Obsidian's Sequel Doesn't Quite Achieve the Heights
More expansive doesn't necessarily mean better. It's an old adage, yet it's also the truest way to describe my feelings after devoting 50 hours with The Outer Worlds 2. The development team added more of everything to the follow-up to its 2019 science fiction role-playing game — increased comedy, enemies, weapons, traits, and settings, all the essentials in titles of this genre. And it functions superbly — for a little while. But the burden of all those ambitious ideas leads to instability as the game progresses.
An Impressive First Impression
The Outer Worlds 2 creates a powerful first impression. You are part of the Earth Directorate, a altruistic institution focused on curbing dishonest administrations and corporations. After some serious turmoil, you find yourself in the Arcadia sector, a settlement divided by conflict between Auntie's Option (the result of a combination between the previous title's two big corporations), the Protectorate (groupthink taken to its worst logical conclusion), and the Ascendant Brotherhood (similar to the Catholic faith, but with mathematics rather than Jesus). There are also a number of rifts creating openings in the universe, but at this moment, you absolutely must access a transmission center for pressing contact reasons. The problem is that it's in the middle of a battlefield, and you need to figure out how to get there.
Similar to the first game, Outer Worlds 2 is a first-person RPG with an overarching story and dozens of secondary tasks distributed across multiple locations or areas (big areas with a lot to uncover, but not open-world).
The initial area and the journey of getting to that communication station are remarkable. You've got some funny interactions, of course, like one that includes a rancher who has fed too much sugary cereal to their preferred crab. Most guide you to something useful, though — an surprising alternative route or some new bit of intel that might open a different path ahead.
Notable Sequences and Overlooked Possibilities
In one memorable sequence, you can find a Guardian defector near the bridge who's about to be executed. No quest is linked to it, and the sole method to find it is by investigating and paying attention to the ambient dialogue. If you're swift and careful enough not to let him get defeated, you can preserve him (and then protect his runaway sweetheart from getting eliminated by beasts in their hideout later), but more pertinent to the task at hand is a power line obscured in the foliage close by. If you track it, you'll find a concealed access point to the relay station. There's another entrance to the station's sewers tucked away in a grotto that you may or may not observe based on when you undertake a specific companion quest. You can locate an readily overlooked character who's crucial to rescuing a person much later. (And there's a stuffed animal who subtly persuades a team of fighters to support you, if you're kind enough to save it from a danger zone.) This opening chapter is rich and engaging, and it appears as if it's overflowing with rich storytelling potential that rewards you for your inquisitiveness.
Waning Hopes
Outer Worlds 2 never lives up to those opening anticipations again. The second main area is organized similar to a map in the original game or Avowed — a large region sprinkled with key sites and optional missions. They're all story-appropriate to the conflict between Auntie's Choice and the Order of the Ascendant, but they're also short stories detached from the central narrative narratively and location-wise. Don't expect any contextual hints leading you to fresh decisions like in the initial area.
In spite of pushing you toward some difficult choices, what you do in this region's secondary tasks doesn't matter. Like, it genuinely is irrelevant, to the point where whether you permit atrocities or guide a band of survivors to their death culminates in nothing but a casual remark or two of dialogue. A game doesn't have to let every quest impact the plot in some significant, theatrical manner, but if you're compelling me to select a side and giving the impression that my selection counts, I don't feel it's unfair to anticipate something more when it's finished. When the game's already shown that it has greater potential, any reduction seems like a trade-off. You get expanded elements like Obsidian promised, but at the price of substance.
Daring Plans and Missing Drama
The game's second act tries something similar to the central framework from the initial world, but with clearly diminished panache. The concept is a courageous one: an linked task that spans multiple worlds and motivates you to request help from assorted alliances if you want a easier route toward your aim. Beyond the repeated framework being a slightly monotonous, it's also lacking the suspense that this kind of scenario should have. It's a "bargain with evil" moment. There should be difficult trade-offs. Your association with either faction should count beyond making them like you by doing new tasks for them. Everything is lacking, because you can just blitz through on your own and clear the objective anyway. The game even makes an effort to hand you means of achieving this, pointing out alternate routes as secondary goals and having partners tell you where to go.
It's a side effect of a wider concern in Outer Worlds 2: the anxiety of allowing you to regret with your choices. It regularly goes too far in its attempts to ensure not only that there's an different way in frequent instances, but that you know it exists. Locked rooms almost always have multiple entry methods signposted, or nothing valuable internally if they fail to. If you {can't
