The Outer Worlds 2: The Definitive Review
Always. Be. Obsidianing.
In the latest round of releases for games extremely relevant to my interests, I’ve been rocked by a surge of unwanted resonance. Deep, chasmic waves of familiarity have surged through my heart as I read and watched reaction to the sole saving grace of my Game Pass Ultimate subscription, The Outer Worlds 2. For a company that prides itself on setting moral dilemmas, Obsidian whacked me about the head with a particularly large and glaring one: do I pay for early access or not? Having gone down this route for Starfield, I naturally felt the urge to have Obsidian’s exciting new sci-fi extravaganza right now, and yet I was held back by the righteous obstinacy of not wanting to give Microsoft any more of my fucking money. And yet, I felt a pang that Obsidian deserved - and maybe needs - my additional financial support. What a cruel, dark comedy, right? Oh how I chuckled at the irony of this Hobsonian choice as I watched the early-access heads set about engaging thoughtfully with the latest free-roaming consequences-lol action RPG. I saw a fair few streamers having lots of fun and community discussion about creative choices that make themselves apparent in the early stages. And thus, The Outer Worlds 2 entered the discourse as another flawed-yet-admirable entry to be forever consigned as ‘mid’ by assholes with no discernible taste in culture.
The Outer Worlds 2 only had to do one thing to win my heart, and that was: be better than Outer Worlds 1. Which it most definitely is. Even though I’m only halfway through the second major map, I’m filled with delight and satisfaction, even though we got off to quite a shaky start. A lot of that is down to amassing the kit to have a whole lot of experiential fun, and we all know what an absolutely craven addict I am for acquisition. It should come as no surprise that the nuts and bolts of the game’s quotidian activities are simply great fun. This experiential joy is virtually cordoned off from the larger narrative beats and twists because as is par for the course, this is a game with a main storyline with consequential choices, and having to weigh your choices is a lot less joyous than gadding about on an acquistional arc.1 And it seems it’s the consequences that are driving much of the discourse. Although not as strongly in the narrative aspect as you’d expect. I’ve read much more dissatisfaction and opinion-piecing around Obsidian’s benevolent dictatorship with regards to character development. We live in a post-respec era, where according to some, the fundamental consumer rights of the player are despicably and tragically defiled if we cannot reassign all our skill points at will. I saw this asserted as a blunt fact by several commenters, who demanded the inalienable right to access 100% of the game’s content within timeframes they deemed acceptable. Utterly perplexed, I felt the pall of that bleak comedy descend once more, and wondered if the narcissification of the individual in the modern videogame was perhaps getting a bit out of hand. One commenter, protesting at how little time they have to play and how much they really needed to be able to respec to ‘get the most out of their time’ was sent into an apoplectic rage at the suggestion they could maybe play the game more than once. This intransigence over being locked out of stuff because of choices the player was forced to make seemed novel to me, especially in the context of the free-roaming RPG template that Outer Worlds 2 occupies. Of course I blame servile player-fawning mainstream AAA for this obnoxious sociology, or perhaps the modern vogue of having extraordinarily short memories for how things literally used to be. I remember both Skyrim and its attendant Fallouts doing plenty of content-locking without any controversy, leaving me utterly bemused by any outrage over such a thing happening in 2025. I assume these are the same people who think they can do anything after watching a TikTok tutorial, or more likely, think they should be allowed to.
A regular mention in this vital and urgent culture war was Obsidian’s fantasy counterpart to The Outer Worlds; Avowed. This rang quite clearly for me as I wandered far and wide in The Outer Worlds 2’s opening map. In some part due to curious homologies in the terrain. Both share a wonderful efficiency of space, where subtle pathing makes you feel like you’re in a much bigger landscape. I accidentally fell off one path to find it was packaged neatly alongside a twisting ascent that had been part of a previous side mission. A neat stumble behind the curtain of Obsidian’s skilful staging, which feels far better managed here than in the series debut. But in Avowed we have a real companion game of sorts. Ultimately, Avowed is a superb combat engine wrapped in a free-roaming RPG that seeks to accommodate the player’s whims and frailties with uncommon politeness, whereas The Outer Worlds 2 is a larger and more dictatorial piece. The two work together as answers to similar questions about the modern action RPG and where the focus should lie. Avowed is decidedly streamlined and heavily guided as a compact exercise in sufficiency and sustainability, whereas Outer Worlds 2 feels like one more ladder rung along the grand climb to a mature, luxurious true successor for Fallout New Vegas. It always had a disproportionate grandiosity of ambition that it originally failed to fulfil, but this sequel redresses quite a chunk of the balance. We’re not fully there yet, but the arc seems to be visible and attainable, should Obsidian get the chance to make a third in the series. Rest assured I’ll be noodling at length about the specifics of The Outer Worlds 2’s greatness in future pieces, but the general vibe of the first two maps is more than enough to satiate me. I’m having a blast, and the places are great, much like Avowed’s.
I was initially concerned that the first map, with yet another space-western town and yet another society of steampunkian cowboy victoriana addicts, was a disappointing re-tread of the original. A Force Awakens offence that’d unfold with grim predictability until it didn’t. In fact, it surprised me pretty quickly and my fears were allayed, then quickly put to bed. By the time I was struggling to get into the map’s key mission area, I knew that the signposted glimmers of hope from Avowed had borne fruit. The fact that I found a secret entrance to said area while on a completely different sidequest had me whooping in my seat. On the first map, at least, there’s a masterful interweaving of objective and locale that creates a particular music, one that gets sweeter and sweeter as you accrue skills and equipment to best exploit terrain and combat. Better still was the game signposting that when you fuck it up, you cannot miss how badly you’ve managed to do it. Gloriously so, in a sense that will be spoiled in this footnote,2 but the game deliberately humbles those who’d want to optimally spec themselves away from uncomfortable failures in a manner that seems genuinely brave, if not wholly iconoclastic, in the modern vogue.
After the natty corralling, guidance and momentum of Avowed, I found it surprisingly hard to get into a Bethesda mode of open exploration in Outer Worlds 2 but when I did, I was definitely rewarded. Not just in finding that secret entrance, but in ticking off a visit to every building shown on the map and in tracing a route to get to a companion’s quest locations. All of this was totally worthwhile, even if spurred by an urge to get levelled so I can uprate skills to get me through logjams in the main story. By the second map, I was locked beautifully into a much more freeform trajectory of wandering between main mission, sidequest and exploration that’s always been a kind of nourishing supply of gaming ambrosia for me. The real meat of the Bethesda open-worlder mode, running very nicely under Obsidian’s skies. I was overjoyed, and don’t really care if the game drops the ball later on. As I said earlier, it only ever needed to be incrementally better than its predecessor to win me over, for Avowed had given me plenty of confidence in Obsidian deploying a thoroughly enjoyable systome for my own highly perverse tastes. The fact that The Outer Worlds 2 goes fully bonkers for stealth builds plays a big part in my self-satisfied smugness that the game lives up to my incredibly realistic expectations, especially considering how wonky it was in Avowed. Pushing away from Avowed’s forced companionships, I was glad to do most of my Outer Worlding solo, as it fucking should be, hence getting much more mana from stealthing around. Gaining silencer mods helped a shitload, too.
There was a point in free roam where my mind was drifting back through Avowed and Atomfall to an unexpected memory of Redfall. I was thinking of the landscapes being deliberately artificial, presented in a style that happily departs from the photo-real, yet is rich with lush detail. Redfall was the most recent in Arkane’s fabulous devotion to painterly visual styles, and even though it was definitely the least stylish of its worlds it still carried a washed VHS-like palette that could evoke the moods of Romero and Carpenter with quite some vigour. The Outer Worlds 2 plays to a similar sense of courting themes, even if the two maps I’ve seen have been brightly-lit and gaudy cartoon spaces, they’ve not been so obliquely comic-book to be nudging Borderlands’ aesthetic, even if the environmental theming feels startlingly close at times. But it comes in aspects of the architecture; the second map’s warzone, where a golden-age city lies in fragmented ruins amongst towering crystal formations in a dry desert, easily approaches Avowed’s touches of sublime beauty, with actually exquisite environmental detailing. Wreckage and debris abound in a way that never feels placeholder or copied-and-pasted, as with certain Ubisoft worlds. Instead, the gloriously overblown verticality of the ruins - and their quasi-Deco styling - evokes a post-collapse Dishonored 2. It’s a delightful reminder of places I’ve not passed through for far too long, and I look forward to seeing if Obsidian can keep it up as the game continues. As I’ve mentioned so many times, my growing love of the sense of transportation to a place is almost as vital a reward as pleasing combat and acquisition. The Outer Worlds 2 isn’t letting me down in that regard.
Ultimately, I am glad I didn’t succumb to personal greed and pony up for early access, because fuck you, Microsoft. I’m sorry if that means Obsidian misses my tiny fragment of some vital metric that determines its fate on the Microsoft spreadsheets of psychopathic materialism, but my conscience feels fine with it. Maybe because I was fearing that The Outer Worlds 2 was going to be some exponential expansion in moral dilemmas, where it becomes such a signature of the Obsidian mode that you have to solve one each time you board your ship or enter a town. Luckily it’s cooled off to a degree but in that respect, I did feel dismayed at how often I’d approach a settlement to find, yet again, a group of people discussing some intractable issue for which I was the one and only tract to prevent protracting it, but I guess that is one trope that Obsidian is essentially celebrating with The Outer Worlds 2. It’s a shame that amongst all the wacky-but-weak satire it isn’t wholly capable, it seems, of satirising itself and its form quite as knowingly as it does other targets, but maybe that’s a bit too much to ask. As with Redfall, Outer Worlds 2 feels like a damoclean project for Obsidian, and I wonder if part of the sheer sense of fun that infuses the entire game so far is a Deathloop-style celebration before it all goes tits-up. Is the intent to ram binary dilemmas and loyalty choices at high volume because it’s what this IP’s brand differentiation demands, or is it to get as many in as possible because there might not be another chance to play in this pleasing, quixotic sci-fi universe? I hope it’s the former. And as cliché as they’re becoming, if they’re what Obsidian needs to keep this fire burning, then please, by all means, cliché away.
[21]
I mean, does anyone actually enjoy having to pick an outcome for which petty faction wins a petty squabble, even if the consequences bring great drama? Do you get to skip them if you take the Dumb trait?!?!?!?
You actually can’t avoid fucking it up for the first big, big mission and it ends in disaster one way or another. However, the age-old practice of save-scumming and a dose of healthy curiosity will allow you to make that fuck up considerably less awful. Especially if you’ve played ball with all the side missions before going for the big one. I guess I got lucky too.