Obsidian's Sequel Fails to Achieve the Stars
More expansive doesn't necessarily mean better. It's an old adage, yet it's also the truest way to encapsulate my feelings after spending five dozen hours with The Outer Worlds 2. The creators expanded on all aspects to the follow-up to its prior science fiction role-playing game — additional wit, foes, weapons, traits, and settings, every important component in games like this. And it functions superbly — initially. But the weight of all those ambitious ideas causes the experience to falter as the time passes.
An Impressive Initial Impact
The Outer Worlds 2 establishes a solid opening statement. You belong to the Terran Directorate, a altruistic organization dedicated to controlling unscrupulous regimes and businesses. After some capital-D Drama, you wind up in the Arcadia sector, a colony splintered by conflict between Auntie's Selection (the outcome of a combination between the original game's two big corporations), the Guardians (collectivism extended to its most dire end), and the Ascendant Brotherhood (similar to the Catholic faith, but with math in place of Jesus). There are also a number of tears tearing holes in space and time, but at this moment, you absolutely must access a communication hub for critical messaging needs. The issue is that it's in the heart of a warzone, and you need to determine how to arrive.
Like its predecessor, Outer Worlds 2 is a FPS adventure with an main narrative and many secondary tasks scattered across various worlds or areas (expansive maps with a much to discover, but not open-world).
The initial area and the journey of getting to that communication station are spectacular. You've got some humorous meetings, of course, like one that features a agriculturalist who has given excessive sugary cereal to their beloved crustacean. Most guide you to something useful, though — an unexpected new path or some additional intelligence that might unlock another way forward.
Notable Events and Overlooked Opportunities
In one unforgettable event, you can encounter a Guardian defector near the overpass who's about to be killed. No task is tied to it, and the sole method to locate it is by investigating and listening to the environmental chatter. If you're quick and alert enough not to let him get slain, you can preserve him (and then rescue his deserter lover from getting eliminated by beasts in their hideout later), but more relevant to the immediate mission is a energy cable concealed in the foliage in the vicinity. If you trace it, you'll locate a concealed access point to the transmission center. There's another entrance to the station's underground tunnels hidden away in a cave that you may or may not observe contingent on when you follow a particular ally mission. You can find an simple to miss person who's crucial to preserving a life down the line. (And there's a soft toy who indirectly convinces a team of fighters to support you, if you're kind enough to rescue it from a minefield.) This initial segment is dense and engaging, and it seems like it's full of substantial plot opportunities that compensates you for your curiosity.
Diminishing Anticipations
Outer Worlds 2 fails to meet those initial expectations again. The next primary region is structured like a map in the first Outer Worlds or Avowed — a large region sprinkled with points of interest and secondary tasks. They're all thematically relevant to the struggle between Auntie's Selection and the Ascendant Brotherhood, but they're also vignettes detached from the central narrative in terms of story and geographically. Don't anticipate any world-based indicators directing you to fresh decisions like in the first zone.
Despite pushing you toward some hard calls, what you do in this region's secondary tasks doesn't matter. Like, it truly has no effect, to the degree that whether you enable war crimes or lead a group of refugees to their demise culminates in nothing but a throwaway line or two of dialogue. A game doesn't need to let each mission impact the narrative in some major, impactful way, but if you're compelling me to select a group and pretending like my decision is important, I don't feel it's unreasonable to anticipate something additional when it's over. When the game's already shown that it has greater potential, any diminishment seems like a trade-off. You get additional content like Obsidian promised, but at the price of complexity.
Bold Ideas and Missing Stakes
The game's second act tries something similar to the primary structure from the opening location, but with distinctly reduced panache. The idea is a bold one: an interconnected mission that spans multiple worlds and urges you to request help from assorted alliances if you want a more straightforward journey toward your objective. Beyond the repeat setup being a little tiresome, it's also lacking the suspense that this type of situation should have. It's a "pact with the devil" moment. There should be difficult trade-offs. Your relationship with either faction should be important beyond making them like you by doing new tasks for them. All this is absent, because you can simply rush through on your own and achieve the goal anyway. The game even takes pains to hand you ways of doing this, indicating alternative paths as additional aims and having allies tell you where to go.
It's a side effect of a wider concern in Outer Worlds 2: the apprehension of permitting you to feel dissatisfied with your decisions. It often overcompensates in its attempts to ensure not only that there's an different way in frequent instances, but that you are aware of it. Secured areas nearly always have several entry techniques signposted, or no significant items internally if they don't. If you {can't
