Obsidian's Sequel Doesn't Quite Achieve the Stars
More expansive isn't always improved. It's a cliché, yet it's also the most accurate way to encapsulate my feelings after devoting five dozen hours with The Outer Worlds 2. The creators included additional each element to the follow-up to its 2019 sci-fi RPG — more humor, foes, arms, attributes, and locations, all the essentials in such adventures. And it functions superbly — for a little while. But the weight of all those grand concepts leads to instability as the hours wear on.
An Impressive Opening Act
The Outer Worlds 2 establishes a solid first impression. You are a member of the Planetary Directorate, a altruistic agency dedicated to restraining corrupt governments and corporations. After some capital-D Drama, you find yourself in the Arcadia system, a settlement fractured by hostilities between Auntie's Choice (the result of a merger between the previous title's two major companies), the Guardians (communalism extended to its most extreme outcome), and the Ascendant Order (like the Catholic church, but with math instead of Jesus). There are also a bunch of rifts creating openings in the universe, but currently, you urgently require reach a communication hub for critical messaging reasons. The problem is that it's in the middle of a battlefield, and you need to figure out how to arrive.
Like its predecessor, Outer Worlds 2 is a first-person role-playing game with an main narrative and many secondary tasks distributed across various worlds or areas (expansive maps with a lot to uncover, but not open-world).
The initial area and the process of getting to that comms station are spectacular. You've got some goofy encounters, of course, like one that features a farmer who has fed too much sweet grains to their preferred crab. Most direct you toward something beneficial, though — an surprising alternative route or some additional intelligence that might open a different path onward.
Memorable Moments and Missed Possibilities
In one notable incident, you can find a Guardian defector near the bridge who's about to be eliminated. No task is tied to it, and the exclusive means to find it is by exploring and listening to the ambient dialogue. If you're quick and alert enough not to let him get killed, you can preserve him (and then protect his runaway sweetheart from getting eliminated by creatures in their hideout later), but more pertinent to the current objective is a electrical conduit concealed in the grass close by. If you trace it, you'll find a secret entry to the communication hub. There's a different access point to the station's drainage system tucked away in a grotto that you could or could not observe depending on when you follow a particular ally mission. You can encounter an easily missable person who's essential to saving someone's life down the line. (And there's a stuffed animal who implicitly sways a group of troops to fight with you, if you're kind enough to rescue it from a danger zone.) This opening chapter is packed and exciting, and it feels like it's brimming with rich storytelling potential that rewards you for your exploration.
Diminishing Anticipations
Outer Worlds 2 fails to meet those early hopes again. The second main area is structured comparable to a map in the initial title or Avowed — a big area sprinkled with points of interest and secondary tasks. They're all thematically relevant to the struggle between Auntie's Selection and the Order of the Ascendant, but they're also vignettes detached from the primary plot in terms of story and location-wise. Don't expect any contextual hints directing you to new choices like in the opening region.
Regardless of compelling you to choose some tough decisions, what you do in this region's secondary tasks has no impact. Like, it really doesn't matter, to the point where whether you enable war crimes or lead a group of refugees to their death culminates in only a casual remark or two of speech. A game doesn't need to let every quest impact the story in some major, impactful way, but if you're compelling me to select a faction and giving the impression that my selection is important, I don't feel it's irrational to expect something more when it's over. When the game's already shown that it is capable of more, any diminishment appears to be a concession. You get additional content like the developers pledged, but at the cost of substance.
Bold Plans and Missing Stakes
The game's second act endeavors an alike method to the central framework from the first planet, but with distinctly reduced flair. The concept is a bold one: an related objective that extends across two planets and encourages you to seek aid from different factions if you want a more straightforward journey toward your objective. Beyond the repeat setup being a little tiresome, it's also lacking the drama that this type of situation should have. It's a "deal with the demon" moment. There should be tough compromise. Your relationship with each alliance should be important beyond gaining their favor by completing additional missions for them. Everything is lacking, because you can merely power through on your own and achieve the goal anyway. The game even goes out of its way to give you ways of achieving this, highlighting alternative paths as secondary goals and having allies inform you where to go.
It's a side effect of a broader issue in Outer Worlds 2: the anxiety of letting you be unhappy with your selections. It often overcompensates out of its way to make sure not only that there's an different way in most cases, but that you realize its presence. Closed chambers nearly always have several entry techniques signposted, or nothing worthwhile internally if they do not. If you {can't