At time of publishing, it has been quite a while since ‘The outer worlds’ by Obsidian was a game firmly in the public gaze and the spotlight has moved on to newer shinier releases. However, I was reluctant to rush a write up on this game without sitting down and giving it a fair shake. My loyalties to Obsidian’s previous published works forced my hand in that respect. So now that I have taken the time to travel Halycon and see everything that the colony has to offer it’s about time to get everyone up to speed.

Let’s start with the story. In the initial cut scene where context is chucked at you like a tray straight out the oven, we are introduced to Phineas Welles. A mad scientist and vigilante, who busts you out of your cryogenic prison aboard the lost hope, a ship that has been lost for fifty years. Then takes you away to his hideout to thaw you out. The game makes sure to explain that all people aboard the hope where the finest minds that the colony had to offer and were frozen to save the race from any impending disaster. A decent concept and introduction for your character and gives you a nice blank canvas in which to build a character to role play, something Obsidian’s head writers have been praised for throughout their careers.

The character creation is fairly standard and allows for enough depth to make the character your own, along with various perks and skills that can be given to the player based on their previous job before being frozen and more general things such as strength, intelligence etc.

From there you are sent to your starting area of ‘The Emerald Vale’ and are tasked with meeting up with Phineas’ contact Alex Hawthorne who will act as your guide. However, in Obsidian’s usual comedic way, your pod lands on him, killing him instantly and you are left to fend for yourself. From there the game opens up and truly begins. The thing that immediately strikes you upon landing is just how stunning the art style of this game is. The aesthetic is a cell shaded meets sci-fi realism with a vast panoramic landscape that looks like it has ample nooks and crannies to explore.

The opening hours of the game were truly the most captivating and fun. Your character has little resources, the game is constantly throwing new mechanics, lore, environments, characters and loot at you and it offers a fun and challenging opening narrative questline. Most notable mechanics being the TTD or ‘Tactical time dilation’ which is a fancy name for ‘Max Payne’ style bullet time. Not exactly inventing the wheel but no one can argue that slow motion gunplay isn’t fun. If you keep trudging through the emerald vale you stumble across Edgewater. It’s a fun area that offers a few well written quests and characters, gives you your first encounters with companions that accompany you on your journey and your first key decisions that affect the overall outcome of your character’s affect on the Halycon colony.

Ultimately, it felt like the game was keeping things a little bit linear. It offered opportunities to explore and do side quests but it still felt a bit guided and nothing felt like any initiative was needed to accomplish. This was Ok though. It’s the opening of the game and if it wants to initially hold my hand then by all means. It’s an obsidian RPG, it’s bound to open up and release the shackles right?

The next stop was Ground breaker, which is a beautifully realised area that acts as a space port where a fraction of the race has set up shop and called home. Although it is a small area it is bursting with life and things to do at time of arrival and serves as a hurdle in which you will need to get port keys to proceed to the next area. This again gave me hope that this title was going to give me more than I had first encountered. I thought this was my first sip of an open and immersive experience is a fully realised space landscape. For me, this is where it all began to slow down.

Although the story, writing and pacing were competently pieced together. Although there were more fantastically crafted and gorgeous areas to encounter and although there were sub plots and missions that I could devote additional time to. It was clear that something wasn’t quite right. It felt like my character was on rails, constantly running from A to B, with little motivation to do the quest other than it was on a checklist of things to do.

The story based gameplay pretty much continues in this vain for the remainder of the playtime, with small moments creeping in to elate the player, raising expectations only to bring them back to the mundane with a thud. What has to be said is that if you follow the very clearly marked path to the letter, the main story offers a satisfying ending and a generally good narrative. Not ground breaking or truly memorable, but above average for sure.

Outside of the main quest path, it is a mixed bag and that is generous. The bag is mostly filled with bland tasteless quests but hidden away there are small nuggets of tasty goodness, even if they are few and far between. Most companion quests offer a fun and engaging plot that allow you to get to know your crew but much like a lot of the games narrative, it’s not consistent. Take Parvathi and Felix’s quests for comparison. Both companions can be acquired in the first hours of gameplay. One quest, that being Parvathi’s, offers a long and engaging questline that sees you get to know your little southern accented buddy. Meanwhile the other offers a quest aiming to give context to Felix’s ties and alliances before he joined your crew. The writing in both is great as you would expect and the concepts for both are as solid as one another. The difference is, one is fully fleshed out, offers multiple tasks and because of this can offer more dialogue and intrigue simply by the longevity of the questline. The other simply asks one thing, gives one alternative approach and ends with little else said afterwards besides a brief conversation. It just felt, much like select parts of this game, promising but unfinished.

Looking at the main aspects of the gameplay, it plays much like you would expect from the former developers of a fallout game. Dialogue offers a path through the game with minimal violence and lends itself to seeing alternate paths to goals. It operates almost identical to a Fallout game in that stats will determine your ability to use unique dialogue options in certain scenarios. It works well and through not re-inventing the wheel, they can mark this down as a success through conservation. No one wants a TES: Oblivion persuasion meter situation again.

Keeping it simple is sometimes the best path to take and the outer worlds does this for a lot of it’s interactions throughout your journey. Where some new IPS oversaturate their game with mini games and gimmicks just to do simple tasks. The outer worlds avoids this through simpler means. The best example being instead of adding hacking or lock picking mini games, the whole idea is condensed down to simply collecting assets to open locks or hack terminals. This is through mag locks and bypass shunts which are items peppered across the colony. It is an example of the developer perhaps failing to but their own stamp on the RPG scene but I think in a lot of places it was wise to stay conservative, this being a prime example.

The main area that the game differs from the developer’s famed releases is the focus on gunplay and combat options. Tactical time dilation is something that we have touched upon as something that lends itself very well to the tight and varied fighting styles, with melee, close encounters, ranged and even unique science based weapons accounted for. By no means is this FPS multiplayer ready levels of polished gunplay, but for the setting and genre, it is more than enough to make the player feel powerful and satisfied. The game also offers companion options. Regrettably the directions that you can give your crew do take you out of that immersive state. Telling your pal to sneak up behind a mantosaur queen and get into position for an assault, only for them to stand so close that they are close enough for a group picture with the monster hoard. Then if that’s not bad enough, said hoard just remain oblivious to them.

On the flip side, the companion attack abilities offered a fun and useful tactic for clutch situations. At the end of your clip and baddie is closing in? Use a companion attack. Last enemy on the roof and bearing down on you with no clear path to get to them? Use a companion attack. Yes, this may also be Immersion breaking to have your crew teleport onto a roof as if by magic to dropkick a marauder but that’s the kind of silliness that I can get behind.

In terms of unique and out of the box gameplay additions, it has to be said that the outer worlds has little to none. The game borrows assets from the RPG landscape of the last ten years. Be that the elemental damages or general movement and semi weightless space jumping of borderlands or the heavy reliance on that Bethesda made template for a first person RPG. They take these elements and to their credit adapt them to make sense in the world they have created. It’s commendable but still leaves a sour aftertaste as you are left feeling that you wish something was there that they could truly call their own in terms of gameplay.

One aspect that makes a return in an Obsidian IP is a faction system. In Fallout New Vegas, the Obsidian made cult classic, the faction system was very much the driving force of the narrative within that title. The outer worlds tries to use this template and give the player ties to all its groups and factions through a karma system. In terms of how it functions, it does what it is meant to do, with good actions seeing you raise to a deity amongst the group and killing every member seeing you known within that faction as the devil incarnate. Why it didn’t have the same success this time around was partly due to consistency and partly due to longevity once again. The game in areas does have you make hard decisions that affect your relationships with these factions and does make you feel emotion, then nothing. The issue is that these factions, the board excluded, are contained within their very small areas and besides a possible cameo in the final area; do not feature unless you go seeking them.

When contrasting with New Vegas, a world that was open and interwoven so beautifully and all these groups were equally fleshed out and fully realised, making constant appearances and referenced by others throughout. Small nuances were considered such as wearing other uniforms would anger other factions and there was up to a point, always an option for reconciliation. Within the outer worlds, it all feels very one dimensional. The concepts for the groups are great, such as the zany evangelical iconoclasts, or the corporate MSI, or even the stuck up residents of Byzantium. Despite this though, it’s very hard to argue that these groups merely exist within their own small corners of Halycon.

All areas have few amounts of named characters. All actions feel like they are on rails and all decisions are truly final with no means of a nuanced and complicated relationship within these groups. You admittedly can’t blame the writing or the world design because both have great potential to build an amazing interwoven world. The issues lie in the development of all these core concepts. No matter how strong the initial ideas are, they will always struggle to grow when the areas are so small, separated by loading walls and not so fast, fast travel between planets. It provides a real disconnect between the groups. Not to mention, even if this was not the case and the world was a fully open space epic, the games run time is so short.

The game offers, at best, twenty five hours of content and that is squeezing every last drop out of this game. It offers little motivation to go off the beaten track and explore without being instructed to do so and if the player is simply doing the main mission quest line alone, it will take approximately ten hours depending on the route taken. One fantastic benefit about this medium of gaming in comparison to say a movie, is that it can take it’s time to weave a story over many hours and make a player truly feel a part of something. This game is ambitious and wants to succeed so bad, that is very apparent. However, it takes a special game to do this and a unique and wonderful one to do this in such a small amount of play time. I love that this game shoots for the stars but it only soars in the clouds in this department.

A final small criticism being that within this games travel map between planets there are several marked planets that are inaccessible no matter what level of completion the player achieves. This decision to include these areas may be a nod to future DLC but one can only point at it as another presentation of an unfinished title.

The Outer Worlds_20191021234527

Overall, this game is worth playing, don’t get me wrong. The game has enough familiarity with recent first person RPGS and will scratch an itch for those that are searching for another fix of an RPG template that is dying out. The reason it’s dying is shown in a microclimate that is the outer worlds. Developers don’t have the time or resources to make new IPS and world build in the industry. To be new and innovative but also provide familiarity plus create a fantastic story, yet develop a vast range or characters, worlds and groups. Then also make the game pretty, with tight controls and on top of that, make it fun. It’s exhausting and time consuming work and ultimately, these companies are out to make bank.

This game tries to do it all, and in some areas, really hits the mark. Aesthetically it’s beautiful. The writing is brilliant, the gameplay is as a whole, solid, and there are memorable moments to take away from the title. The issue is that these moments are so sporadic and even the highest points of the game still don’t leave you with a euphoric feeling. The game relies so heavily on borrowed or simplified assets and gimmicks with nothing new to offer that you can say is primarily ‘outer worlds’ content. Even the aesthetic, something that I have to commend as it is flawlessly executed, it’s not new. It’s a mesh of things we have seen before. Ground breaker is basically homage to bioshock’s neon heavy rapture. The landscape of Edgewater is something you might encounter in No mans sky and Monarch seems like a space based Mojave wasteland with a musical score that even supports that view.

What I do have to commend, as it is something that is seldom done with high end releases in recent years, is praise Obsidian for creating a brand new RPG universe. The world building, despite it’s fractured connections has to be appreciated, especially considering this is a brand new world brought to life and not simply building on old existing lore from other franchises.

This is a game that I would have loved to love but ultimately it rests on its laurels and I could only muster a mild fondness for the title. Everyone expects Obsidian produced title’s writing to be strong but in this instance it seems they expected it to carry to whole game. Every fabric of this game feels borrowed, uninspired or simply unfinished with small exceptions only serving as a means of inspiring hope and keeping you on track until the end. I don’t regret my journey through Halcyon but I certainly have learned just how vast and hollow that space can be.