The challenge of quest design is to shape them in such a way that they don't just feel like running from place to place, tripping story or objective triggers in the game world. You have main quests and side quests, all of them objective-based tasks that are used to structure the play into chunks, some offering story, some amusement, some necessary in-game resources. Like many games of its type, including the Fallout games it draws major influence from, quests are everything in The Outer Worlds. See, The Outer Worlds has a major, overwhelming problem with the way it structures itself. Why, oh, why, then, does playing The Outer Worlds, a game that revels in its anticapitalism, feel so goddamn much like work? Repeatedly during the process of reviewing this game, I found my eyes glazing over as I wandered from waypoint to waypoint, crossing off objectives and planning the next step in my journey like I was going down a shopping list. Combined with strong art direction and an emphasis on encouraging exploration, The Outer Worlds has a lot of what it needs to succeed. Almost everything in the game, large and small, feels written to reinforce the larger themes of the world or to give that world unexpected depths, leading to a sense of place that feels lively and coherent. It's focused and witty, layered and satirical, with a thoroughness to it that's frustratingly rare to see in games. Here are the people who get it.Īnd, true to form, the moment-to-moment writing of The Outer Worlds is superb. The company returning to this genre with The Outer Worlds felt like a thrilling development. Obsidian's pedigree has always been their ability to pay close attention to theme and narrative design, steeped in the old tradition of roleplaying as actually occupying a specific role in the world, as opposed to the generalist superhero favored by a lot of modern open-world RPGs. The last time Obsidian made a game like this, after all, it was Fallout: New Vegas, an inventive sequel to Bethesda's Fallout 3 that remains one of the deepest, most thematically and narratively satisfying RPGs ever made. The Outer Worlds follows in the tradition of some of the most lauded roleplaying games in existence. If only playing in that world didn't also feel so laborious. The Outer Worlds draws its best moments from this contrast, and from the suffering and determination of the people living under the yoke of a really asinine economic system right out of the Gilded Age. The spacefaring world of the game is beautiful, brightly colored, a site of awe and mystery-and absolutely depressing to the core. The Outer Worlds is full of a lot of experiences like this, where the absolute bleak horror of a space empire run by lousy corporations melds with an intergalactic setting to produce moments that are stunning in their tragicomic brutality.
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