Obsidian's Sequel Doesn't Quite Achieve the Stars
Bigger isn't necessarily superior. It's an old adage, but it's also the most accurate way to sum up my feelings after devoting 50 hours with The Outer Worlds 2. Developer Obsidian expanded on each element to the next installment to its 2019 futuristic adventure — more humor, enemies, arms, characteristics, and locations, everything that matters in games like this. And it works remarkably well — for a little while. But the load of all those grand concepts causes the experience to falter as the time passes.
An Impressive First Impression
The Outer Worlds 2 establishes a solid initial impact. You are a member of the Planetary Directorate, a do-gooder organization committed to restraining dishonest administrations and companies. After some serious turmoil, you find yourself in the Arcadia region, a settlement divided by conflict between Auntie's Choice (the result of a union between the first game's two major companies), the Guardians (groupthink pushed to its worst logical conclusion), and the Ascendant Brotherhood (like the Catholic church, but with mathematics instead of Jesus). There are also a bunch of fissures tearing holes in the fabric of reality, but currently, you really need get to a transmission center for pressing contact purposes. The issue is that it's in the middle of a battlefield, and you need to determine how to reach it.
Following the original, Outer Worlds 2 is a first-person RPG with an overarching story and numerous optional missions distributed across multiple locations or regions (expansive maps with a much to discover, but not open-world).
The initial area and the journey of reaching that comms station are spectacular. You've got some funny interactions, of course, like one that involves a farmer who has fed too much sugary cereal to their favorite crab. Most guide you to something beneficial, though — an surprising alternative route or some additional intelligence that might open a different path ahead.
Notable Sequences and Overlooked Chances
In one memorable sequence, you can encounter a Guardian defector near the overpass who's about to be killed. No quest is tied to it, and the exclusive means to find it is by exploring and hearing the environmental chatter. If you're fast and sufficiently cautious not to let him get slain, you can rescue him (and then rescue his runaway sweetheart from getting eliminated by monsters in their refuge later), but more relevant to the task at hand is a energy cable obscured in the undergrowth in the vicinity. If you track it, you'll locate a hidden entrance to the transmission center. There's a different access point to the station's sewers hidden away in a cavern that you might or might not notice contingent on when you undertake a specific companion quest. You can encounter an simple to miss individual who's essential to rescuing a person 20 hours later. (And there's a stuffed animal who subtly persuades a team of fighters to fight with you, if you're considerate enough to save it from a danger zone.) This initial segment is rich and engaging, and it appears as if it's overflowing with deep narrative possibilities that benefits you for your exploration.
Fading Hopes
Outer Worlds 2 never lives up to those initial expectations again. The following key zone is arranged like a map in the initial title or Avowed — a expansive territory sprinkled with key sites and optional missions. They're all narratively connected to the conflict between Auntie's Selection and the Ascendant Order, but they're also short stories separated from the primary plot plot-wise and location-wise. Don't anticipate any environmental clues leading you to new choices like in the initial area.
Regardless of forcing you to make some hard calls, what you do in this area's optional missions is inconsequential. Like, it genuinely is irrelevant, to the degree that whether you enable war crimes or lead a group of refugees to their death culminates in nothing but a throwaway line or two of conversation. A game isn't required to let all tasks impact the story in some big, dramatic fashion, but if you're making me choose a group and giving the impression that my choice is important, I don't think it's irrational to expect something additional when it's over. When the game's already shown that it has greater potential, any reduction feels like a compromise. You get more of everything like the team vowed, but at the price of complexity.
Daring Concepts and Missing Tension
The game's middle section tries something similar to the main setup from the first planet, but with clearly diminished style. The idea is a bold one: an interconnected mission that extends across two planets and encourages you to seek aid from various groups if you want a smoother path toward your aim. Aside from the recurring structure being a slightly monotonous, it's also absent the drama that this sort of circumstance should have. It's a "bargain with evil" moment. There should be hard concessions. Your association with each alliance should be important beyond making them like you by completing additional missions for them. All this is absent, because you can just blitz through on your own and clear the objective anyway. The game even makes an effort to provide you means of doing this, indicating alternate routes as additional aims and having allies inform you where to go.
It's a consequence of a larger problem in Outer Worlds 2: the apprehension of allowing you to regret with your decisions. It frequently goes too far in its attempts to ensure not only that there's an alternative path in most cases, but that you are aware of it. Locked rooms practically always have various access ways marked, or nothing valuable inside if they don't. If you {can't
