The Spirit Of The Outer Worlds 2: The Definitive Review

A Vibes-Based Approach To Videogame Criticism

As a child, I lived on an armed forces base in Germany and consequently had to endure just one single TV channel. This was the BFPO channel, and was a mixture of the three broadcast channels found in the UK at the time. This was 1979-1980, and despite my deepest wishes, I was not getting to watch Blake’s 7 or Battlestar Galactica anytime soon. I was lucky to get a snatch of Baker-era Dr Who here and there. And then came something glossy and more palatable to a mainstream audience indoctrinated on Star Warsian sci-fi adventure; Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Interestingly enough, this relic of the 1930s had been rejuvenated alongside the movie re-imagining of Flash Gordon, both being part of not only the sci-fi renaissance of the 1970s but also the decade’s love affair with the 1930s. At the beginning of the 70s, the opening of the 1939 Buck Rogers serial forms the intro to George Lucas’ THX 1138 as a kind of faded, lost fantasy that melts into the nightmarish reality of the film’s hyperconformist, hyperconsumerist dystopia. At the end of the decade, this new TV version seemed to bring Buck Rogers’ ideas of temporally-transposed swashbuckling adventure into the Disco age as a vehicle for cash-in thrills.¹ Creator Glenn A Larson knew exactly what he was doing - liberated from the desperation and fundamental bleakness of Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers offered a lighter and more fun-filled universe that made perfect Saturday tea-time fodder, and the series was an immediate hit with me and my schoolfriends. You were always assured some spaceships and matte paintings of futuristic buildings, a dogfight or two and plenty of laser guns, all draped in an unashamedly bright artificial-fibred late-70s aesthetic. These days, Buck Rogers tends to be ridiculed more than celebrated, but this is more often borne of naïve mis-remembering or grumpy second-hand opinion. If you watch it through, you’ll find a charmingly kitsch and reliably entertaining space opera that celebrates its archetypes and ancestry with good humour and genuine warmth. While it gives kids plenty of formulaic TV action to suck on, it almost winks back at the adult audience, inviting you to join in with its pantomime - if you can get past its relic-of-the-70s objectifications and attitudes.² Of course I own the two-season DVD set and of course I’ve ripped them to watch while having a bath and it was indulging in an episode that saw Buck become a secret agent of subterfuge to dismantle an unfairly powerful dictator’s reign that I felt a deep echo with The Outer Worlds 2.

No, that isn’t just a brutally forced segue. I did genuinely feel the spirit of Buck Rogers is encoded somehow into the general atmosphere of The Outer Worlds 2 as part of its less-than-serious take on a hypercapitalist dystopian future. It struck me that the 45-minute standalone episodes of Buck Rogers bear more similarity to the game’s typical quest-dungeon structure than you might initially assume, and makes me wonder if our tolerances for those quest durations is because of the episodic formats we watched as children.³ Seriously though - meeting a regional government, getting a task, infiltrating a location, doing some meddling to effect a regional geopolitical result, having fights. It literally is the template of an action RPG mission. Deeper still, Buck Rogers’ core concept - the idea of a human projected forward from the 20th Century to the 25th - is a literal correlation with what the player actually does when they engage with The Outer Worlds 2! Not that we ever get a chance to wisecrack 20th century sayings to the bemusement of in-game companions or whatever, but the sense of being plonked in a wild and bonkers future nonetheless has a certain resonance with Buck’s personal journey. Despite its deliberate cartoony style, The Outer Worlds is actually less florid and fantastical than Buck Rogers.⁴ It’s tempered perhaps by a certain Gibsonian-noir flavour of cyberpunk in its corporate-militaristic oligarchies and is heeled by stated influences from a run of 90s-2000s sci-fi that sobered a lot of the playful excesses of the 70s into more sensible structures where being cool was as important as indulging in freeform fantasy. Those proudly post-modern arrivals like Firefly, Farscape and Futurama have a certain temperance, no? Certainly The Outer Worlds is happy to indulge in Futurama’s omnivorous ransacking of sci-fi’s past and borrows from it heavily for aesthetics and palettes, although it swerves away from adopting a wholesale Raygun Gothic design sensibility.

More’s the pity, perhaps, as The Outer Worlds universe seems more aligned with upscaling the 90s sci-fi videogame aesthetic as it does mirroring any non-gaming media. This chimes nicely with Avowed’s sense of restructuring and re-rendering the 1990s with modern capabilities and tastes, but I can never escape feeling how the environmental codings for desert or ice or volcanoes or artificial structures all seem built on the progenitor styles of the holy trinity of texture-mapped worlds, Quake, Unreal and Half Life. But The Outer Worlds undoubtedly owes a visual debt to Borderlands in a way that’s so blatant, it’s actually weird how little the two are mentioned in the same sentence. The similarity isn’t just aesthetic either - the two share the same absurdist fundamentals in their humour. For that we only have a few places to look, with the most obvious being Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, which leant heavily on the absurdities of 1970s capitalism for multiple sections of guide entries and certain plot points. Naturally, I see hooks and inklings from 2000ad’s vast catalogue⁵ all over the place, and in both games. I’d guess that Borderlands has been kept out of any formal discussion of influences because of PR concerns: Borderlands 4’s recent release is direct competition. However Borderlands isn’t the only game that imbues The Outer Worlds 2 with spirit. Obsidian isn’t too shy to take inspiration from its own past.

With the aim of conveying the sense of inter-factional warfare, The Outer Worlds 2 makes a point of laying out actual battlefields on some of the world maps. These have long trenchlines spotted with emplacements and bunkers, but they also have decent tracts of well-dressed and well-mined no-mans-land, giving a tangible sense of a war of attrition in deadlock. What this immediately recalled for me was the minefield between Camp Forlorn Hope and Nelson which, yes, is in Fallout New Vegas. If you’ve followed any media coverage of The Outer Worlds 2, you can’t have escaped the constant referencing to New Vegas, as the formal messaging has made this extremely explicit. Where I thought Outer Worlds 1 fell well short of its predecessor, it looks like Outer Worlds 2 gets close (at least) to capturing the magic. Certainly speaking, the notion of deadlocked factions applying throughout Outer Worlds 2 is a direct parallel with New Vegas’s dam dilemmas, even if the morality of each side isn’t cast in quite the same shades as the NCR, the independents and The Legion. In some senses, Outer Worlds 2’s factional politics and morality plays are more complex and adult. In others they’re far more binary and simplistic, but I don’t think that’s necessarily to the game’s detriment. The Outer Worlds 2 is distinct enough that it doesn’t feel like it’s following in New Vegas’s footsteps, although the interactive design falls just as short of matching the Bethesda Open Worlder, just as it did in The Outer Worlds 1. The progress here is in building out the systems and righting a whole load of wrongs while making the worlds feel much fuller. It’s improvement by increment and as such, isn’t really matching New Vegas as much as it’s telling similar stories in a very different place with everything better, nicer, shinier. Fallout New Vegas suffered in some ways by being tied to the Fallout universe. It can’t offer the wild vistas and grandiose architecture of The Outer Worlds’ frequent excesses. As such the spirit lies in pedestrian carry-overs of narrative and world setup rather than injecting some vital energy that applies across every aspect. Thankfully, The Outer Worlds 2 has the imagination to stand by itself, even if it’ll never escape being a descendent of New Vegas. But then, I never felt that New Vegas was a humorous romp, or a comical farce. It had rompy and farcical aspects, but overall was framed as a gritty quest for answers and revenge that ends in deciding the fate of the wasteland. There was a harder edge in play, perhaps coming from the post-apocalyptica that seeps into every pixel of the game, which Outer Worlds doesn’t really express. Whatever Outer Worlds 2 takes from New Vegas, it’s definitely not the mood nor the atmosphere that gave the game its legendary reputation.

If there’s a point to this piece, it’s to celebrate how complex the underpinning spirit of The Outer Worlds 2 really is. There’s a cultural richness both in play and on display that elevates it beyond other games that might match or surpass it on paper. My great and unending animosity towards the Mass Effect series comes from how incredibly dull and boring it is with its references, how unimaginative its sci-fi is, how flat and pedestrian it all turns out to be. It’s ultimately a grey and tiresome series that longs to be people in boats in some fantasy archipelago rather than actually be spaceships and lasers. There was nothing celebratory in there, just exploitation to create unexceptional Babylon 5 fanfiction for millennials. The Outer Worlds 2 feels like it’s trying to push out something new and vibrant, even if it does feel cast in the same genre of videogame mildly-black comedy as Portal, Borderlands and a host of similar sci-fi jokefests. Yeah, I might even cast my beloved Deathloop into that pool too. But I think The Outer Worlds 2 succeeds in doing that style well. As a result, the vibe is simply fun. And for my money, and much like Buck Rogers In The 25th Century, really that’s all I need.⁶

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1. It’s probably worth noting that 1979’s Alien also introduced corporate overlord wrangling as a key sci-fi concept for the postmodern era. Though you could possibly argue there’s definite inklings in Silent Running and the Alien prequel, Dark Star.

2. Infamous for forcing the sci-fi spray-on jumpsuit on Erin Grey, Buck Rogers actually leans towards more progressive attitudes when it can, even if a higher priority is making sure there’s plenty of fanservice for watching Dads.

3. This is a key point - Buck is a sole hero with a bunch of companions and while there’s clear influences from Star Trek, the fact he’s an archetypical hero rather than a captain doing his duty as per Kirk, mark out his adventures as being oddly symmetric with the tasks set in a sci-fi RPG. Battlestar Galactica suffered by having its coolest character being a sidekick to a far duller frontman.

4. An interesting link to note is the blatant courting of the Rick And Morty fanbase in Outer Worlds 1 ties us directly to Buck Rogers via Bird Person, which is a direct lift of Buck Rogers’ Hawk, a Season 2 main character.

5. There’s quite a bit of space cowboy shit in 2000ad, particularly in Judge Dredd’s Cursed Earth adventures and even bits and pieces of Nemesis the Warlock, The Ballad of Halo Jones and Bad Company. I’d love to think Obsidian’s writers are slavish devotees to golden-era 2000ad, but the game would obviously be infinitely better if they were.

6. This is a lie. What I desperately need is TV-quality space-Disco Bethesda Open Worlder that mashes up Buck Rogers and Blake’s 7.