Obsidian's Sequel Doesn't Quite Achieve the Summit
Bigger doesn't necessarily mean superior. It's an old adage, however it's the best way to sum up my thoughts after investing 50 hours with The Outer Worlds 2. Developer Obsidian expanded on each element to the follow-up to its 2019's futuristic adventure — more humor, adversaries, arms, characteristics, and settings, all the essentials in games like this. And it works remarkably well — for a little while. But the burden of all those ambitious ideas makes the game wobble as the time passes.
An Impressive First Impression
The Outer Worlds 2 makes a strong opening statement. You are a member of the Planetary Directorate, a do-gooder organization dedicated to controlling unscrupulous regimes and corporations. After some serious turmoil, you find yourself in the Arcadia region, a colony fractured by war between Auntie's Choice (the outcome of a combination between the previous title's two big corporations), the Defenders (groupthink pushed to its worst logical conclusion), and the Ascendant Brotherhood (similar to the Catholic faith, but with mathematics rather than Jesus). There are also a bunch of tears creating openings in space and time, but currently, you absolutely must reach a communication hub for urgent communications needs. The challenge is that it's in the middle of a combat area, and you need to determine how to get there.
Following the original, Outer Worlds 2 is a FPS adventure with an overarching story and many side quests scattered across multiple locations or areas (expansive maps with a lot to uncover, but not open-world).
The opening region and the process of accessing that comms station are remarkable. You've got some goofy encounters, of course, like one that features a rancher who has given excessive sugary cereal to their preferred crab. Most guide you to something beneficial, though — an surprising alternative route or some additional intelligence that might unlock another way ahead.
Memorable Moments and Missed Possibilities
In one memorable sequence, you can encounter a Guardian defector near the viaduct who's about to be killed. No mission is tied to it, and the only way to discover it is by searching and paying attention to the ambient dialogue. If you're quick and careful enough not to let him get defeated, you can rescue him (and then save his deserter lover from getting killed by monsters in their hideout later), but more pertinent to the current objective is a electrical conduit hidden in the grass close by. If you track it, you'll find a hidden entrance to the communication hub. There's another entrance to the station's drainage system tucked away in a grotto that you could or could not observe depending on when you undertake a specific companion quest. You can locate an simple to miss person who's crucial to rescuing a person 20 hours later. (And there's a plush toy who subtly persuades a squad of soldiers to join your cause, if you're considerate enough to save it from a minefield.) This beginning section is packed and engaging, and it seems like it's brimming with substantial plot opportunities that benefits you for your exploration.
Diminishing Expectations
Outer Worlds 2 never lives up to those early hopes again. The next primary region is organized similar to a location in the initial title or Avowed — a large region scattered with key sites and secondary tasks. They're all narratively connected to the clash between Auntie's Selection and the Ascendant Brotherhood, but they're also short stories isolated from the central narrative narratively and geographically. Don't expect any world-based indicators guiding you toward new choices like in the opening region.
Regardless of pushing you toward some difficult choices, what you do in this zone's side quests doesn't matter. Like, it really doesn't matter, to the degree that whether you enable war crimes or lead a group of refugees to their demise results in merely a throwaway line or two of conversation. A game doesn't need to let every quest affect the plot in some major, impactful way, but if you're compelling me to select a faction and acting as if my selection is important, I don't believe it's unreasonable to anticipate something further when it's concluded. When the game's previously demonstrated that it has greater potential, any diminishment seems like a concession. You get more of everything like the team vowed, but at the cost of complexity.
Bold Ideas and Absent Stakes
The game's middle section tries something similar to the main setup from the first planet, but with noticeably less style. The notion is a courageous one: an linked task that extends across two planets and urges you to seek aid from different factions if you want a easier route toward your objective. Aside from the recurring structure being a slightly monotonous, it's also lacking the drama that this kind of scenario should have. It's a "pact with the devil" moment. There should be difficult trade-offs. Your relationship with each alliance should count beyond earning their approval by completing additional missions for them. All this is absent, because you can just blitz through on your own and achieve the goal anyway. The game even makes an effort to provide you ways of achieving this, indicating alternate routes as additional aims and having companions tell you where to go.
It's a byproduct of a larger problem in Outer Worlds 2: the apprehension of permitting you to feel dissatisfied with your choices. It often exaggerates in its attempts to make sure not only that there's an alternate route in frequent instances, but that you know it exists. Closed chambers almost always have various access ways marked, or no significant items internally if they don't. If you {can't
