The Outer Worlds, like many of its ancestors in the narrative-driven RPG sector, is a game about choice — the choice between right and wrong in an outer space technofuture.
Fittingly, the ultimate version of The Outer Worlds is called Spacer’s Choice Edition. This collection for PC and current-gen consoles houses the base game and both of its DLC packs, Peril on Gorgon and Murder on Eridanos. Additionally, it features a few extra upgrades to such aspects as framerate, lighting, and the game’s leveling system, though I should note that at launch these upgrades were buggy or outright broken.
I admit I did not play The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition until after the bugs were patched, so I cannot speak to the frustrations felt by early adopters of this $60 “upgrade” (or perhaps a more stomachable $10 if you already own the base game). However, I did play the original on PS4 when it launched in 2019, and I remember how it ran like a broken-down Scooty-Puff, Jr. on last-gen hardware, with its eons of loading time, visual bugs, freezing, and randomly dead companions. The base game on PS4 was cool, don’t get me wrong, but it didn’t take long for me to cave and make a dreaded Epic Games Store account just so I could play it on PC, where it would run like butter with a solid state hard drive and upgraded graphics card.
Thus, to me, releasing this edition on the current generation of consoles feels like the right choice, even if it is a bit pricey. The upgrades on offer are welcome additions (at least for console players), as they make The Outer Worlds feel like the experience it could have been if it wasn’t held back by hardware at the end of its lifecycle. In this collection, Obsidian narrowly avoids the wrong choice, which would have been maximizing profit with minimal consumer benefit.
At least that’s what I, or perhaps my character Professor Babykins, would believe to be the wrong choice. After all, The Outer Worlds is a game about choices, many of them centered around corporate profiteering — which Professor Babykins and I are not chill about. I am perhaps not as violent about it as Professor Babykins, however, as he shoots greedy corporate leadership on sight, rarely stopping to ask for their side of the story.
Speaking of which, The Outer Worlds’ main story will be familiar to anyone who has played a similar narrative-driven RPG from the likes of Obsidian, Bethesda Game Studios, or Bioware. It presents well-constructed binary narrative choices where one side is clearly better, but it tries to pull you in both directions nonetheless. Many of The Outer Worlds’ binaries revolve around a corporate collective called “The Board,” which players discover is the clear bad guy after reading testimonies and context clues, mostly through computer terminals in the game. In spite of its clear anti-corpo cynicism, the game cleverly attempts to trick players into sympathizing with these mega-businesses through typical corporate manipulation tactics like bureaucratic diversion, “everybody’s doing it” nihilism, and capitalistic utopian conjecturing. In fact, an incurious player could easily run the game pro-Board and miss the consequences of their decisions until they see one of the game’s several negative ending cinematics.
However, Professor Babykins — being an educated man of science — is very curious and has zero tolerance for the inhumane acts committed by The Board. Every Board member and subservient upper-manager is a target for Babykins; his eyes are a crimson shade of red, either from rage or as a side-effect of the vegetative state The Board left him in for years, or both. He is out for bloody vengeance, and he will not stop until The Board is executed and its profit centers burned.
This character was an easy choice for my second full playthrough of The Outer Worlds, as I had a better picture of the corruption surrounding The Board going in. I knew I would lean anti-Board this time, but I wanted to see what would happen if I violently rejected The Outer Worlds’ binary choice structures by murdering Board management. Through Professor Babykins, I’d exhaust some dialogue with each corporate honcho, get a sense of their character, then (most likely) direct Babykins’ companions to execute a critical hit and wipe them and their crew out. In doing so, I’d see if I could break the polarizing tension of the game’s storylines, and I was largely successful: the game still presented me with unique and compelling dialogue options after each murder, and it occasionally rewarded me with unique tertiary story paths that made my choice worthwhile. For instance, killing the Spacer’s Choice manager in Edgewater, an early location in the game housing a canned fish factory, allowed me to finish a quest which benefits a nearby colony in the Botanical Lab without suffering additional negative consequences for their encampment. In other cases, I was able to obtain better guns and armor early or find quicker quest solutions. This reward system for attempting to “break” the game’s structure made it feel good to be “bad,” something I almost exclusively choose to forego in other games from studios like Bioware and Bethesda; I rarely commit crimes in those games at all, because being a wanted criminal just isn’t as smooth and compelling in those games as it is in The Outer Worlds.
The Outer Worlds’ narrative is immensely polished, regardless of what you choose to do, and this polish radiates through much of the rest of the game as well. Visually, The Outer Worlds is stunning. Beyond its color and vibrancy, there is a clear and compelling influence from artists and films of the mid 20th century such as Roger Dean and 2001: A Space Odyssey. You can also feel the humor and odd-band-of-heroes vibe pulling from TV series such as Red Dwarf, Firefly, and Futurama. It looks and feels like something familiar and classic throughout, but it mashes these pieces together in a way all its own.
Every environment in The Outer Worlds also feels meticulously crafted to elevate the game’s mystery and intrigue. Each of the game’s zones is large enough to get lost in, but also compact enough that Obsidian was able to make them look both artisanal and distinct. Each area brims with environmental storytelling, intriguing side areas, and curious or cryptic messages on the game’s computer terminals like hidden audio logs, and interactive books and notes. These elements heighten player immersion and make unraveling the game’s mysteries a hands-on and ultimately fun experience.
This is important, as I believe that one of the major purposes of science fiction is to make its consumers feel deeply immersed in an otherworldly space. This is sometimes to offer a disconnect from the real world, but it is often more to fixate more richly on one of the real world’s more perplexing facets — in this case late-stage capitalism. In either case, The Outer Worlds succeeds in player immersion in a way that its predecessors like the Fallout series, No Man’s Sky, and whatever Star Citizen prerelease version we’re on largely do not. It is compact, focused, and hand-crafted down to the pixel. Perhaps there is some copy-pasting and algorithmic asset creation here, but I cannot tell because I see the influence of human eyes and hands permeating through every aspect of this game’s design.
As a player, this is great. As a long-time lover of science fiction videogames, however, it brings me an unavoidable tinge of unease: I, like many — perhaps yourself included — replayed The Outer Worlds and its awesome DLC as a hype-building appetizer before that one big daddy science fiction video game releases about a month from now. Yet my hype has now diminished a bit. The Outer Worlds has reminded me of the stakes of the personal touch. I am now not only less hype, but also more than a little worried that the future of sci-fi RPGs may be mired by artificiality, by the untreated raw binaries of computer code whose algorithms attempt to fill the emptiness of these games’ outer space with yet more emptiness. There is a sort of irony that the exploration of the final frontier may consist of more than 99% nothing and only rare blips of genuinely rewarding discovery, especially when that final frontier is artificially created.
This irony compounds when you consider that The Outer Worlds is a game about corporate greed, behind-closed-doors deals, and corporate-led warfare when it lands smack in the middle of a multi-layered gaming greed war. It is not only the key early exclusive in the Epic Games vs. Steam PC distribution battle, but also the key game in the Obsidian acquisition by Microsoft, which has become a pillar in the ongoing legal battle between Microsoft and the FTC. In a way, The Outer Worlds has unintentionally flipped the very binaries of its narrative choices back onto itself as a consumer product.
Of course, none of this diminishes its quality, but these ironies have left me more than a little worried about the near and distant future of space games. With Todd Howard calling Starfield “irresponsibly large,” I am apprehensive of its general quality, and I wonder if the sheer detail and handmade-ness of The Outer World‘s assets might diminish the joy Starfield will bring me. The Outer Worlds has very little superfluous content; every nook and cranny is stuffed with stories and compelling loot, and no NPC or companion feels unnecessary. On the other hand, Starfield is another in a long line of algorithmically bloated exploration-focused space games, so I wonder if its stories might get dragged along by tedious navigation. I also wonder whether Starfield, The Outer Worlds, Call of Duty, and other major pillars in this modern DRM war may be playing a role in inviting a consumer-unfriendly future with enormous mega-corporations and consolidated boards monopolizing our gaming content.
This is all speculation, of course. My unease aside, The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition is a mighty pleasant way for a sci-fi RPG fan to spend 30-40 hours, especially if you haven’t yet played its two DLC packs. It is wonderfully crafted, offers compelling choices between “right” and “wrong,” and gives curious players a few hidden pathways beyond those binaries. Its worlds are compact and homespun. It is not a galaxy of content, but in a world full of corporate bloat, overlong working hours, console wars, and games as a service, all I can say is thank goodness for that.
