News that the makers of
Fallout: New Vegas were going to make an FPS RPG set in space was going to do nothing but set high expectations. Since the last couple installments of the
Fallout franchise,
Obsidian Entertainment has been everyone's mythical hero: the people who took a good thing and made it incredible, and who should've been handed the reins. I have one foot in the pro-Obsidian boat (I actually liked
Fallout 4 and fail to see what the big issue is, but whatever), so I was among those with high expectations for
The Outer Worlds. I'll head this off by saying that those expectations were, for the most part, met.
I wanted a robust RPG system, and I got one. I wanted an interesting world, and I got one. I wanted fun FPS combat, and I got it. I wanted engaging characters, and I got them. The thing is, I just didn't get
enough.
The scale of the game was almost shockingly small, with only a handful of decently-sized maps that are just sort-of handed to you in a pseudo on-the-rails format. I never once felt like I could just pick a direction and go see what was out there. And the world itself had just enough intrigue written into it that I wanted to see what everything was about, but unlike the likes of
Fallout 3 and
Skyrim, I never wanted that deeper dive. My eyes glazed over when presented with a pane of flavor-text. The well didn't seem very deep.
One of the scratches this game itched was the
Mass Effect itch, with the variegated cast of companion characters. There was a lot of potential for me to get just as attached to all these people as I got by the end of
Mass Effect 1 (let alone the trilogy), but by the end the only character I felt endeared to was Parvati—and I think that's because her companion quest arc kind of required attention throughout the bulk of the main story, whereas everyone else's companion quests could be completed in one quick sitting.
Speaking of the itches the game scratched, there seemed to be a lot of influences playing in here. Good influences too. The
Fallout/
Elder Scrolls itch needs no mention, and I've already brought up
Mass Effect, but some of the combat and the more confined maps felt very
BioShocky. Setting and (the excellent) music made me want to dig out my
Firefly DVDs.
There are a lot of good pieces to
The Outer Worlds, and I believe they're all in the right place and in the right order—but there's just
not enough. Like, literally do everything the same, only do more of it. Go deeper. Flesh this out, expand that. I mean, for exclamations within audible range, I feel like the skill tree was built for a game that didn't force you to end it around level 30.
I don't think this is a failure by any means. I enjoyed it, and I'll very likely play it again, but it'll give me the same feeling I had for those really fun demos that used to come with PC games back in the day. Really fun to replay, but god damn I wish there was more.
Update: After reading something about the game, I grew curious. Turns out I overlooked how
The Outer Worlds managed to make
dialog skills, of all things, a viable main build. I played through again, this time focusing on all things Dialog and Leadership, and it opens up a completely different FPS/RPG game than the standard
get-good-at-guns-shoot-bad-guys routine. If you didn't hate the game but also didn't dive into this mode, give it a shot. It's fun.
I also realized that I thoroughly enjoyed the game in my replays, almost as much as the first time. It's not exactly a selling point that one has to play a game multiple times to see its true quality, but it's true here. Half-star bump on second pass.