Developer: Obsidian Entertainment
Publisher: Private Division
Rrp: £49.99 (Gog.com, Humblebundle, Steam and Epic)
Released: 25th October 2019
Available on: Gog.com, Humblebundle, Steam and Epic
Played Using: Mouse and Keyboard
Approximate game length: 16 hours
“You’ve tried the best. Now try the rest. Spacer’s Choice!” The electronic vendor chirps at you as you clutch your side trying to stem the bleeding and cursing your luck. Of course the gun that last marauder dropped was from Spacer’s Choice. You remember one of the other slogans their vendors seem to love to spit out; “All Spacer’s Choice weapons are now thirty percent less likely to malfunction.”.
The Outer Worlds is an RPG in a similar vein to that of the Fallout series, which makes sense when you consider that Obsidian were the developers of Fallout: New Vegas. However, one should note that I haven’t called this an ‘open world’ game, that is because to my mind The Outer Worlds isn’t one. My reasoning is that, to me, an open world game is a singular large world to explore with the only loading areas being the equivalent of dungeons etc. In the Outer Worlds each of the planets you go to are essentially a small to medium sized environment and the only way out of it is by boarding your ship. In a way it shares more with the Borderlands series in the way its worlds work than a open world game like Fallout.
I rather enjoyed the setting of the Outer Worlds in that it’s a dystopia but not of the sort we usually see. In this version of dystopia People are seen as ‘assets’ to whatever corporation their settlement is owned by and even the act of suicide is seen, not as a failure of society, but as an act of vandalism to company property, that property being the person that self terminated.
At the start of the game you get to create your character starting with attributes. You’re given six points to spend on your attributes which are Strength, dexterity, Intelligence, Perception, Charm and Temperament. These attribute points cannot be earned in anyway in the game, once these are set that’s it. After these are chosen you get to spend two skill points each of which can only be used on a single core skill. The core skills being; Melee, Ranged, Défense, Dialogue, Stealth, Tech and Leadership. Then we move on to aptitude which is what your previous job was, this will grant a small bonus to a single specialised skill.
Now I know I’ve just thrown out three terms there without giving any context to what they actually mean, so I’ll attempt to explain them now, starting with attributes. Your attributes are the main stats of your character, these would be the equivalent to your ‘SPECIAL’ in Fallout. The difference being that in Fallout you can actually increase your SPECIAL stats permanently, which is not the case in this game. These attributes influence how your character is played and what checks they can pass as you play.
Next comes your core skills. These core skills have specialised skills beneath them (these come next) and increasing your core skill will raise the specialised skills that are attached. However a core skill can only be increased to a maximum of fifty points. Once you hit that point your skill points have to be spent on each specialised skill individually.
Specialised skills are skills that have a specific role, for example the ‘Tech’ core skill has three specialised skills under it, Medical, Science and Engineering. It should be noted that each of these specialised skills are actually useful beyond passing checks. Medical actually causes the amount you heal by when using a healing item as well as increasing the duration of drug effects. Science increases the damage plasma and shock weapons cause, it also allows you to ‘tinker’ with weapons and armour to increase there potency. Lastly engineering reduces the amount of armour or weapons parts that are needed to repair equipment.
As you may have surmised from the last sentence weapons and armour degrade as they are used and will require maintenance. To repair these items you’ll need a workbench (unless you’ve invested the engineering specialised skill to a certain point). The lower an items durability the worse it will perform.
Weapons and armour also have levels, the higher the level of the weapon or armour the more potency it will have. You can increase the level of a weapon at a workbench by ‘tinkering’ with it. Tinkering is an ability that is unlocked with the science specialised skill that allows you to increase the stats of a weapon or armour. Doing this will increase your items level by one but will cost bits to do so and this cost can quickly spiral. However, a item can’t be ‘tinkered’ to be more than five levels about their wielder.
You have an ability called Tactical Time Dilation (shortened to TTD) that you can activate, this allows you to slow down time and make more precise attacks. Once you achieve a certain (quite low) skill level with weapons you unlock ‘Time Dilation Hits’. This basically allows you to hit body parts while in TTD and for it to have an effect besides lowering the enemies health. You can’t stay within TTD for too long though, there is a meter visible in the top left corner of the screen that decreases slowly as you are in it and each attack greatly expends the meter. Once out of TTD the meter will slowly refill, though you can improve this regeneration rate in a few ways.
As with most RPG’s you level up through gaining experience which in turn is derived from completing quests or killing enemies.
When you level up you earn ten skill points that you can spend on your core and specialised skills. At increments of every twenty points specialised skills unlock a bonus, these bonuses vary depending on the skill in question, such as tinkering through the science specialised skill.
At every two levels you gain a perk that you can select on your perk screen. These perks grant you large bonuses and allow you to customise your playstyle further. The game has a maximum level cap of thirty (though the DLC’s increase that to thirty six if you get both).
You can also gain perks by choosing to take a flaw when they appear, which is usually done through taking a lot of damage of a certain type or from a specific enemy. If you take a flaw you’ll ‘gain’ that weakness but also be rewarded with a extra perk point.
As you play you can get yourself a companion, in fact you can (and honestly should) gather a small crew for your ship. These companions level up as you do and even have their own perk tree’s that give bonuses to you if they come with you on adventures. You can change your companions equipment to make them more effective, which you really should do even if all you do is give them your cast offs rather than sell them. You can also adjust the party members behaviour, such as how closely they follow you, whether they favour melee or ranged weapons and how aggressive they are in combat. Each companion also comes with their own quest which if you complete can give a small skill or combat bonus to them. These quests are also usually quite entertaining, or at least I found them to be.
I only really have one complaint to lay at the Outer Worlds and that’s the lack of enemy variety. For the most part you’ll be fighting other humans, specifically ones called marauders, there are other creatures but those are basically the fauna of various worlds or robots. Even counting all those (without going into specific variants like the ‘mega’ versions of the creatures) there are less than ten enemy types. Admittedly the developers have made good use of the enemies they have it can still feel somewhat strange to think that an entire solar system with multiple habitable planets has so few hostile creatures.
If you’re a fan of the Fallout series, especially New Vegas, then this game is likely to really appeal. The characters are well written and very funny. Though word to the wise, it also deals with some dark subject matter (such as the suicide mentioned earlier) in a way that many might see as flippant. But this flippancy is actually more of a commentary on rampant and unchecked corporatisation and viewing people as resources instead of individuals.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Fallout: New Vegas
The Borderlands Series
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