The Outer Worlds isn’t just disappointing. It’s a portent for the cult of the western RPG

Obsidian Games had struck gold. They would tie up, with the utmost subtlety, the link between their new IP – The Outer Worlds, released in the November games rush of 2019 – and the postmodern classic Fallout: New Vegas. It would be mentioned in the publicity but it wouldn’t be pushed. “The team that brought you…” and little more. A piecemeal callout to Bethesda and then, mouths shut tight. In the wake of Fallout 76 and increasingly low expectations for their space-faring Skyrim-alike Starfield, Bethesda were in hot water, and it was exactly the right time for Obsidian to crawl out of the woodwork and bum-rush the big boys. The Outer Worlds was destined to be the western RPG that western RPG fans had been waiting for ever since western RPG Fallout: New Vegas set a new standard for branching gameplay, thoughtful motif, worldbuilding expertise and western RPG-ing generally. The Outer Worlds would pay homage to that tradition while issuing the long-distance telegram of a middle finger that Bethesda had deserved ever since Fallout 4 exposed the gaping holes in their capacities as torch-bearer for that particularly beloved post-nuclear game series.

First: some background. Fallout 1 and 2 were isometric roleplaying games released on PC in that awkward phase for everyone that happened as the 90s segued into the ice-cold millennium. The first was developed by a company called Interplay Entertainment, also known for making Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, and the lesser known band consequently mediocre “Battle Chess”. Their subsidiary, Black Isle, would develop Fallout 2, with the designer Tim Cain and artist Leonard Boyarsky staying in place for that iteration. Both the original Fallout and Fallout 2 placed an honest emphasis on player choice, included characters that had sincere backstories and motivations, and aimed to create decisions that encouraged critical thinking on behalf of the player and had a genuine impact on the story. Then, Fallout 3 came around and blew all this to bits by offering a cheap imitation of these elements but in a fully 3D setting with decapitating weaponry and wanton explosions. Fallout 3 was the opposite of a spiritual successor: it retained the name of its inspiration but very few of the gameplay elements. But it was the new standard for western RPG-ing, and it set the direction of the genre for the next five years, or longer – more on that later. For this prescient reason alone, it won critical acclaim – it was simply remarkable for the time. And games built in its image – Skyrim, first and foremost – became behemoths on the back of Fallout 3.

When Fallout 4 came out in New Vegas’ shadow, it disappointed some – in short, because it was the epitome of the “width of an ocean, depth of a pond” problem. This was compounded by an inability to choose one’s own backstory and a perhaps overzealous focus on randomised, radiant quests (“another settlement needs our help”, etc etc.) So the aim of The Outer Worlds was to take these issues to count and address them by building a game that was the opposite. A game small enough that it could be as deep as an ocean, failing that, a chunky lake at least. Characters with backstories built in to their stats and abilities. Handcrafted quests beyond a “go somewhere, fight bandits, find objective” trifecta. In those respects, The Outer Worlds was a definite success, and the thought put into both its design elements and also its style is frequently clear. Myriad references to sci-fi history from Vonnegut to Adams to Ballard are plain to see, but the game is also chock-full of capitalist pseudo-critique. The corporations own the galaxy! People speak like advertisements! They must, contractually, open their speeches to the player with “It’s not the best choice – it’s Spacer’s Choice!” The way this actually affects the game world feels peripheral; the game actually does better when it’s making slightly more pointed jabs at gaming culture, be it through mocking morality systems or the fetch quest paradigm.

The problem is, The Outer Worlds still follows that same dull quest structure more often than one might expect. While the game builds in alternative options, they are rarely so distinct in terms of their outcome and impact, things that could make them feel real. The game is, unfortunately, too small for its depth to shine through. A puddle can rarely be deeper than an ocean. Moreover, the base mechanics of the game don’t have enough breathing room to offer responsive change to the player’s actions. While you have a wide variety of skills to tick up, the impact skills have on gameplay rarely feel tangible. For example, the effect dialog skills have in combat - an interesting innovation in principle - is something I never noticed actually play out, despite playing a dialog-focused character. Across all the skills, too many of the buffs are passive, such that the range of options you have in any given situation feels disappointingly similar between level one and level thirty. And it’s the same for the debuffs The Outer Worlds calls “flaws”, which were flaunted as one of the game’s most interesting conceits.

Flaws are unfortunately… a flawed system. At certain points in the game, based on your behaviour, you may be offered an additional perk point in exchange for say, vulnerability to damage from robots, because you have been taking so much damage from robots. In principle it sounds interesting, but the game simply doesn’t have a wide enough range of perks or mechanics to make choosing flaws an engaging gameplay decision. It also doesn’t have a sufficient understanding of the player’s behaviour to offer flaws beyond “take even more fall damage” or “take even more damage from dogs”. Finally, the game is simply too linear to accommodate any flaws that have anything more than a peripheral impact on how gameplay works.

This is a game where you kill things or pass skill checks. All the other systems, such as stealth, are implemented in such a tacked-on slap-dash way that they are simply not viable strategies. Skill checks barely make the grade, given that they are so simplified. Like in Fallout, you are told exactly how skilled you need to be in a given skill to pass a check. Furthermore, the game chooses a peculiar sticky middle between a dialogue system with no guidance and a complete one. In a game like Skyrim, even, you are notified when you complete a quest objective such that a new dialogue option will be available with an NPC. The Outer Worlds doesn’t do this, which can create ambiguity around player choice. Also, the relationship between the ideas in a player’s head and the options available can be stymied by insufficient dialogue skills. You can’t even venture an option requiring a skill if you don’t meet the skill check. This is actually a step backwards from Fallout: New Vegas.

Another issue in The Outer Worlds stems from how disconnected the world is. I understand that a small developer working under pressure cannot build an entire province like Ubisoft or Bethesda. But the organisation of The Outer Worlds’ … worlds has other negative connotations. The world is laid out across a solar system with small open worlds on each planet, with some planets having multiple areas within them. There are the larger hubs, Monarch being the largest, and the smaller locations, such as Scylla or the Groundbreaker, that are revisited throughout the story for multiple quests. The problem is that, like in Fallout, the game insists on having factions. The problem is that – outside of the evil megacorporation faction – these groups are usually isolated – at least in an operational sense – to a single planet or two, despite half of them being megacorporations. In practice, therefore, the interplay of factions and the player’s relationship to them is rarely a serious gameplay element, unless the player is a bloodthirsty madman who kills everyone. Even then, word seems unable to spread from one faction to the next, as if each group rests on the assumption that you become an ideologically clean slate with each planet skip.

In addition, these small open worlds really draw away from the sense of space-faring, swashbuckling adventure. There are no spaceflight mechanics in this game, just a fast travel map, so you spend most of the game hopping between worlds chasing objectives, which kills a degree of immersion. What kills it even more is the length and frequency of loading screens, which should not be this consistent in worlds this much smaller than, say, Skyrim, where they were excusable given the time and sheer world size. Even in the case of Monarch, which is larger and therefore more self-contained, I grew sick of the world instead of growing immersed in it, given how repetitive the enemies and quests tended to be. Kill things or skill checks. There is not a lot of enemy variety in this game, nor is there a lot of variety in the weapons you use. Given that variety in dialogue is also limited, this puts the game in a difficult place. I didn’t want to be skipping the beautifully delivered dialogue towards the end of this game. But I found myself doing so anyway, because I was tired of the path I knew it would take me down. By the time I reached the final hub world, I eschewed side quests and shot right for the main story, consistently disappointed by how easy it was to bypass honest-to-goodness gameplay with high enough dialogue skills (one button press) and enough built-up resources.

I will admit that I am holding the Outer Worlds to a very high standard, perhaps even to a higher standard than I would hold Skyrim or, more pressingly, New Vegas. The reason is simply that almost every game in whichever genre now has "RPG elements". Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, The Crew – okay, maybe every Ubisoft game has "RPG elements". But they appear in one guise or another across every video game genre outside the stalwart shoot-em-up. The original Walking Dead, released in 2012, was the new standard for dialogue in games. It came out after New Vegas and, like Skyrim, lets the player know when they open up new dialogue options. However, easily the most revolutionary thing about The Walking Dead was how it baked in both player agency and urgency in conversations and decisions alike. Many a game now frequently apes the illusion of player choice, often through the lens of good/evil, harkening back to Mass Effect’s Paragon / Renegade system. The duality on display ignores a wide variety of "shades of grey" bullsh*t. But the fact of the matter is, The Outer Worlds feels like a game that acknowledges The Walking Dead – by trying to make its characters deeper and more nuanced – while failing to really cash that cheque, perhaps because it is so committed to satire. It’s not as if Airplane was known for its profound character development. Meanwhile, in the RPG space, Dark Souls has torn up the rulebook on gameplay, while Zelda: Breath of the Wild has committed to making a world that does not exist purely for the character’s benefit. The Outer Worlds seems oblivious to how western RPG-ing has changed as games become globalised and mechanics cross-pollinate from east to west.

It feels like Obsidian built the Outer Worlds with the intent to both harken back to New Vegas and out-do both Fallout 76 and Fallout 4. While it definitely achieves the first two objectives, I’m not confident to venture on the third. Fallout 4 had far larger scope and unparalleled scale. Part of the reason why The Outer Worlds fails is precisely because it is a halfway house between the style of New Vegas and the substance of Bethesda-developed Fallout titles. It is not so overzealous to give players a giant Commonwealth to explore, but it is neither so confident as to fully commit to the maxim of tangible player choice. It feels like those were the only bellweathers Obsidian was working with, staring them down, cursed by short-sightedness while the notion of an RPG itself falls apart. Now, they have been bought out by Microsoft Studios and are working on what looks like a mashup of A Bug’s Life, Minecraft and Fortnite. How the mighty have fallen. But hey! Who am I to criticise? It’s not the best choice; it’s Obsidian’s choice.