🔗 Share this article

Larger doesn't necessarily mean better. That's a tired saying, yet it's also the truest way to describe my impressions after spending many hours with The Outer Worlds 2. The development team added more of everything to the sequel to its prior science fiction role-playing game — increased comedy, foes, weapons, traits, and settings, all the essentials in titles of this genre. And it works remarkably well — for a little while. But the load of all those ambitious ideas leads to instability as the game progresses.

An Impressive Initial Impact

The Outer Worlds 2 establishes a solid initial impact. You belong to the Planetary Directorate, a altruistic organization committed to controlling dishonest administrations and businesses. After some capital-D Drama, you end up in the Arcadia system, a colony splintered by conflict between Auntie's Selection (the product of a union between the original game's two large firms), the Guardians (groupthink pushed to its worst logical conclusion), and the Ascendant Brotherhood (similar to the Catholic faith, but with math rather than Jesus). There are also a bunch of fissures causing breaches in the fabric of reality, but currently, you urgently require access a relay station for urgent communications reasons. The challenge is that it's in the center of a battlefield, and you need to find a way to reach it.

Following the original, Outer Worlds 2 is a first-person RPG with an overarching story and dozens of secondary tasks spread out across multiple locations or areas (large spaces with a lot to uncover, but not open-world).

The first zone and the process of reaching that comms station are remarkable. You've got some humorous meetings, of course, like one that includes a rancher who has overindulged sugary cereal to their favorite crab. Most lead you to something beneficial, though — an unforeseen passage or some new bit of intel that might provide an alternate route forward.

Notable Sequences and Overlooked Opportunities

In one notable incident, you can come across a Protectorate deserter near the bridge who's about to be executed. No mission is linked to it, and the sole method to locate it is by exploring and listening to the environmental chatter. If you're swift and sufficiently cautious not to let him get defeated, you can save him (and then save his runaway sweetheart from getting killed by monsters in their hideout later), but more relevant to the immediate mission is a energy cable obscured in the grass in the vicinity. If you track it, you'll find a concealed access point to the communication hub. There's a different access point to the station's drainage system stashed in a cave that you might or might not observe based on when you follow a particular ally mission. You can encounter an simple to miss person who's crucial to rescuing a person down the line. (And there's a plush toy who subtly persuades a squad of soldiers to fight with you, if you're kind enough to rescue it from a danger zone.) This beginning section is rich and exciting, and it seems like it's full of deep narrative possibilities that compensates you for your inquisitiveness.

Diminishing Expectations

Outer Worlds 2 never lives up to those initial expectations again. The next primary region is structured similar to a map in the original game or Avowed — a large region sprinkled with points of interest and secondary tasks. They're all narratively connected to the struggle between Auntie's Choice and the Ascendant Brotherhood, but they're also short stories detached from the central narrative plot-wise and spatially. Don't expect any environmental clues guiding you toward fresh decisions like in the initial area.

Regardless of compelling you to choose some hard calls, what you do in this area's optional missions is inconsequential. Like, it genuinely is irrelevant, to the degree that whether you permit atrocities or lead a group of refugees to their death leads to merely a passing comment or two of dialogue. A game doesn't need to let each mission affect the story in some major, impactful way, but if you're compelling me to select a group and pretending like my decision matters, I don't think it's irrational to expect something more when it's over. When the game's earlier revealed that it has greater potential, any reduction appears to be a concession. You get additional content like the team vowed, but at the price of complexity.

Ambitious Concepts and Lacking Stakes

The game's middle section attempts a comparable approach to the primary structure from the first planet, but with noticeably less flair. The concept is a bold one: an linked task that extends across several locations and urges you to seek aid from different factions if you want a easier route toward your objective. Beyond the repeat setup being a slightly monotonous, it's also absent the drama that this sort of circumstance should have. It's a "bargain with evil" moment. There should be tough compromise. Your association with each alliance should be important beyond making them like you by performing extra duties for them. Everything is absent, because you can merely power through on your own and achieve the goal anyway. The game even takes pains to hand you means of achieving this, highlighting different ways as optional objectives and having companions advise you where to go.

It's a byproduct of a wider concern in Outer Worlds 2: the anxiety of letting you be unhappy with your selections. It regularly exaggerates in its efforts to make sure not only that there's an different way in many situations, but that you realize its presence. Locked rooms practically always have multiple entry methods signposted, or nothing worthwhile within if they don't. If you {can't