The one thing I never expected an Obsidian game to be was terminally uninteresting but that's exactly what The Outer Worlds is. A collection of shallow systems, characters, and quests that sort of affect the illusion of a proper RPG with depth and consequence but in reality offers nothing of the sort.

The almost cartoonish lack of depth in the gameplay is mirrored in the story, which is a smarmy and infuriatingly smug monument to Enlightened Centrism that wraps itself in a veneer of anti-capitalist rhetoric so thin that it would struggle to appear meaningfully leftist even to someone who gets all their political opinions from Breadtube. Faux-empathetic South Park politics for the Rick and Morty generation, where picking an actual side is always fucking stupid and you should always strive for a meaningless compromise in order to preserve the status quo.

Genuinely astonishing that this came from the same studio that released Pillars 2 just prior, a game that, for all it's issues, actually had the guts to grab you by the neck and tell you to pick a fucking side, to get some god damn ideology, and actually let you meaningfully change the broken world it presented. That game was the real New Vegas 2 you've all been clamouring for, but no one bought it, so I guess we're stuck with this.

Nothing else to really say because there's basically nothing else in here. An utterly empty and vacuous game that doesn't even manage to surpass Fallout 4. A snake oil salesman promising you a miracle solution to bring back the Fallout you remember, but get past the fancy logo and uncork that bottle, and you'll find nothing in there but dust and echoes.

The game is rightly dubbed a spiritual successor to the Fallout series, but does so much of it better. At least when compared to recent Fallout games, that didn't reach the heights of New Vegas. It's a welcome change that a game of this type is rather short and with tightly contained areas which enabled the developers to put more effort into the details. Locations, their characters and their stories are all well written and worthwhile exploration. On the technical side the game sometimes feels rough around the edges, but more often than not I was really immersed in a wonderfully colorful sci-fi world.

A fun but very flawed experience. Though the game marketed itself heavily on the heights of Fallout: New Vegas, you would do yourself (and the game) much justice by ignoring that comparison and going into The Outer Worlds with a fresh mind. This is not New Vegas 2.

There are many things The Outer Worlds does poorly:

Mind numbing combat with terrible AI (both enemy and companion); some quest choices feeling very by the numbers/illusion of choice; an ungodly amount of stuff to read that will cause your eyes to glaze over; often boring and bland world designs that make exploration both inside and outside of towns a bit boring; way too much miscellaneous trash that will fill up your inventory; a mostly bland cast of companions (not you Parvati); poor RPG skill/perk system that made character building dull; poor performance; and a near soul draining world filled with some of the most unlikable NPCs I've ever experienced and a message that Obsidian hammer into your head on every world you visit.

Though if you can put all that aside there are a lot of great things in here that make me look forward to the next installment in this series.

There are a myriad of fun quests both in the Base Game and the DLC for you to sink your teeth into, all with a great amount of variety in how you want to complete them. There's all sorts of fun dialogue to give your PC personality and let you role-play and for those who enjoy it, there are also plenty of skill-checks (I hate them myself though) and like any good RPG, dialogue options can evolve depending on what your PC knows (from reading terminals, speaking to other NPCs, etc...) which will often lead to you getting a secret third choice outside of your binary good guy, bad guy choices. This game rewards exploration and willingness to go off the beaten path and try stuff that isn't just outlined in your quest journal.

Again this is a very flawed experience and it's definitely not for everyone but if you typically enjoy Obsidian games I'd say to give Outer Worlds a try. There are some good proof of concept systems here and a fun experience to be had if you can get past the flaws.

Get an OP weapon that will let you skate past the god awful combat (I chose the Salvagers Helper which you can find fairly early on Groundbreaker); don't play on Supernova (lack of fast travel + survival mechanics = bad time); and resign yourself to being the big brother/sister of the crew and marrying ADA since there is no romance in this game... still hung up about that.

you don't need to be a bethesda game (although there is definitely a way to beat them at their own game if you are brave)

you don't need to be new vegas again (even though it is obvious that's what you are trying to be)

you just have to be SOMETHING

why are you so reluctant to be anything at all

you are the lorax movie on repeat for thirty hours, followed by a smarmy grin and a "i hope that gave you a lot to think about"

The thing about The Outer Worlds is that it got announced back when I beat Fallout: New Vegas for the first time, and since I loved that game and my appreciation for it has only grown with each subsequent playthrough, my excitement for Obsidian's next action RPG was through the roof. Despite the strength of my anticipation for this game, I never ended up buying it, and I'm not sure if it was because of the game's middling reception scaring me off or something like that, but I was still really excited to play it years later. When I went to the video store last week and picked up DVD copies of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Severance, I also came across the Nintendo Switch port of The Outer Worlds, and after noticing how much cheaper this copy of the game was than its price on the PlayStation store, I thought "Why not?" and decided to buy it.

For me, the highlight of Obsidian's games (and, by extension, Black Isle Studios' games) has always been in their writing, and The Outer Worlds is no exception. The Halcyon system and its planets were as interesting to learn about through exchanges and terminal logs as they were to explore, and the hypercorporate space colony setting is populated with a whole slew of interesting, funny, and eccentric characters that you can choose to either befriend, rebuff, kill, or ignore entirely. Speaking of which, the companions that can join you aboard the Unreliable were easily my favorite characters in the game, as helping them reconcile with their mistakes, desires, and views made the team that I had built throughout the game feel like a real found family. Unlike so many other games that let you make good or bad decisions, the choices here in The Outer Worlds have actual moral weight to them, and there were several moments where I felt genuinely bad about doing what I had initially thought was the right thing due to their horrible consequences. The game's relentless and blunt satire on greed, capitalism, consumerism, and bureaucracy is front-&-center in every one of the game's planets, missions, and even items, but it all struck a delicate balance by being entirely unsubtle while also never coming off as annoying or overbearing, and this meant that The Outer Worlds actually benefitted from its in-your-face approach to delivering its themes.

One of my favorite aspects of Fallout: New Vegas would be how your skills and perks were just as important in conversations as they were in combat by giving you the chance to let others trust you or give you what you want, so I was really glad to see that feature make its way to The Outer Worlds, and while I was disappointed to see the exclusion of the intentionally bad dialogue options that would show up if your skill level for that specific choice wasn't high enough, it still made conversations feel really dynamic. The writing was easily my favorite aspect of the game, but the combat here in The Outer Worlds was pretty fun as well, as the varied selection of weapons and multitude of ways to upgrade your arsenal and abilities allowed me to really personalize my playstyle. Despite how much fun I had with The Outer Worlds, though, I will say that I kind of regret going with the Nintendo Switch port rather than just waiting for it to go on sale somewhere else. Don't get me wrong, this game looked and ran pretty well on my Switch, but if you have the option to play it on something else, then I recommend you do so. Even with that in mind, though, I was still able to appreciate The Outer Worlds for the great game that it was, and although I was a little disappointed to see its sequel get announced as an Xbox exclusive, I am a little hopeful that it'll eventually get ported to other systems like some of their other exclusives.

The Outer Worlds has many things to offer I really like: A team that follows you on your journey with own opinions and quests, diversive worlds and a nice soundtrack.
Many of the quests will add to the finale, too.

BUT everything feels like the game is totally okay with the fact that every Main Fallout was bigger, had better loot and felt more polished.
In Outer Worlds everything is smaller: Towns, Secrets, Loot,...

Overall I had a good time. But to say it is a perfect game would be a lie.

Invader Zim levels of critique on capitalism.
We're better than the corporations because our social atomisation, dissociation from community doesnt have a Pip Boy mascot. Let's kill "Marauders" (please don't ask who or what they are). Damn is that gun a Gucci? We replaced the politics of New Vegas with a gripping perk system that entirely leans on combat stat boosts. The extent of this game's role-playing capability is deciding whether or not to be a character who presses the bullet time button. Randomly generated loot lends to the sheer artifice of this world, the characters are all jokes and interacting with them is like flicking a bobblehead. This review is as short and unfocused as the game is.

An odd game. Playing for many hours I was thinking internally "This is pretty good, it has the rpg elements, multiple ways to approach quests, the loot system is improved from New Vegas, it has a satirical and darkly funny tone, so why am I not enjoying it that much?".

In truth I think it lies in 2 aspects. 1) The satire is a lot less subtle and is more substanceless. For all the anticorporatist /anticapitalist tone of it all you are heavily punished for going revolutionary or trying to find an alternative for the future of the colonies. The game is made by either centrist liberals or fabian socialists whose idea of nuance is "radical change bad".

2) There is only ever 1 correct choice to a quest. For every major struggle for which an interesting choice has to be made, there is a third option which is just objectively the better, middle ground option. This again reinforces the point that this game was designed by dumb centrists and basically ruins the replayability or even the struggle of finding the best of a bad bunch of options, no one will disagree with the correct choice if made aware of its existence.

Ultimately the Outer Worlds is a game which is fine, it is competently made and I had some fun with it but it will not be remembered and I doubt many will ever replay it, I certainly doubt I will.

The only Obsidian game I ever played where I just dropped it entirely less than midway through, this is Obsidian's nadir. Super glad I just played it on Game Pass at launch. An utterly shallow game both narratively and mechanically, so terminally vapidly centrist it gives Bioshock Infinite a run for its money. Disco Elysium had just came out like a week before and it just made this game look exponentially worse in comparison in every way. Still will never get over how Parvarti was Rainbow Capitalism personified as she never stopped licking the boots of people who enslaved her and separated her from her mom. Just appallingly tone deaf writing.

Fricking sucks we're getting a sequel to this pile while Alpha Protocol and Tyranny will be forever lost to rights hell.

Outer Worlds é ame ou odeie, eu AMEI

Cara o quanto eu gostei de The Outer Worlds não da pra descrever aqui com todas as palavras, achei ele um jogo quase perfeito, personagens carismáticos, uma história massa e é o puro suco de RPG mano, um universo claramente pequeno porém muito bem construído, a liberdade que essa pedrada aqui da ao jogador é uma loucura.

De começo no jogo eu já notei que ele estabelecia criticas ao capitalismo, com um mundo cheio de gente revoltada com o sistema e outras que apenas aceitam e continuam nele, e claro.. tem quem quer jogar com ele e se tornar um capitalista. E claro, como é um RPG você tem a opção de ser contra ou a favor desse sistema (mas se tu for a favor eu vou ficar com muito pé atrás de tu em)

E os planetinha aqui cara é muito bem feito de verdade, os monstrinhos eu achei um tanto repetitivo e os inimigos também, a batalha é um pouquinho chata e apenas o que anima continuar lutando são os diálogos do jogo, que sinceramente é um dos pontos FORTÍSSIMO de the outer worlds. Todo diálogo dele é muito bem construído e a personalidade de cada personagem é bem viva, nada daquela coisa apagada ou pra preencher linguiça, muito bem feito mesmo!

Ah.. outro ponto que me decepcionou é que, porr* obsidian, você faz NPCs/Companions perfeitos e lindos e não posso namorar nenhum deles? Estou triste com você.

In a time when most of the biggest names in RPGs have largely jumped ship to pursue the games as a service model, it's nice to see there are still a few developers out there making them in this classic style. This space western feels like they took one of the best titles from the last generation and polished it to play like today's biggest hits. The gunplay, exploration, and underlying systems are all up to modern standards, but it's a blast from the past at its core.

Freedom really is the name of the game. The Outer Worlds wastes little time before letting you off the leash to roam its various memorable planets and interact with their inhabitants. As I picked up quests I was amazed at how open ended they were. You're given the tools and mechanics to be who you want to be and do things how you want to do them, with the outcomes being reactive to your every decision. Because of this there are many branching paths through the story and all of them are worth taking due to how humorous the writing is. While you're rather limited in terms of what you can do for your appearance, it's what's under the skin that counts and you truly can create any kind of character you want with things like background and selected intelligence or perception levels effecting everything from dialog options to combat buffs.

Naturally, all of this gives players plenty of reasons to keep coming back. There's more stuff here than you'll be able to see on a single or even a second playthrough making it fairly sizable for a AA title. To make matters better it's all very high quality. There are some issues however. A few bugs and glitches are present, such as one that kept resetting a companion's perk points and deleted whatever armor I would give them. You can also see some areas where they maybe had to trim back some things to fit the budget constraints. There are a few planets of the map that despite being named are unable to be visited. These will likely be the sites for future DLC, but regardless of whether or not I will be able to travel to them on the future I would have preferred it had I not been able to see them in-game until that time as it comes off too much like Destiny's paywall locked, on-disc content. There are also your shipmates to think about. Some like Parvati have fully fleshed out plotlines and interactions, while others like Felix feel like most of their role was was left on the cutting room floor.

All in all though, my enjoyment was hindered very little by the flaws. This is the kind of RPG many of us have been craving ever since we moved on from the Xbox 360 and PS3 era. Old features like not having a voiced protagonist reminded me how much joy I got back in the day from being in charge of every little thing my custom avatar said and made conversations far more personal to me than the automatic small talk that's been popularized by the Mass Effect sequels. The only thing I ever really want from my role playing games is to discover exciting new worlds and define myself as I see fit in them. The Outer Worlds let me do that without any aspect seeming dumbed-down for the masses or making me feel like I wasn't 100% in control. If those same qualities are what you look for as well, then this should hands down be your next purchase.

9.3/10

EDIT: Okay, yeah, this game did not sit well with me at all.

Obsidian Entertainment is a gaming company that I respect wholeheartedly for delivering some of the most interesting, and, dare I say, some of the greatest Western RPGs among its kind. From Knights of the Old Republic 2, Alpha Protocol, Fallout: New Vegas, and even Pillars of Eternity, a game which while it didn’t quite appeal to me I still respected nonetheless for what it was trying to accomplish. Needless to say, Obsidian has always been a group of developers I always entrusted or hold in high regard when it came to crafting incredible RPGs, with New Vegas in particular being the gold standard of everything they are capable of achieving.

However, it is undeniable that the Obsidian that worked on New Vegas is not who they are today. Most of the notable developers since then had either jumped ship or moved on to other projects, with the only holdover being Josh Sawyer. I think this shift in talent has felt somewhat noticeable with their output since New Vegas. I wouldn’t call it “bad”, as some like Pillars or Tyranny look really worthwhile to play, but wanting more RPGs akin to New Vegas is not on the cards now.

Fast-Forward to 2019 where Bethesda had a disastrous launch with Fallout 76 which jaded so many fans of the Fallout franchise, coupled very nostalgic over New Vegas during this, that they needed something to justify their misguided cravings for a “New Vegas 2”. Everything was set in perfect motion for Obsidian to announce and drop a trailer for The Outer Worlds at the perfect time for those desperately seeking refuge from Bethesda’s Fallout (and if I were to be a bit dramatic, the state of WRPGS).

I feel it’s impossible for anybody, especially back when the game first dropped, to form any conversation about its quality without somehow resorting to comparing it to Fallout 76 or Bethesda. Whether it be consciously or subconsciously, that was clearly the criteria and bar people were willing (maybe even still but I kinda doubt it) to measure this game against. Regardless if it’s not being faithful about what the game itself achieves or provides. None of this is even helped by the hard fact that these comparisons were made by Obsidian’s marketing, or intentional by the game itself.

The Outer Worlds is a braintrust project between Tim Cain & Leonard Boyarksy. At least one of these names should be familiar to anyone who's played through the franchise that directly inspired this game. Tim Cain shepherded the original Fallout but left during the production of Fallout 2 to form Troika games. To avoid wiki dumping, Troika went bankrupt and Cain never quite made a major rebound since then, mostly just helping to program some games here and there. That’s until he joined Obsidian and with original Fallout alumni, Leonard Boyarsky, had developed The Outer Worlds. With that in mind, this game is meant to be three things.

1) It was meant to be Obsidian’s return to the land of open world role-playing games since New Vegas. 2) It was meant to be Cain & Boyarsky’s epic comeback into the public consciousness of RPGs since the days of Interplay/Troika. 3) It is no shere coincidence that Outer Worlds is meant to be their spiritual successor to both the original Fallout and New Vegas.

However, despite blatantly self-plagiarizing the gameplay from both games almost 1:1, cribbing from the same pool of ideas and concepts providing both its aesthetic and commentary, and clearly trying to appeal to the jaded audience who experienced Bethesda gloriously misfiring with the Fallout franchise, somehow none of this has any bearing whatsoever on the actual quality of The Outer Worlds.

Yes, mechanically it functions identical to New Vegas, and, ironically enough, Fallout 4/76, but that’s where it ends. The Outer Worlds does the bare minimum to provide an engaging, worthwhile experience. The game’s equivalent of perks are all arbitrary stat bonuses and don’t offer any of the experimentation that New Vegas had when it came to its skills, perks, and weapons. So there’s no genuine fun to be had for leveling up. The weapons are boringly designed to use. The armor is incredibly limited and ugly. Which is more to do with the game’s unappealing art direction and aesthetic which is just Bioshock set within the glossy microwaved table scraps of Mass Effect: Andromeda’s cut planets and NPCs. The enemy variety is an utter joke. Exploration isn’t rewarding because of everything above.

Even the story and writing, the one key aspect of any Obsidian game you’d think would make an experience feel at least worthwhile, ranges from being so uncharacteristically dull to downright lazy. If you noticed I didn’t mention world-building that’s because there isn’t any. I find it hard to remember many of the characters backstories, motives, or, y’know, any real sense of tangible personality that isn’t an unholy amalgamation of Borderlands’ humor and Joss Whedon’s dialogue. With only a few rare instances invoking the dark satirical edge of the developers previous games.

Speaking of satire though, this might have some of the most annoying social and political commentary in how self-congratulatory and smug it is for confidently saying nothing. This is part of a modern trend I've noticed that isn’t exclusive to this game, but it has to do with how media try to say their piece on a relevant systemic issue (this case being capitalism) potentially plaguing society. But because of mass marketing appeal, this all gets lost and it ends up saying nothing and ends up glorifying that problem ironically enough. This is what informs the story, world, and characters of Outer Worlds and is something difficult to divorce from when taking account of the commentary which is somehow on the same level as a ShoeOnHead tweet. It’s a game that presents a world ruled by corporations, that wants you to feel them as an overwhelming threat that needs to be taken care of with urgency (haha unrealistic right?). Unfortunately, since Outer Worlds has a crisis in tonality and character, the corporations are just cartoonishly incompetent for this to ever land. Eliminating any sense of stakes in the story or pitiful attempts at moral choice and consequence spoonfed to you through Rick Sanchez.

Perhaps the worst part about Outer Worlds is that it’s not even that objectively terrible which makes it worse because I can’t properly hate it. I wasn’t even sure you could make a game this middling where it doesn’t truly excel at anything but because it doesn’t fuck up like other games it somehow evens out into this white void of quality and memorability.

Something of a tough game to rate. Too similar to Fallout for its own good. There's next to nothing changed mechanically. Which makes it easy to pick up and master. However, outside of companions it doesn't really lap the prior single player Fallout at much. Sure, you can RP easier if that's your thing but the world itself isn't particularly fascinating or fun to explore.

You're in this overbearing capitalist critique that gives no alternative beyond, "what if we put nicer people in charge of the shit hole?". Even the better side quests are beat for beat ripped from prior Fallout quests. It's a fine, worth playing once game.

Obsidian Entertainment lit the world on fire with Fallout: New Vegas. Many considered it superior to Bethesda's own offering, Fallout 3. The Outer Worlds was considered a spiritual successor to New Vegas. The same type of play style. A first-person RPG with shooting elements, a large story, companions, quests, and worlds to explore Many were calling it New Vegas in space, but is it really that, and does it live up to New Vegas?

The short answer is no. It falls short in nearly every way. The game really does feel like it's trying to be New Vegas with the funny humor in the propaganda posters and the overseeing mega-corporation that's trying to take over the Halcyon colony, and you're trying to get factions to agree with each other or side with them. The overarching story is pretty much forgettable, and that goes for most of the game. The story, characters, and side quests are mostly boring. I hate to really say this, as this game has sat installed on my PC for a couple of years now, and I would do a mission or two and quit because of just how dull the game is. The characters aren't memorable; there's no personality that stands out, and the overall mega-corporation humor that overshadows the game just feels like it's in the background.

The game is also incredibly short. I did several companion quests, dealt with all the factions, did multiple side quests, and still clocked in at around 12–13 hours. If you blow through the main story, you can finish it in 4-5 hours easily. I feel that contributes to the problem of the story and characters being uninteresting. There's not enough time for them to develop. Your entire crew is all humans, and they all just feel like generic Bethesda faces that were run through a random generator, and nothing stands out. I wound up skipping through a lot of dialogue because I just didn't care. I loved the characters and overall story of New Vegas. It was fresh and interesting, but this just feels like a generic space odyssey.

So what about the gameplay? It's tighter and more refined than New Vegas, but not by much. I hated the upgrade and skill tree systems. They felt generic and half-baked. The game's poorly balanced, where it's either way too easy and you mow down enemies, or they swarm you and kill you on the spot. I felt like none of the items you can use helped at all; stats didn't seem to matter, and the only thing that really did matter was your level in each respective category. You really want to get your speech levels high, including in engineering, as you can bypass a lot of battles with speech checks. Most of the weapons in the game felt pretty generic, and their weapon power didn't seem to matter.

Weapons can be tinkered with and modded at workbenches. Mods can be picked up and attached to various parts of guns. They can add elemental damage, increase clip size, add scopes, and do damage to different types of enemies, but outside of this, you can just tinker with the weapon's level, and future weapons don't matter. There were no cool, unique weapons found on bosses or for getting into hard-to-hack safes. Looting, like in Fallout, feels pointless as there is so much given to you. By the end of the game, I had thousands of rounds of ammo for each weapon type. You can specialize in long, pistol, or heavy weapons, but I just wound up dumping points into all three. Add a few good mods and tinker with the weapon up to your level, and you will stick with the same weapons through most of the game, rarely trading them out. You can equip up to four weapons, and I rarely ever used healing items until the final showdown, where you are swarmed by enemies in every room you go into.

Another balancing issue is with the factions. You can gain and lose reputation, and this will make guards attack you on-site in certain towns, locking out quests and not being able to finish any in this case. I wound up pissing off a couple of factions, had to abandon the quests there, and couldn't go to the shops either. This is really frustrating, and there's usually no way to get the reputation back. This can lock off companion quests and many side missions. Throughout the entire game, I mostly just mowed down every enemy in my way and used my companion's abilities when I was swarmed on occasion. You get a single ability to slow down time, which is useless because it slows down time too much.

The only thing I really enjoyed were the visuals. The game looks like a last-generation title, but the worlds are unique and look really good. I was interested in discovering new towns and new enemies, but that was really it. Everything else was either ignored, forgotten, or skipped because of how uninteresting most of the game is. I don't feel like this is Obsidian's best work or their love letter to New Vegas. The game is horribly optimized, looks dated, and feels dated because it is too safe. The game lacks any depth, and most may not even enjoy the shooting. The story and characters are boring and unoriginal, and the game's length doesn't justify this type of game in general. Who wants to play a 4-player RPG with supposed vast worlds to explore? You might enjoy blowing through the main story, but that's about it.

A fun game that has a really great set of dialogue choices, and characters full of personality and diversity. Especially the companions you can recruit, all with their own little quest-lines. In fact their quests are probably my favourite in the game, as they all provide much different experiences than normal quests; it's not all about taking down corporations and saving the universe, you might just need to help your companion go on a date.

On the other hand the many factions in the game can get a bit repetitive and blend together as they all seem to follow the exact same plotlines. I loved it in the first world, as I learned about the first town, and then the deserters and had to make a choice about which one to side with. But then a similar situation happens later on, and by that point I had met so many factions and been through so many sidequests that I couldn't even remember enough about what made each one unique.

Also while I enjoy the story, I do wish it was a bit more subtle at times. The theme of fighting the big bad corporation is interesting, but sometimes they just shove it in your face that "These are the bad guys" as you read computer terminals and read countless "Screw human life. Acquire money" messages.

The game is also let down by some missing quality of life stuff. Cursors on the map speed are slow; you can't sort consumables by effect despite there being hundreds of them but only a few actual given benefits between them; can't sort weapons and armour by power/defense when equipping them to companions - which is insanely weird because you can do so in any other situation; legendary/unique weapons don't really do enough to tell you what makes them so special other than having an actual name.

Otherwise tight controls, great companions, excellent dialogue and characters, rewarding level up system all make it a worthwhile RPG to play.