The Outer Worlds was a hit for Obsidian Entertainment. The space-faring RPG demonstrated that the studio could stand its own against Bethesda in a first-person open-world format, even with a new IP.
However, while the satirical sci-fi proved Obsidian’s ability to keep the genre fresh, The Outer Worlds also ran into a few key problems that the studio should fix if it makes The Outer Worlds 2.
One of the keys to the long-term success of open-world RPGs like Skyrim is that the protagonist is so loosely defined that the player can easily roleplay as just about anyone, giving the game great replayability. Obsidian itself pulled this off seamlessly in Fallout: New Vegas. The Courier is the ideal open-world RPG protagonist, as their backstory is completely blank aside from a single delivery job which ended in them being shot in the head. The Courier could be anyone from a crusty desert-dwelling prospector to a fresh-faced delivery boy.
Similarly, the main quest of Fallout: New Vegas presents itself as entirely optional not just within the mechanics of the game but within different compatible roleplaying possibilities. A player who wants to RP as a particularly vengeful character might go after the men who shot them right away, but the game makes it equally plausible that the main character would simply count themselves lucky and continue their life. This is not the case with the extreme urgency of Fallout 4‘s missing child plot-line, and the game suffers for it.
The same freedom of RP can be seen in the Skyrim opening, where the player witnesses a dragon attack on Helgen which saves their life, but doesn’t learn that they are the only one who can stop the dragons until quite a while later in the Skyrim main quest, thus giving players the roleplaying opportunity to escape Helgen and explore the world of Skyrim without having rejected the call to adventure.
The Outer Worlds 2 needs an origin which provides as much freedom. The main character in the first game is unfrozen from The Hope and is immediately told that they are the only one who can help save the other frozen colonists. As such, any player who wants to simply explore the world does so with a roleplaying burden: they are abandoning their fellow passengers. The next game should have an origin like New Vegas or Skyrim which introduces the world and maybe even a threat but saves the call to action for the end of the first act of the main quest, allowing the player to forge their own path without pulling against the story.
The Outer Worlds 2 needs more combat options, or more accurately, more options besides combat when dealing with NPCs outside of towns. In the first town of Edgewater, for example, the main quest revolves around juggling the morality of supporting a strict corporation that oppresses its workers by has the structural integrity to help the townspeople survive, or supporting a commune that is self-sustaining but fertilizes its crops with corpses.
While this main quest invites a lot of moral calculus and is great for RP, travelling between locations the player character pretty much has to mow down every “marauder” they come into contact with, all of whom attack on-site with reckless abandon. While The Outer Worlds’ combat itself is fun, The Outer Worlds 2 should try and present players with a wider variety of ways to deal with potentially hostile encounters.
Players with high enough charisma, for example, should be able to charm bandits they encounter, or, if they’re carrying a rocket launcher, intimidate them. Similarly, these next-gen enemies should not just attack on site, but act a bit more realistically. Perhaps they can be convinced to rob the player but let them live. Perhaps they can be tricked with disguises. The important thing is that players who don’t want to roleplay as a super soldier be given the option to develop skills which allow more varied ways to deal with hostile NPCs.
The Outer Worlds’ greatest strength is its setting. While this is felt through all the non-combat interactions, however, the worlds themselves should feel more threatening to really bring the backwater solar system to life. Leaving town, the player should be factoring in the size of their travelling party, the weather, and the landscape for a truly immersive next-gen RPG experience.
Survival modes aren’t up everyone’s street, but judging by the extreme popularity of Skyrim mods like Frostfall, having to factor in survival elements can make the world feel much more immersive and intimidating. Furthermore, it helps reduce the rate of player progress while making the journey more rewarding. For example, players might not be able to wear that shiny military armor they found in the snow if they need to stay warm until they can make it back to civilization.
This gives players great reasons to dress immersively, hide in and explore caves, to stop at different towns along their journey, and to treat the world of the game itself with a bit more reverence and fear. Ultimately, that reverence makes the world seem far bigger. It is a lesson Obsidian will also have to learn in order to make Avowed‘s world feel huge.
If nothing else, The Outer Worlds 2 needs to make itself far more available to modding on both consoles and PC so that players who want to include any of the above features are able to do so easily, like they can with Skyrim’s extremely successful Creation Kit. By doing this, the game is likely to have a far longer lifespan than its predecessor, while not requiring a huge amount of additional work by the development team themselves.
In any case, the market for next-gen RPGs will be extremely competitive. Between Obsidian’s own Avowed and Cyberpunk 2077, RPGs are looking to redefine the depth of the genre and the storytelling experiences it can provide on the next generation of hardware. The Outer Worlds 2 doesn’t need a better setting or better writing, but needs to lean into its open-world roots and provide players with a greater breadth of roleplaying opportunities if the series is to expand on its success.
The Outer Worlds is available now for PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
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