Instead the overplot is immediately discarded in favour of dropping you down onto the surface of a tutorial planet and giving you the objective of finding a power regulator to get a parked spaceship working again, after which you can use it to explore the rest of the solar system to do various odd jobs before encountering The End Of The Game.
You’re not shown anything of these other colonists you’re supposed to be spending the entire game trying to save and most of what you spend your time doing in The Outer Worlds is almost totally unrelated to it, making it an abstract goal at best that only really reappears at the end of the game when you get the “classic” pick-an-ending choice of helping the colonists or siding with the corporations. Except for you, of course you’re the lucky colonist who gets revived by a mad scientist/freedom fighter as a test run for waking up the rest, but unfortunately he can’t actually do that until you’ve jumped through several plot hoops for him.Īnd those are the poorly-defined stakes of The Outer Worlds. When the first ship does eventually arrive the corporations just leave all of the genius passengers in cryosleep because they don’t want anyone to ruin their fat profit margins.
The outer worlds game length full#
The ship with all the supergeniuses on it experienced some issues during the flight from Earth and turned up several decades late, leaving the second ship to build Halcyon into exactly the kind of corporate hellworld we’ve seen in literally every single piece of cyberpunk media to date, except this time it’s full of 1950s-style advertising jingles. The Outer Worlds is set in an extraterrestrial solar system called Halcyon that’s been colonised by humanity, with its basic premise ripped off from the old Douglas Adams joke about sending off one colony ship full of humanity’s best and brightest and a second colony ship with its most useless examples 2 - salesmen, ad executives and so on. For the first couple of hours I was having as much fun as anyone will with The Outer Worlds, but the more I engaged with its systems, the more I peeled back its Fallout-esque facade to try and get at the actual game beneath, the more I became convinced that there was absolutely nothing there. Hell, it might have been enough for me if it had been executed with any kind of flair or panache or… anything that convinced me that it wasn’t just a cynical exercise in box-ticking. There is definitely a gap in the market for The Outer Worlds right now, for a thing that’s basically just a Fallout game with the branding filed off, and that’s going to be enough for a lot of people. It is, quite literally, cargo cult game development: if we just make something with all of the Fallout bits - first-person perspective, a ripoff of the SPECIAL stats and perks system, a button you can push to stop time and headshot people and a conversation system with the odd skill check scattered into it - then surely we’ll experience the same kind of ludicrous success as Fallout 3 and 4, especially since Fallout 76 did actually do something different 1 and blew up on the launch pad as a result. There’s absolutely no vision or original ideas behind it it’s been assembled pretty much entirely from a mish-mash of off-the-shelf parts that have been put together in the shape of something that superficially resembles a modern Fallout game. The Outer Worlds is exactly the kind of by-the-numbers RPG I obliquely laid into at the end of my Disco Elysium review. Now I see it as an aggressively vacuous product that failed to impress me in every single respect, and whose obvious desire to be nothing more than an off-brand Fallout knockoff I found outright offensive in the wake of the genuinely groundbreaking work being done elsewhere.
Sadly for The Outer Worlds that’s no longer the case. If I’d played The Outer Worlds a month ago I probably would have treated it as what it was intended to be: an entirely unremarkable, unambitious attempt to do Fallout in space. Even worse, though, is that it has had the sheer bad luck to release just ten days after Disco Elysium, a game which has quite literally redefined what I want and expect from my RPGs in the future. For starters it’s continually getting mixed up in my brain with Outer Wilds, which is one of the best games I’ve played this year and not at all something that Outer Worlds particularly wants to be inviting comparisons to. The Outer Worlds is a very unfortunate game.
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