Obsidian's Sequel Fails to Achieve the Summit
Bigger isn't always improved. It's a cliché, but it's also the best way to sum up my impressions after spending many hours with The Outer Worlds 2. Developer Obsidian expanded on all aspects to the sequel to its 2019 futuristic adventure — additional wit, foes, weapons, traits, and settings, everything that matters in titles of this genre. And it works remarkably well — initially. But the load of all those daring plans makes the game wobble as the game progresses.
A Powerful Opening Act
The Outer Worlds 2 creates a powerful opening statement. You are a member of the Terran Directorate, a do-gooder organization focused on curbing dishonest administrations and companies. After some capital-D Drama, you wind up in the Arcadia system, a outpost splintered by conflict between Auntie's Selection (the result of a union between the original game's two large firms), the Protectorate (groupthink taken to its most extreme outcome), and the Ascendant Brotherhood (reminiscent of the Church, but with calculations rather than Jesus). There are also a bunch of tears tearing holes in the fabric of reality, but at this moment, you really need access a relay station for pressing contact needs. The problem is that it's in the center of a warzone, and you need to find a way to reach it.
Following the original, Outer Worlds 2 is a FPS adventure with an main narrative and many side quests spread out across various worlds or zones (big areas with a lot to uncover, but not open-world).
The opening region and the process of accessing that relay hub are spectacular. You've got some humorous meetings, of course, like one that includes a rancher who has overindulged sugary treats to their preferred crab. Most lead you to something beneficial, though — an unexpected new path or some new bit of intel that might provide an alternate route onward.
Unforgettable Sequences and Missed Chances
In one memorable sequence, you can encounter a Defender runaway near the overpass who's about to be killed. No quest is tied to it, and the exclusive means to locate it is by investigating and paying attention to the ambient dialogue. If you're quick and careful enough not to let him get killed, you can preserve him (and then protect his runaway sweetheart from getting killed by monsters in their hideout later), but more relevant to the immediate mission is a energy cable concealed in the grass in the vicinity. If you follow it, you'll discover a concealed access point to the communication hub. There's a different access point to the station's sewers tucked away in a cave that you could or could not detect based on when you follow a specific companion quest. You can find an readily overlooked person who's essential to preserving a life much later. (And there's a soft toy who indirectly convinces a group of troops to join your cause, if you're nice enough to rescue it from a explosive area.) This opening chapter is dense and engaging, and it seems like it's full of deep narrative possibilities that rewards you for your curiosity.
Diminishing Hopes
Outer Worlds 2 never lives up to those initial expectations again. The following key zone is organized like a map in the original game or Avowed — a expansive territory scattered with notable locations and secondary tasks. They're all story-appropriate to the conflict between Auntie's Choice and the Ascendant Brotherhood, but they're also mini-narratives isolated from the primary plot in terms of story and spatially. Don't look for any environmental clues leading you to new choices like in the initial area.
Regardless of forcing you to make some tough decisions, what you do in this zone's side quests has no impact. Like, it really doesn't matter, to the degree that whether you enable war crimes or direct a collection of displaced people to their end leads to merely a casual remark or two of speech. A game doesn't need to let all tasks influence the narrative in some major, impactful way, but if you're forcing me to decide a faction and pretending like my choice matters, I don't feel it's unfair to anticipate something more when it's concluded. When the game's already shown that it is capable of more, anything less appears to be a compromise. You get more of everything like the team vowed, but at the cost of substance.
Daring Concepts and Absent Drama
The game's intermediate phase attempts a comparable approach to the central framework from the initial world, but with clearly diminished panache. The notion is a bold one: an related objective that spans two planets and motivates you to seek aid from various groups if you want a easier route toward your goal. Aside from the repeat setup being a slightly monotonous, it's also just missing the drama that this kind of scenario should have. It's a "bargain with evil" moment. There should be tough compromise. Your relationship with any group should be important beyond earning their approval by doing new tasks for them. Everything is absent, because you can merely power through on your own and complete the mission anyway. The game even goes out of its way to provide you methods of accomplishing this, highlighting alternative paths as optional objectives and having companions inform you where to go.
It's a byproduct of a larger problem in Outer Worlds 2: the anxiety of permitting you to feel dissatisfied with your decisions. It often goes too far out of its way to ensure not only that there's an alternate route in many situations, but that you know it exists. Secured areas almost always have various access ways signposted, or nothing worthwhile internally if they fail to. If you {can't
