🔗 Share this article

Bigger isn't always improved. That's a tired saying, however it's the most accurate way to sum up my thoughts after devoting many hours with The Outer Worlds 2. The development team added more of everything to the next installment to its 2019 futuristic adventure — more humor, foes, firearms, attributes, and settings, all the essentials in such adventures. And it works remarkably well — at first. But the burden of all those ambitious ideas leads to instability as the game progresses.

A Strong Initial Impact

The Outer Worlds 2 makes a strong opening statement. You belong to the Earth Directorate, a altruistic agency focused on restraining unscrupulous regimes and companies. After some capital-D Drama, you end up in the Arcadia sector, a settlement splintered by war between Auntie's Option (the product of a union between the first game's two big corporations), the Guardians (communalism pushed to its worst logical conclusion), and the Ascendant Order (reminiscent of the Church, but with calculations rather than Jesus). There are also a series of rifts creating openings in the universe, but at this moment, you absolutely must access a relay station for urgent communications reasons. The problem is that it's in the middle of a combat area, and you need to figure out how to reach it.

Like its predecessor, Outer Worlds 2 is a first-person role-playing game with an main narrative and numerous secondary tasks spread out across different planets or zones (large spaces with a much to discover, but not fully open).

The opening region and the process of getting to that comms station are remarkable. You've got some humorous meetings, of course, like one that features a farmer who has given excessive sugary treats to their beloved crustacean. Most direct you toward something useful, though — an unforeseen passage or some fresh information that might provide an alternate route ahead.

Unforgettable Moments and Lost Possibilities

In one unforgettable event, you can find a Protectorate deserter near the overpass who's about to be killed. No quest is associated with it, and the sole method to discover it is by investigating and paying attention to the background conversation. If you're fast and alert enough not to let him get slain, you can save him (and then save his runaway sweetheart from getting killed by monsters in their refuge later), but more relevant to the immediate mission is a power line hidden in the grass nearby. If you follow it, you'll discover a hidden entrance to the communication hub. There's another entrance to the station's sewers stashed in a grotto that you may or may not observe contingent on when you pursue a certain partner task. You can encounter an simple to miss individual who's key to saving someone's life 20 hours later. (And there's a stuffed animal who indirectly convinces a group of troops to fight with you, if you're nice enough to save it from a danger zone.) This beginning section is dense and exciting, and it appears as if it's full of substantial plot opportunities that benefits you for your inquisitiveness.

Diminishing Anticipations

Outer Worlds 2 fails to meet those initial expectations again. The next primary region is structured like a location in the initial title or Avowed — a large region sprinkled with notable locations and secondary tasks. They're all thematically relevant to the struggle between Auntie's Choice and the Ascendant Order, but they're also vignettes detached from the primary plot in terms of story and spatially. Don't expect any contextual hints directing you to alternative options like in the initial area.

Despite compelling you to choose some tough decisions, what you do in this area's optional missions doesn't matter. Like, it truly has no effect, to the degree that whether you enable war crimes or lead a group of refugees to their death results in nothing but a passing comment or two of dialogue. A game doesn't need to let each mission affect the plot in some big, dramatic fashion, but if you're compelling me to select a faction and acting as if my selection is important, I don't believe it's unfair to anticipate something additional when it's concluded. When the game's already shown that it has greater potential, any reduction feels like a trade-off. You get more of everything like the developers pledged, but at the price of complexity.

Daring Ideas and Absent Stakes

The game's middle section endeavors an alike method to the primary structure from the opening location, but with distinctly reduced panache. The idea is a bold one: an related objective that extends across several locations and motivates you to solicit support from various groups if you want a more straightforward journey toward your goal. Aside from the repeat setup being a little tiresome, it's also just missing the suspense that this sort of circumstance should have. It's a "bargain with evil" moment. There should be difficult trade-offs. Your relationship with any group should count beyond making them like you by completing additional missions for them. All of this is missing, because you can just blitz through on your own and complete the mission anyway. The game even takes pains to hand you ways of accomplishing this, indicating alternative paths as additional aims and having allies inform you where to go.

It's a byproduct of a broader issue in Outer Worlds 2: the fear of letting you be unhappy with your selections. It often overcompensates in its efforts to ensure not only that there's an alternate route in many situations, but that you know it exists. Locked rooms almost always have several entry techniques marked, or nothing worthwhile inside if they do not. If you {can't