The Outer Worlds:
The Outer Worlds: Space Capitalism Run Amok
The Outer Worlds: A Backwater Sci-Fi Adventure
Time to Beat:
25 Hours and 5 Minutes
In the video game wrap up of 2022, I promised a rematch between Obsidian Entertainment and FromSoftware. Obsidian steps into the 2023 ring first with its 2019 release, The Outer Worlds. This action RPG is reminiscent of Bethesda's Fallout series (more accurately, Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas). Here's the problem; I find the modern, first person shooter with soft RPG elements bland. This includes: Deus Ex (except the original), Fallout New Vegas, Fallout 4, Prey, Thief (original), Borderlands, and Dishonored. These share similar elements; an RPG system that seems to improve the protagonist, but doesn't. Enemies that act foolishly in combat; standing in place or mindlessly running toward the player. Combat that feels worse than a regular shooter or plain RPG. A handful of interesting characters, or an almost engaging setting, but not enough to make it worth exploring. An endless horde of incrementally improving equipment I have to sift through.
The genre isn't a complete waste. Counter examples include; Alien Isolation, Prey: Mooncrash, Mass Effect 1 and 2, Superhot, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Deep Rock Galactic, Apex Legends, and Kingdom Come. These incorporate horror elements, increased tension, complex RPG elements, superior combat, initiative mechanics, a developed story, or multiplayer (co-op or competitive).
Nothing about The Outer Worlds feels new or unique. It follows a well worn path, copying elements from a variety of other science fiction games, especially Fallout.
The player awakens on the Hope, a transport ship sent from Earth, now drifting aimlessly around the Halcyon system. Halcyon is a star system colonized decades earlier by the Hope's sister ship, The Groundbreaker. Colonists are sent in cryosleep, but the Hope mysteriously vanished, only to appear later in a state of decay. An outlaw scientist, Phineas Vernon Welles (a reference to several famous sci-fi authors), rescues the protagonist, but asks for their aid. Because the colonists have been in extended suspended animation, a specific, rare, chemical is needed to restore them. Anyone revived without this chemical collapses into a pile of sludge.
Welles sets the player down on Terra 2, asking them to acquire enough of the chemical to rescue hundreds of thousands of frozen citizens. The corporate, oligarchic government of the Halcyon system is too hierarchical, corrupt, and inefficient to help. They actively obstruct the player and Welles. Taking the spaceship, The Unreliable, from the accidentally demised Alex Hawthorne, the protagonist sets off to right the wrongs of the system, or add to the chaos. Like most games of this type, the player often has two contradictory, parallel, paths to choose from; chaos or order, evil or good, helping or hurting, for entrenched interests or for the people.
The Halcyon has a few planets, each with their own distinct nature, but featuring a cohesive theme. Terra 2 is managed by Spacer's Choice, a capitalist, consumerist corporation, which enforces productivity, efficiency, and quotas, while being unproductive, inefficient, and detrimental to the health of its citizens. The citizens are supposed to accept their societal role (employment), daily ingesting more platitudes about the value of work than calories. Some people, called marauders, live outside the settlement. They are brain dead, their minds killed by continuous use of Adrena-Time. This dangerous drug (Halcyon doesn't regulate the production of medicines), increases a person's productivity, at the cost of chronic psychosis and paranoia. Overwork, and lack of pharmaceutical regulation drives people mad. The player is given an unacceptable choice (that's how these sorts of games work, both choices are unsatisfactory) between maintaining the status quo of the settlement, or sacrificing it to rescue an anti-capitalist outpost. But for some reason, the player can't liberate the people in the city, lead them to the commune. They must suffer servitude or perish.
The system features competition between two ideological factions. The ruling class embraces Scientism, a religion ruled by an absent God, who created the processes by which the universe functions, and has no other interaction with the world. A materialist philosophy, the adherents accept determinism, because the universe is composed of matter, and all matter obeys the laws of the universe. It is a cold, merciless ideal, which says everyone should accept their situation because it was determined by the Grand Architect. Incorporating elements of the unscientific, social-Darwinism, it says the weak die for the betterment of society. It highlights the absurdity of capitalism, while also criticizing Marxist materialism, a cultist devotion to science, and conservative religion thinking.
The competing faction (there are other smaller factions), is Philosophism (a portmanteau combining philosophy and its opponent/sibling sophistry). Philosophists believe in pantheism, a worship of nature which leads to merging (in a process called Awakening), with the Godhead/Universe.
Of the two, Philosophism receives less attention, but neither ideology is given the full attention it deserves. These two factions are only vague background noise compared to the larger economic inequality. Regardless, both factions are portrayed as detestably absurd.
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Relevant:
Fallout 4: The Fall and Rise of the Commonwealth
Dishonored: Plague Rats Ate the Manuscript and Killed the Best Characters
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