The Outer Worlds Made Me Miss Avowed

Earlier this year I played Avowed and fucking adored it (review here). It had everything I wanted out of an RPG, interesting choices, a fantastic story that didn't get distracted, characters that didn't just make you love them, but made you love the world they exist in, and smooth as butter gameplay that was also fantastic. It is one of my favorite RPGs ever.

Meanwhile, The Outer Worlds came out in 2019 and I started playing it in 2020 not long after lockdown. I enjoyed it a little bit, but fell off of it because it just didn't really draw me in. Now with Avowed out and me loving it, and Outer Worlds 2 coming out in just a couple months, I figured I should go back and try to actually play and finish the first one.

That experience was very...mixed. I loved a few things, but most of it was just underwhelming. It could have been a lot better and you can really see what Avowed built on, but Outer Worlds is just not the best experience 6 years on.

The Premise

The Outer Worlds is a hyper capitalist hellscape where the only thing that matters is work. The world is ruled by corporations and they have established different space colonies throughout the galaxy all in the service of a better lif- I mean, higher profits. You are one such colonist from the colony ship The Hope who was unfrozen late after your ship was lost in space. A scientist named Phineas Welles discovered your ship and picked you to unfreeze. When you crashland on a local planet in the Halcyon colony, you have to become captain of a ship, lead a crew, decide who lives or dies, and explore the whole colony in order to find out why, exactly, it seems to be failing. And all of this in service of hopefully unfreezing your fellow residents of The Hope so they can help save the colony. Do you support the people on the front lines who do the work to keep the colony going? Or do you support The Board of the corporations in charge simply because they have all the wealth and can pay you more? The choice is up to you.

The Good

The characters and setting are Outer Worlds strongest aspects. The writing makes you feel immersed in this world of Halcyon. You see the extreme corporation filled capitalistic hellscape that it exists in. You get to see things like the suffering from starvation that citizens of one planet are dealing with, the ramifications of having one planet be abandoned by the corporation that used to exist there but still have people living there thus leading to what may as well be a civil war between the town and Cultists who just want a chance at freedom without the BS that is dealing with the Board looking over their shoulder. You get to see the mass extermination of "early retirees" in a very Nazi like fashion (but with robots to make it "easier"). You see a space station dealing with being short of supplies because the corporations are cheap asses, you get to see the horrible truth behind the origin of the Marauders and the Adrena-time drug and how research only being driven by profit will lead to genocidal outcomes. The writing executes all of this excellently and it feels well realized even if there are moments of shallowness. Add on the tremendous amount of lore that the game provides and you can definitely see that this world is lived in and people have had to suffer through their lives there.

Then, when you get to the characters you really start to find the charm that keeps you playing. Parvati is particularly one of my favorite characters, as she was for many of other players, but all of them are interesting. Even if not AS interesting as her. The characters you interact with are all dealing with the failure that is the Halcyon colony and having to accept that they are merely cogs in the larger machine of hyper capitalism. It's fascinating to see their stories unfold and the details of the world that they reveal to you during their stories and quests. Genuinely the best parts of the quests are interacting with the people in them.

I usually don't bring DLC into my reviews but Outer Worlds has some of the best DLC for this type of game (first person futuristic RPG). It didn't just provide a new area to explore with a new story, it also provided more depth for the area and story that I had been existing in for the entire game already. It allowed me to meet new awesome characters and make interesting decisions. It was genuinely very enjoyable.

The Bad

Obviously this game has been out for a while now, as there is a sequel coming out in just a few months, but something I genuinely got frustrated with is the lack of Mantle. This is something that is just so constant in so many older fps games that you forget about it when you mainly play newer ones. Avowed had a wonderful mantle system and I hope Outer Worlds 2 has the same because here in 1, it was brutal. Constantly running up against spots that, with a mantle, I'd be able to reach no problem. Yet, because the game doesn't have that system I was just constantly reminded of Destiny 1 in that my characters ankles must be so damn beat up with how much they run into things.

Now, something I've been tired of for a while and that ruined my experience with both of the recent Zelda games, and even dampened my Witcher 3 experience back in 2015, is breakable weapons. Here it isn't as awful as it is in Zelda, but it still sucks. It's a system that feels like a relic of the past that is just wholly unnecessary and brings zero benefit to the game. All it does is means you have to stop by a workbench every so often to repair your weapons and armor. But that's just tedious and annoying. Breakable weapons, whether this way or fully breakable like in the most recent Zelda games just needs to die as a game mechanic. Thankfully, I think it broadly has, although the next Zelda might bring it back and hey, maybe Outer Worlds 2 has this system and I don't even know it yet. It just pisses me off.

The gunplay is also....ehhh. I think it very much gives off the feeling of Obsidian struggling to make an FPS game by themselves as the last one they made was New Vegas which was in the Fallout 3 engine so largely has all that already done. But this, there's some good parts and, much more, bad parts. For instance, I think a big problem is just how little damage your guns do. I feel like I'm using a pee shooter often which is just infuriating when I'm using the most powerful gun I have against not super difficult enemies. I get needing challenge but Avowed had a wonderful amount of challenge without making you feel like you weren't doing much damage. That said, you can really see Obsidian learning in the game when you compare it to Avowed. You can see that Outer Worlds laid the groundwork for what Avowed would eventually become. It's rather fascinating making those comparisons and I rather enjoyed viewing it from that game development perspective even if the overall feeling is just kinda crap. The Outer Worlds takes way too long to have the basic Gameplay be fun, mainly until you get some interesting weapons and your skills get much higher. Avowed, however, is fun almost immediately. That's what I'm hoping Outer Worlds 2 does. Makes a game with the setting of Outer Worlds and the smooth feeling of gameplay of Avowed.

There's also a lot of little problems with the game that make it finicky. Things like having to point directly at an object to be able to interact with it and then also having the interact and reload buttons being the same thing so if you're trying to tap X to pick something up but you're not quite pointing at it and you also happen to have less than max ammo in your clip then congrats you're reloading and can't interact with what you wanted to interact with until the animation is done. Or how the game is often built around having your companions with you at all times but several beneficial perks that you can unlock are designed around not having them in your party. Honestly, many of these problems are only as glaring because of how Avowed really fixed them. Avowed showed Obsidian can truly make a game that has great writing and gameplay, while Outer Worlds only showed they can make a game with good writing.

Meanwhile, the stat system is kinda meh. You have this really basic set of skills that you, at least early on in skill number, can only upgrade groups of. They're basic, but get the job done. The problem arises with one of the other biggest draws of the game that ended up just falling flat for me: Flaws. Basically every so often you'll get moments where, after doing something enough times, you'll get the opportunity to pick up a flaw that will give you one perk point but then you have to deal with the downsides of said flaw. For instance, if you take too much shock damage, you'll eventually get a popup to take the shock damage vulnerability flaw where it does more damage to you...but you get a skill point. It's an interesting idea but they always ended up feeling underwhelming and not worth it. Since the combat was often so difficult, why would I want to take more damage from a damage type that I face a bunch? And just for a skill point? Not gonna happen. This was something I was intrigued by originally and based on what I've watched for the sequel it definitely seems it was improved on, but in the first one? It's kinda crap.

The Ending - Detailed

**Start Spoilers**

Obviously this is an Obsidian RPG game that has a multitude of endings so what I will be going over here won't necessarily match what you might have or might end up experiencing, it's just what I got.

After Skipping The Hope into the star system in orbit of Terra 2, I went to Phineas' lab only to discover that he has been taken by the Board and was put into Tartarus, the maximum security prison for the colony (thankfully I had corrupted their tracking signal so he had time to prepare before they got to his lab). After talking to my crew to get their opinions, I went to the prison to rescue the old timer.

I landed and persuaded a guard to give me his ID info and then was able to literally walk through the rest of the level disguised, casually avoiding people as much as possible so that I didn't get discovered when my disguise dropped for a moment.

Then, I got to a room where the Board Chairman finally showed his face, for the first time the entire game, and told me to back off. To which I said I was looking forward to killing him. He then said there was the best killing machine ever in the next room and I better not scratch it.

Well. I destroyed it in mere moments, which felt very anticlimactic. Then walked up to rescue Phineas only to find the Chairman there, killing him in 3 shots, and then just rescuing Phineas. Talked to him and it was done. I decided to lead Halcyon because I was the only competent leader left and on we went to the slideshow.

And what an okay slideshow it was, finding out what happened to my companions (like Parvati going to live on with her partner on the Groundbreaker), to the towns I helped (like Monarch finally dealing with the famine since they have plenty of corpses for fertilizer), to the people I helped, to Phineas, to Halcyon, and to me. It covered all the things you'd expect with nothing that really surprised me or provided interesting outcomes to your choices, like how Monarch survived. I already figured that was gonna happen since that was the ending to that quest, all the slideshow did was confirm it. Not as interesting as it should have been.

**End Spoilers**

The Ending - Reaction

While I didn't do everything possible so I could get the best ending, I did everything I was interested in. The ending, however, just fell flat. Not only was there not some big final fight but the bad guy you kill to end the game, the Board Chairman, is only seen for the first time just before you kill him. It felt rushed and like they had intended for there to be more.

The slideshow at the end provided more information of course which was appreciated, but I still don't think it really made up for the lackluster ending. It was a real shame honestly because I thought the writing was so damn good. To have the last mission kinda fall flat sucked a lot of the air out of my sails. Although it was cool to be able to just walk through the whole damn level without fighting because of how high my persuade skill had gotten. That was probably the most satisfying part of the mission.

The Conclusion

Okay. So. The Outer Worlds is just so mixed. For a game that provides a world that I loved, the gameplay pulled it so far down that it became frustrating to play. It took it from me looking forward to learning more about the story and characters (like in Avowed), to just dreading continuing to the next area cause I'd have to do more and more difficult fights (unlike Avowed where I loved the combat). The game is a fantastic world establishing experience that I know Obsidian is fully capable of taking and making a fantastic sequel to, but this one just was not very good.

If you haven't played it and want to before the first one, you should only do it if you really, really want to. It's kind of a drag in some parts, the combat is annoying for most of the game until you get some really powerful weapons, and it just feels kinda half baked especially with the ending. It's not a horrible game, you just should only play it if you are craving a futuristic Obsidian RPG. Otherwise, just jump into the second fresh faced. It's not a continuation of that story.

Oh and maybe just play Avowed if you just want a good Obsidian RPG, that one fucking rocks.

Meow,

Cat