The Outer Worlds

I completed my romp through the Halcyon colony in the game The Outer Worlds yesterday.  It was the most fun I've had in a video game in a while.

The Outer Worlds, as you already know if you're a gamer, was developed by the studio Obsidian, who had previously produced the classic Fallout: New Vegas.  In many people's opinion, New Vegas is the best Fallout game and the last good game in the franchise.  My contrarian opinion is that Fallout 4, the next game after New Vegas, is a good although very different game, but I agree with the consensus that the next game after Fallout 4, Fallout 76, is utter trash.

Anyway, we're not here to bury Caesar, but to appreciate The Outer Worlds.  It does look and feel like the best of the Fallout games.  Even though it's set in a different universe and is a completely separate story, you can tell it's by the same creative team.  Like the Fallout games, you have to make moral choices between aligning with different factions and then live with the consequences of those decisions. As a result, you can replay the game several times making different decisions and have a very different experience each time.  You can also choose to use persuasion skills or even outright lie rather than use violence to settle many conflicts, and those choices not only result in different actions, but frequently result in different situations as the game progresses.  

Humor is an attribute, and the dialog and storyline in The Outer Worlds are frequently quite funny. For example, after battling through a small army of marauders and monsters to get to a secret laboratory, and then engaging in more conflict resolution to find out what exactly is going on at that laboratory, you're told that the top-secret project they're working on, their great invention, is . . .  diet toothpaste. You risked your life and took countless others' just to defend research into the dubious merits of diet toothpaste.

But probably the best part of the game is the half-dozen or so computerized companions you meet in the course of your quest.  Each one has a distinct personality and their own backstory, and they really feel like actual companions as you explore the worlds of The Outer Worlds.  They all contribute their own idiosyncratic snarky comments on the action, and best of all for ego-gratification, almost never fail to compliment you when you get a good kill-shot in on an enemy ("Nice shooting, Captain!").  If it's your desire, they can all live with you on your spaceship, and you can pick up to any two of them to join you on a quest, and as they all have different skill sets (i.e., lock-picking, persuasion, small-arms weapons, etc.), the choice of companion has strategic consequences.  In really tough fights, they'll even dispatch of most of the enemies for you while you can just fall back and  watch, although the game does insist on letting you deliver the final coup de grace on strategic opponents and bad-ass monsters.  But these virtual friends make the game experience feel downright social.

My only complaint, and its a mild one, is that the game might have been a tad too easy to play.  I played at the "Normal" difficulty setting, but there's also a "Hard" level and a super-difficult "Supernova" setting, as well as an "Easy" setting.  At "Normal," while I did die in-game many times, it was usually because I was just standing there shooting like a moron and not making any defensive moves.  In the course of the game, I never came across a situation where I couldn't figure out how to get into some building or room necessary to obtain an essential object or clue.  In some other games (cough, Far Cry, cough), I'd try to get into a building for the longest time, trying every door and jimmying ever window multiple times before finally looking for the answer on line and learning that there's, say, a completely non-intuitive entrance a quarter mile away to a tunnel leading to the basement.  There was nothing here that couldn't be figured out pretty quickly, and there were no passwords or computer swipe cards that couldn't be found after a few minutes' search.  I'd rather a game be too easy than so difficult you feel like you can't ever win, but it may have been just a tad too easy in this game.

I finished the game at around 5:30 pm yesterday, but by 8:00 had already started a second play-through determined to make different choices and decisions than on my first game, and already I've found different quests and had different experiences than before.  The game's not terribly long by modern standards, about 40 hours, compared to the 80 to 100 hours of some of the big, bloated open-world RPGs of today.  But the prospect of multiple play-throughs, siding with different factions each time, means one may get more hours of varied game playing with The Outer Worlds than with some of the more time-intensive marathons of other games.

Notwithstanding the ease and brevity, The Outer Worlds is a great, great game and a blast to play.  I am so glad I purchased a copy.