy new robot body, and you explore the ship. You discover that the rifts are impossible to stabilize and will tear everything apart, and eventually you confront the Consol.

He’s just as crazy as you’d expect a fascist leader to be, especially one who has essentially done a coup against the prior fascist leader, and he is convinced that the rifts will allow him to rebirth Arcadia into a system firmly under the Protectorates vision, instead of just tearing it apart and ruining everything.

Thankfully I was able to talk him down (much like the ending I got of Avowed), and he...decided to fly the ship into the rift causing them to close because of the absolutely massive rift modulator on it that is, afterall, designed to close the rifts. Interestingly for me, Ava wanted to go with him. I didn’t let her but she was definitely upset. She believed in her cult even after finding out it was all a lie...much like a lot of cultists do in real life so that’s a pretty accurate representation.

Then, there’s a slide show about what happens with all of the choices you made and characters you met in the game. Afterwards, credits.

**End Spoilers**

The Ending - Reaction

I honestly rather enjoyed most of the ending but there was still one thing that really bugged me, I wanted more of an influence with the Earth Directorate and, frankly, another choice for how things would play out. Besides that though, it was pretty great. It felt satisfying, I felt like my past decisions had a small amount of weight, and overall appreciated that I could still not end with a boss fight. That said, I think compared to the first game this ending felt more satisfying to me. There had been more build up and I felt more attached to the characters and choices. Plus in the first one I really didn’t feel like any of my choices mattered at the end of the games section, but this one? This one felt much more influential. Maybe not as influential as it could have been but there’s only so much you can do there without expanding the work out exponentially.

Also, I always appreciate a good slideshow and Obsidian showed me with Avowed that it can feel really satisfying to have the specifics. Especially seeing what happens with my companions after having done all of their quests. It was great.

The Conclusion

Honestly, I really did enjoy The Outer Worlds 2. But given a lot of my issues with the game and how, very similar to the first game, (I was comparing it to Avowed instead) I don’t think it left as big a mark as I was hoping. I loved the critique on different ideologies and showing that no matter the ideology there is a lot of nuance in the world and we should acknowledge that there is no perfect system when run by imperfect people. I loved the gameplay. I loved the writing. But there were still things that held it back and, when added up, mean I didn’t have as much of a good time as I expected to after my love of Avowed. As I alluded to in my intro, Obsidian releasing two games of the same genre within 8 months of each other fundamentally just lead to the Outer Worlds 2 team not being able to learn basically anything from the Avowed team. Sure it’s great, but it could have been amazing.

So yeah, I’d say if you really liked the first game you are likely to thoroughly enjoy the sequel too. That said, there are 2 DLCs in the works and it’s also still 70 bucks (except right now on Steam where it is on sale!) so it’s not a horrible idea to either wait for a sale or the inevitable complete edition. Just keep in mind that if you’re looking for something that feels as dense as Avowed or has as great of a hub world design, you are likely to be disappointed. Keep your expectations in check and you’ll have a great time!

Meow,

Cat