“Oh Boy.”
When I started this game I felt like Sam Beckett – leaping into a character I don’t know, a world I don’t know, full of people I don’t know, and hoping to leap out having a made a difference, saved a life (or lives) and accomplished something important. And like with Sam, I had to go through a lot of shit and aggravation to get things done, however by the time I leaped out all I felt was empty, an overwhelming and pervading feeling of “meh”. For me this game is just decidedly average and I’m going to tell you why I think that.
Before I begin, I know the hellfire I am walking through with this. Obsidian has a lot of fervent fans, this game has been praised to the highest heavens, and here I am giving what I know is a highly unpopular opinion. Derision is no doubt coming my way and that is ok. We all have our opinions, they are not facts, and they are completely subjective. My goal in sharing my view is not to criticise or disparage those who love and appreciate the game, their view is as valid as mine, it is just to give my thoughts on what I enjoyed and what I did not. I get heated and passionate about things, but please remember that my frustration is aimed at the game and not those who enjoy it.
So let me just send my love to everyone who reads this, whether we agree or not, and let’s keep on gaming 🙂
Something great about The Outer Worlds is the graphics and how the worlds look. The colours used in the game are absolutely beautiful, I would often find myself stopping in the game to gaze up at the sky or look down from a hill and take in a landscape. If you took the aggressive native species, marauder gangs and corporate politics out of the equation, this game looks like a Pastel Paradise!
The setting here is original. It is an RPG in space, set far away in another system where humans have colonised and live within a corporate dystopia. And the physical look of the worlds is perfect for setting this up; just how beneath the beauty of this world are dangers lurking round every corner, beneath the happy and joyful slogans and smiles is the pain of its people who are slowly starving to death, suffering with plague and living in poverty.
The idea of a corporate dystopia is such an interesting one to explore because it can often feel like we are not too far away from that with every passing day. It can often feel that corporations and marketing departments are getting more and more out of touch with what is happening in the real world and what people really want and need. So many times I have been to the cinema to watch a film and see an advert about how we should all be interested in buying this amazing £35,000 car, however if you were take the people sitting in the room and see how many could afford that, it would be a very small percent. No, what they want you to do is take it out on extortionate finance so you can look like Mr Big Bollocks when in reality your bollocks are shrivelled up from the cold harsh realities of life.
Great moments during the game are when you go to certain places and slogans and adverts are being thrust in your face at every opportunity. Dear Martin here has to constantly use marketing spiel every sentence, it is impossible to have a conversation with him as every attempt just ends in his regurgitating a line about why you should buy a certain product and how it will make your life complete. You can’t even enter Monarch without some guy trotting out his line about how amazing Stellar Bay is. In Byzantium the people are considered wealthy and elite and so do not wish to work. On every other colony pretty much everyone works and this is enforced by the board, and the wealthy very rarely travel outside of their privileged bubble. So the irony here, is who are these people trying to sell this idea and product to? Their own neighbours who are also probably working every hour under the sun and impoverished?
Most of the time it just feels like the person they are really trying to sell the lie to is themselves. You only have to take a look out the front door, smell the Raptidon shit, eat a sprat as you do every day, and see the truth. It just often feels like no one ever wants to. Perhaps denial really is bliss.
Looking at the gameplay, something I really appreciated in The Outer Worlds is the lack of frequent loading screens and loading times which can usually be so annoying! How many times have you played a game where you have to fast travel to a main area, have to walk your character to the exit of that area, have another loading screen, before you can fast travel in the local area, giving you another loading screen! This doesn’t happen here, you can head to a planet where you automatically go into a main area and using the menu you can immediately fast travel into the regional area. This is great in keeping you immersed in the game and story and not having to waste time with one loading screen to another which can get really tedious and irritating pretty fast. There are also different ways you can go about handling quests that come your way; you can kill everything in your path, take a stealthy approach or pass a skill check to get what you need. It’s up to you and the kind of character you are creating.
Following on from other RPG’s, you do have companions that you can recruit and take out on quests with you. This is always interesting to do as they will have conversations between themselves in-between fights, giving you a chance to learn more about them, and they will also comment on the actions you take during missions as well as give their opinions on what you should do. Something I liked was that when talking with NPCs, your companions would often give their opinion on the person or what the person was saying, and the NPC would turn to look at them and address this, speaking directly to them. I hadn’t seen that before and thought it was a really great touch.
The ending was satisfying as it covers all of your actions in relation to the main quests, the side quests and the factions you met and interacted with. I remembered being surprised that people I felt I had only interacted with in a minor way were brought up in regards to how I helped them. You also get to see what happened to your companions after your travels together, if they ended up happy with their lives or if their experience with you only brought them pain.
Everything was wrapped up into a nice little bow for me. And here is where the pros for me end.
Sadly there are far more things that turned me off the game completely and had me finish the game with a sour taste in my mouth. Some of which, at least for me, are huge problems whereas other things are smaller gripes that ate away at my experience over time. All in all though, these are the things that don’t make this a 9 or 10/10, masterpiece, second coming of Jesus game that it is being made out to be. I think that very few games can ever be THAT good and a game like this with this many problems just doesn’t stand up to that level of excellence.
Let’s begin with the gameplay side of things: a minor gripe I had with this game is the first person perspective. It’s minor because if it had been that alone that put me off, it wouldn’t have been a big deal. The thing is though, I spent ages creating my character, her face, her hair, makeup and scars only to never fucking see her unless I go idle and the camera starts panning around to passive-aggressively tell me to come the fuck on. The character creation system is pretty decent with different presets and options to change details of the face to give the opportunity for you to create someone unique to be the hero of your story and then you never see her again. Yes, I knew it was first person going in, but when I saw the detail I could go into creating my character I thought that I would most likely be able to see her in cutscenes or in dialogue with NPCs. NOPE. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever in creating an in-depth character creation menu that the person spends a while on for them to never see them in any circumstance. Give us a basic creation system so we can just move the fuck on in that case.
The music in the game is nothing to write home about. I remember playing Mass Effect and loving certain tracks so much that I would listen to them while working on my PC or as general background music. Some of the music in that game made me feel so sad and when I hear it, it still brings back memories and a feeling of nostalgia. The music in The Outer Worlds is ok, average, kind of generic. it never stood out to me and there was one track that after hearing it so many times I wanted to scream. It’s not reflective, emotive, atmospheric really, it just gets extremely repetitive as you begin to hear it over and over again. The first few times it’s ok, not outstanding but it does it’s job, but for 30 hours worth of game it slowly begins to do your fucking head in.
The combat system is so extremely uninspiring, it’s like even the developers couldn’t be arsed with it. You will be fighting the same few enemies over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. You have some creatures (raptidons, primals, mantiqueen), robots, and humans (corporate soldiers or marauders) and that is literally it. The creatures often respond and attack in similar ways to each other, like the corporate soldiers and marauders attack in the same manner, it is just the same thing for 30 fucking hours of gameplay. Any time you go to a world, you know exactly what you will be facing. It’s not a surprise, there’s no HOLY FUCK HOW DO I KILL THAT, you just do it the way you do your taxes; it’s a chore but you just have to get through it. It gets even worse because the AI is broken! Marauders don’t use cover they just stand out in the open or run towards you. You can take out a marauder from a distance and their mate standing a few feet away just stands there. There is no depth or complexity to the combat system whatsoever and I was already bored with it after I left the first world, about a quarter of the way through the game, and I am terrible at combat sections usually. In other games though, even if I’m not the best, I still enjoy it. This was just tedious.
The weapon and armour system is also a major disappointment. There are not a vast amount of either and often you just find improved versions of them as you progress through the game. The armour doesn’t look particularly amazing and again, even if it did, you’d never fucking see how awesome it is as it’s in first person the whole time! There wasn’t a moment in the game where I was excited about finding a weapon or armour and impatient to use it, I just compared it to my own to see if it was better and went from there.
This same feeling of disinterest and even apathy lends itself to the perk system as well. The perks are unimaginative and to be frank, boring. Do you want to walk a bit faster? Carry a bit more? Have a little more health? There’s not reinventing the wheel and then there’s trying to sell me the wheel when I’ve been using it my whole life already. There was a kind of Debuff system which could have been cool but somehow they managed to fuck that up as well. Say for example you keep falling to your death off ledges, the game will propose that you take some negative attributes because of it, like you run slower because you’ve fucked up your legs, in exchange for a perk point. Well first of all, don’t propose that! Slap that shit on and tough shit! If you keep falling off ledges then watch where you’re going! It would have made the game more interesting to be cautious of things like that so as not to get the debuff or be stuck with it and spend the rest of the game paying for your mistake. Don’t give us the choice and pander to the player. Also, there is no incentive to taking this up when the perk system is so average that there is no perk that you have your heart set on. Levelling up was also less interesting for me as you have to level up groups of skills to level 50 before you can specialise. For example. you need to level up the dialogue skill that includes the lie, intimidate and persuade skill until level 50 before you can choose which one you want to focus on. Why the fuck you ask? Who knows. Instead of being able to create a very specific type of character, you have to become adept at most things for half the game before you can focus in on who you want to be. If you want to be a stealthy handgun-wielding ninja, you’re going to have to level your ranged weapons to 50 first as well. Now if that sounds like a waste of time to you……
The game also introduced a Holographic Disguise system so that you can enter restricted areas undetected. To be able to use it, you just need to find a cartridge for the disguise you need and then off you pop on your sneaky sneaky adventures. Be warned though, you have a timer and if that runs out you’re going to get in trouble and be sent to the naughty step so use it wisely. Amazing right! Wrong. First of all, you know where you can find the cartridge you need to enter the restricted area. Right next to the restricted area door. This game doesn’t want you to have to try and figure things out on your own, it’s like wanting their consumers to think for a minute is just beyond the realm of possibility! Instead they just spoon feed the solution to prevent you getting a headache from all those thoughts you’re doing.
It gets even more insulting though, because once you have “found” the cartridge and you’re in the area the timer starts. BUT if you exit the area it restarts again. And if you get caught by a guard at any point, you can just pass an easy skill check and you’re good for another TWO MORE ATTEMPTS. And by the time you may actually run out of time it’s not a problem, because the game has many restricted and non-restricted areas within one level so you’re bound to exit the area, get your full timer back in time for entering the next restricted area. You have to actually be a fucking moron and walk in circles until it runs out again before you are in danger of any repercussions from being in that area. And even if you do get caught, you may kill a few people, and then BOOM, disguise is back. They have created a stealth system that is so afraid of you losing that it will bend over backwards to make sure that you don’t get caught so there is no risk involved, no stress of getting caught, you just amble along like you do the rest of the game.
Another way the game likes to hold your hand is that there are no kinds of puzzles or challenges in this game. I am not the biggest fan of puzzles, I’m usually pretty laughable at them, but when i think of the Fallout games I loved having to pick the lock or hack the computers ourselves, it was never impossible but got you thinking and presented a challenge to get to the goodies within. The Outer Worlds is just like “your hacking/lockpicking is high enough, there you go, take it all.” There’s no satisfaction in having a high enough hacking skill if I don’t actually get to hack anything.
The maps in The Outer Worlds are relatively small, not true open world, that alone is not a bad thing. The problem is how that is handled. A game like Fallout has very little cutscenes if any at all, most scenes are through dialogue, but it works because the map is huge and there is so much to discover. Mass Effect however had smaller maps and a more linear story. This was supplemented with great combat (Mass Effect 1 aside!) and great cutscenes to carry forward the story. In Mass Effect, once you had done a main mission and the couple of side missions on a planet, that is it and you’re on to the next so there is always something new to discover. The Outer Worlds doesn’t do this. It has small maps and a linear story, but very little worlds to explore and the ones you can explore are re-used to death. Not only that, but for a linear game, there are very few cutscenes whatsoever to carry the story forward. It is all supposed to be done with dialogue and exploring, but dialogue often feels empty and there isn’t much of interest to explore.
This really shows later on in the game when you come across quests that require you to go back to the same map and the same building you already explored to pick something up. You will have exhausted the smaller map and completed all the side and main quests in that world, to go to the next world, to get a quest to go back to the previous one but there is nothing new to explore there, no new building or town that is now unlocked. This means that you just fast travel, walk past the dead bodies that you killed the first time round, head to the terminal you have already read and press a new button on it. Quests become extremely repetitive because of this and there is virtually no excitement derived from it. It just feels lazy. Smaller maps are ok if done right, but not in a way where you reuse and overdo the same damn areas without generating any new incentive or reason to go there again other than “get this”.
To give you an example there was a quest I received at the end of the game to go and collect 4 beacons on the different worlds. I literally fast travelled to the world that I had already depleted, ran to the objective having to engage in another boring combat session on the way, picked up the beacon, fast travelled to the next world and rinse and repeat. The fact that you get this quest at the end of the game means that the game already knows you’ve been and done all these worlds, that there is nothing new there, and yet off you go. It was the most tedious, pointless mission of the whole game.
The Outer Worlds doesn’t do this, it gives you quests that feel like there is nothing to be gained other than fetching and having another quest to add to your “completed” belt. There was another quest given at the end of the game to find complete Marauder, Iconoclast and Spacer outfits, armour and helmets. Chances are you may not have the full sets so GOOD LUCK! This involves having to fast travel to worlds just to buy the fucking thing and then come back. I didn’t have a marauder helmet so had to spend ages on a map just looking for them to kill, but as they don’t all drop armour, it took time to find one who gave me a damn helmet. When combat is lazy and boring, this isn’t a fun thing to do! Quests should not just be there for the sake of a fucking quest. Even during Parvati’s quest, you have a dialogue option to ask her if you are finally at the end of searching for random objects for her. If the game even acknowledges that you would be getting sick of its endless fetch quests THEN WHY ARE THEY STILL FUCKING THERE! It’s not “woke” to say “hey, we feel you, they’re annoying” when you shovel it into the game anyway! You want a pat on the back for admitting you’ve pissed me off?
Now we’re going to get into what I feel are the biggest issues with the game and why I found it hard to give a fuck. Aside from Parvati who was ok, the companions are pretty uninteresting and bland. If the end game had come around and they had all died of sprat poisoning, I would have just shrugged my shoulders and moved on. This game doesn’t take much time for you to get to know them, but we’re supposed to care for them and we’re supposed to believe they care for us? For example, I recruited Felix. I took him out, he chatted on and off during missions with whoever companion was also with us, had the odd interaction with the NPCs, and I found out a little about him. None of those conversations were with me. On the ship, apart from a few questions I could ask him once I had initially recruited him, there was nothing new to ask. NOTHING. I would try and talk to him in-between missions but once those initial dialogue options had been exhausted he had nothing to say. Same with Vicar Max and all the others.
When you board the ship, ADA might tell you an interesting conversation is happening between 2 companions but it never lasts long or is particularly interesting. It also caught me out once, as I boarded the ship and ADA asked me that if I saw Parvati, could I ask her to send SAM to the bridge. So I look for Parvati and find her with SAM. I click on her to ask her to send SAM to the bridge and there’s no option to do that. I try to ask SAM and there’s no option to do that either. I honestly thought that ADA maybe needed SAM for something cool, or there might have been a funny dialogue between them but nope! So, joke’s on me?
Given that after recruiting your companions and exhausting that initial dialogue, there is not much else to be said unless it’s about a companion fetch quest, I didn’t develop any rapport or meaningful relationship with these people. They were just there, doing their own thing with their own agenda, until they want help from me. Going back to Felix and the non-existent dialogue from the moment I recruited him until 3 quarters of the way through the game, suddenly he approaches me for help. OF COURSE. I do his personal quest which took about 10 real life minutes to complete and at the end I hear Felix telling his friend that we are not just his crew but a “family”.
It doesn’t hit home the way that kind of sentiment might in a Fallout game, or even more so in a Mass Effect game, where the relationships between you and your crew are developed and fostered with TIME and CONVERSATION to the point where even you feel that they are your family. Here, it just feels empty and slapped on to try and evoke some sort of emotive response and it falls short. If you are not going to take time in your RPG for the person playing it to really get to know their companions through frequent dialogue and meaningful quests, then that’s ok, but you also can’t then turn around and make out that these companions have developed such a relationship with you and each other that they consider themselves family. It’s like a big chunk of the game is missing! Like you picked these guys up and it cuts straight to the end with them declaring their loyalty to you even if it means death without including the bit in the middle that explains how these relationships were formed and a bond that strong was created. Again, it smacks of absolute laziness. I mean, I recruit Nyoka and straight away she wants me to help her avenge her dead friends. If the game had taken time for me to know her first, then this could have been a great bonding moment between the two of you. Instead you just feel like the person who walks in on 2 people making out and doesn’t know where to look.
As a result, you basically have a group with you who all think the same way. THIS IS A PROBLEM. What is it with the world today? We see it in the news all the time, on social media, everywhere, that there is one way to think and anyone who doesn’t agree gets given a label, called a fascist, and should be censored. Which is the height of irony because censorship is a nice little part of fascism so hypocrisy. This game just shows this mentality even more, we are essentially being spoon fed what we should think about the Board and corporations and who we should be in support of. And if you’re not sure, don’t worry, your companions will tell you. As long as you think the right way, you’re good. We see that in the ending as well; if you side against the Board all your companions are great and having a wonderful life, and if you side with the Board their lives are shit and it’s all your fault. Having companions with different views would have been so amazing at seeing those different sides and any friction it would cause between each other. The ending would also have had more impact; if you sided with the Board, your “pro-Board” companions might have had great futures and your “anti-Board” companions bleak and miserable lives, and vice versa. Maybe you would want to side one way but a companion you absolutely love would be negatively impacted by that so you hesitate. This would have brought a real complexity to the decisions and story and none of that happens because they all think one way, and that’s the way you should too.
There are not romance options in the game either as they thought it would detract from the story. I would have preferred that there were, only so that I could be distracted from the fucking story.
The story, which on paper is something definitely to be excited about, is executed to perfect mediocrity. In fact it spoon feeds you exactly who you should dislike and like the whole way through the game. From the very first cutscene, Welles talks about how disgraceful of the Board it was to leave the colonists of the Hope just floating in space to die. Nasty, nasty Board! From there on, it is a non-stop “corporate is bad” and “corporate is dumb” message that seems to be satirical but gets incredibly old by the time you leave the first world. Yes, it is a dystopia so I expect the situation not be sunshine and rainbows, but the message is hammered in to you without you needing to use brain power yourself to figure out what is going on.
The sheer stupidity of some of the corporate lackeys is to such an extent that I’d have to suspend my belief in humans as I know it to be able to relate with it in any way. I mean, towards the end game you can easily convince a prison guard, who won’t let you dock due to not having authorisation, to send you an example of the authorisation needed, which he does, and then we use it on him and suddenly he believes we have authorisation and falls for the trick. The colonies are dying of starvation because the best scientists e.t.c were not awoken so I imagine them to not be the most sensible at running a colony but trying to realistically see a person that dumb in a role as important as that is just impossible.
Like with the companions, the “satire”, the stupidity of Board staff you come across, all serve to make you think the Board is evil and you need to get rid of them. So……where is the depth here? If you’re going to make a good and evil scenario, what gives it depth are the grey areas, the moments that make you question things. In games that do this well, the bad guys may not always be bad, you may stumble upon something good they did, or maybe their overall aim is good but their methods are not. You may find a good faction and discover a questionable element to them that makes them not perfect and makes decisions trickier. There is none of this in The Outer Worlds. The Board and corporations are failing its people, people are starving, they are dying of plague, they are miserable and they don’t care about the poor as long as the wealthy are protected. The game is so black and white that the only reason you would side with the Board is if you want to just be an arsehole. There’s no big ethical dilemma here, no reason to hesitate and really think about your choice. Even your companions want you to make the good choice.
The game also gave me very little reason to actually give a fuck as well, other than maybe thinking of my own survival. We’re awoken to some brief words from Welles and we’re off. Help him to save the colony, or don’t, but the game tries very hard to get you to save it. I tried to visit Welles in-between missions to find out more on who he is and why he is doing what he is doing to get, just like with the companions, fuck all dialogue. Even the main guy that you are supposed to be helping can’t even be fucked to talk to you! It made me sit there and wonder why the fuck I am helping this guy other than “we’ll all die eventually if you don’t”. Give me a reason to care god dammit! It’s like the game doesn’t want you to have to think at any stage of the process, it gives you a ready made “reason” to care and a pantomime bully of the Board that is so ludicrous you don’t even need to waste a brain cell thinking about whether they are a good choice.
And that’s not the only thing the game doesn’t care about. I decided to spare Dr Eva Chartrand’s life and send her to work with Welles and I NEVER HEARD FROM THE BITCH AGAIN! Went to Welles lab, is she there? Course she’s fucking not, the quest is completed though so at least there’s that, it doesn’t need to be meaningful or anything. The whole thing is just shallow in every way.
As I was doing a playthrough siding with Welles, I was thinking that it would be cool to know more about the backstory of the Marauders. They are living outside of the corporate ideal, why did they choose to leave it? Yes, some of them are most likely raiders and criminals and not to be trusted! But I find it hard to believe that outside of the Iconoclasts who are not particularly interesting, there are no other groups against the corporate ideal who want better. Whether some of the Marauders are disillusioned or just plain criminals, it would still be great to know their backstory and how there came to be such huge numbers of them across all the worlds. We don’t get any of that however, so they are just some faceless enemy whose purpose is just to give you something to shoot at for combat reasons.
In Fallout New Vegas, we could find information on these groups, we know how the Powder Gangers came to be, how the Kings came to be, even if some of these groups are evil or neutral instead of good. That just doesn’t happen in The Outer Worlds.
Right at the end game, after peddling and spoon feeding the constant message that the Board are the bad guys, we get to speak to Sophia Akande who, despite us seeing the video of Rockwell laughing at how colonists will be frozen so the wealthy can keep on wealthing, wants us to know that they will look after the colonists. They will wake them up, and they will fix the food problem. It felt like the game was finally trying to give me that moment where the bad guys don’t seem so bad and I begin to hesitate……
It lasted less than a minute before she then tells me that with that being said, can I please go back to the Geothermal Plant and wipe out the entirety of Edgewater because I put the dissidents in charge there and they just can’t have people outside of Board control running things. HESITATION OVER. She even told me that all the people I found dead at the Geothermal Plant were dead because the Board turned the robots on them for insubordination. The attempt to make them 3 dimensional lasted all of about 30 seconds before the “Corporations are evil!” narrative was reignited. Suffice to say I did not side with Akande.
Towards the end of the game, I started feeling like the whole thing was futile. At every turn, you come across people who seem to be absolutely ok with the status quo. They may express a desire for something better, or a wish for things to change, but other than Welles there is no one you can find that is fervently protesting about change. The character Martin has moments where the real person, with his anxieties, slip out and that is amazing, but more of that could have been used in this game. Finding people who repeat the slogans but slowly look to the side to give you a clue to come talk to them round the back, a secret resistance, anything like that would have been intriguing and make the place seem like it is not as it appears. We don’t get that either. The ambivalence of the NPCs in the game made me feel like I was wasting my fucking time. If everyone is ok with the status quo, then let them just get the fuck on with it. I’ll go suicide in the corner and leave you to a death of starvation. I understand that people can become institutionalised, but if we look at our history, even in the worst times there were always people striving for better. You’d be hard pressed to find that here.
Finally, they have a faction system where your reputation can increase and decrease depending on your actions and I very rarely felt the consequences of that. Unless I started killing people, like the Iconoclasts who turned on me justifiably, nothing else seemed to make a difference. And even then, I found the Iconoclasts at the Iconoclast camp…….not really anywhere else, so unless I’m looking for a fight I can just avoid one. People didn’t like me and people did, and in the end it didn’t make much difference.
I know there were a lot of negatives here but these are honestly my feelings on the game which I wanted to share with you. The game has its good points but there are also a lot of problems that a lot of people don’t want to own up to. I can’t help but feel that Obsidian were lazy with this game but chose the right moment to capitalise on it by releasing it in the middle of the Bethesda discomfort with Fallout 4 and 76. I don’t believe it’s the worst game ever made, there are far worse, but it is not the 9/10 it is being put out there to be, as if there are no faults with it. This is just my opinion of course.
I enjoyed Fallout 4 although it was not my favourite and had its problems and I never played 76 because I was just not at all interested in a Fallout without NPCs I can get to know, care about and talk to. Bethesda has its problems, but for those who think they should be scared of The Outer Worlds I have to disagree, and for those who think Bethesda should take them as an example, I still disagree. I still come back to Fallout 4 but I don’t think I will ever replay The Outer Worlds.
Keep doing you Bethesda……just a bit better please 😀
There are terrible games out there that become amazing because they are hilarious, unique, cheesy and it makes you want to play them. There are the masterpieces out there that change gaming for the better and tell a story that you come back to again and again because of how it made you feel. The Outer Worlds sadly isn’t either. It sits in the middle being decidedly average at the things it set out to do and it leaves you with a feeling no game developer wants you to have: meh.