The Outer Worlds
PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
Give Obsidian a matchbox and, we suspect, it could write a compelling setup on the back of it
Developer Obsidian Entertainment
Publisher Private Division
Format PS4 (tested), Xbox One, PC
Release Out now
From a distance, Edgewater looks hospitable. Its Victorian streets are lined with neon signs, and corporate cartoon mascots vie for your attention as you wander between guards wearing ‘better not start anything’ body armour. Having just walked through a wilderness populated by Raptidons and marauders who attack on sight before you made it through the gate, it feels like a haven of order and regulation.
It’s not until you get talking to a woman in the sick house and hear about how she’s been exiled because her illness has reduced her productivity that you start to see the rot. The fear just behind everyone’s eyes as you talk to them. Then you think back to something the gravedigger told you when you first walked into town, although you weren’t really listening at the time. He’s been digging graves his entire life, working up an endless corporate ladder of menial positions and, now a wrinkled old man, holds the title of ‘junior inhumer’ for the town. Edgewater’s lost to a kind of capitalist cultism that makes our own society seem Amish by comparison.
And you wouldn’t know it from walking around, but the town’s going to fall into chaos anyway, and there’s nothing the Spacer’s Choice corporation can do about it. A mysterious spaceship captain recently rerouted the power sustaining the town, sending it across to a nearby settlement of defectors instead. What Edgewater needs is strong leadership, but with the town cannery boss Reed Tobson laying face down in his own basement as the spaceship captain leaves town, it’s unlikely to get it.
What a knack Obsidian has for world-building. Give the studio a matchbox and, we suspect, it could write a compelling setup on the back of it. With a star system of The Outer Worlds’ magnitude, you get the kind of rich sense of place that feels like it’s been in our collective folklore for years already. A walk-in Hitchhiker’s Guide meets Fallout with remarkable depth for a new IP, a steady stream of tough decisions for the player to face, and factions whose view of the player changes accordingly, and consequences. Often regrettable ones.
This being the brainchild of original Fallout
creators Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, combat finds its basis in pen-and-paper character sheets. Those who specialise in energy weapons will probably be hapless in melee encounters, stealth mains will be hapless in all
encounters except the ones they slip by untracked, and players with high persuade and intimidate stats will talk their way out of potential conflict. On normal difficulty, The Outer Worlds is ruthlessly tough at first, serving to underline the point that you really should play in the style of the character you created with those scant first few stats and buffs. Having been in cryostasis for quite some time before a rebel scientist thawed you out, you’re somehow able to control time for a couple of seconds, and you’d think this would be an overwhelming advantage in any encounter. In reality it proves a handy crutch when the chips are down, nothing more.
The difficulty does let up as the hours roll by, but that only comes as a result of specialisation. Perks every two levels offer the chance to deepen those one or two aspects of the game your character’s competent in, until they’re not just competent but lethal. And further on still, that idea reaches its logical extreme with Flaws. Flaws are the anti-Perks, taking with one hand and giving with the other. Perhaps your legs took a lot of damage in gunfights. Will you accept a 30 per cent movement penalty and lose the ability to dodge for an extra Perk point? They’re always optional, but serve to deepen the laser-narrow focus of your build. Broadening your options in a fight still further are your companions, with Perks of their own and customisable AI routines broadly similar to Obsidian’s previous game, Pillars Of Eternity II. They’re better as characters than soldiers, though, often standing blithely around while you take onslaughts of laser fire, but even more often colouring conversations with their own perspectives. There’s Pavarti, a nervous, sexually confused engineer with an unwavering moral compass. Felix, a space station stowaway who lives life according to whim. Nyoka, an alcoholic tour guide on Monarch and orator of tall tales. These, like many of the cast, get under the skin.
When Boyarsky and Cain revealed they were working on a new game, they described it as “the combination of [Boyarsky’s] dark morbidity and [Cain’s] silliness”. Those twin forces vie for dominance in the early hours, when you land your stasis module on the man you were supposed to meet and crush him to death, and talk to dewy-eyed Spacers’ Choice recruits who can’t remember their own corporate slogan. It’s the dark morbidity that definitely wins out over the course of the game, though. The more planets you explore, corporations you negotiate with and splinter groups you either empower or eradicate, the more your feeling of futility deepens.
Typical of modern RPGs, the morality of your actions, and those of the other big players in the universe, is so murky that you never feel like you’re making a difference for the better. Rebels against the corporate regimes you at first found so oppressive eventually seem like entitled grandstanders. The Board, a faceless, unknowable controlling force throughout the Halycon star system, might just be doing the best job it can. It’s an uncomfortably nihilistic depiction of latestage capitalism, and if it’s intended as modern allegory, it’s perhaps best administered with a fistful of Prozac.
Although there’s a faint atmosphere of an Obsidian greatest hits album to The Outer Worlds, with notes of KOTOR planet-hopping and New Vegas’ gallows humour, the people and places here offer a fresh voice within a familiar framework. It might not always say what you want it to hear, but the words stay with you.