The Outer Worlds 2 Is A Stupendous, And Timely, RPG From One Of The Masters Of The Genre

Stepping foot onto the flagship of the mega-corporation Auntie’s Choice is seeing the horrors of capitalism laid bare – robots dart in your direction, in a cacophony of blaring advertisements, and burning your retinas with blazing neon lights. It was one of the most overwhelming moments I’ve had in a game in years, and then it dawned on me – this is really just a physical manifestation of going to a website and being frustratedly met with a dozen pop-up ads for cars, diapers, and mushroom coffee.

The Outer Worlds 2 is a massive RPG, and I don’t just mean that in terms of game length (although that’s long too). What I mean is that to an almost absurd extent, The Outer Worlds 2 presents a staggering amount of choice in nearly everything you do. It’s a maximalist game in many ways, taking the original concept of the first game to the absolute extreme, both in story and gameplay. The sequel utterly revels in the absurdity of its satire on capitalism, government, authoritarianism, and individuality – even if it takes a bit longer to get situated than the first game. But something we’ll definitely need to talk about, is how the tone and humor of the game takes on an entirely different flavor under the context of Microsoft owning Obsidian Entertainment. While Obsidian’s writing hasn’t lost any of its bite, it feels nearly impossible to interpret this sequel the same way as the first game, given how much the gaming industry has changed in just the short six years between them.

Have a Blast

While The Outer Worlds 2 is technically a sequel, it’s almost entirely disconnected from the first game outside of a few references.

This time around, you play as an agent of the Earth Directorate, an organization based on humanity’s home planet that travels to other colonies to keep the rampaging corporations in check. Your goal is a top-secret mission in the Arcadia star system, an ultra-wealthy system held in the iron fist of an authoritarian regime called the Protectorate. Long story short, your mission goes awry, and you wake up ten years later in a much different Arcadia system – one locked in a war between three factions, and an ethereal rift that threatens to end all existence. Just another day on the job.

Before I dive into the lengthy examination of Outer Worlds 2’s narrative ambitions, which is by far its biggest strength, I do want to quickly note some of the gameplay improvements. The shooting of Outer Worlds 2 is, in general, a fairly drastic step-up from the first game. Everything feels much snappier and more responsive, and this sequel really leans into the freedom of assembling your armory of weapons – from shrink rays and shotgun shell-shooting hammers, to foot-long revolvers and plasma rifles. There admittedly are still some light issues with wonky enemy AI, like characters freezing or getting stuck on objects – on top of a few hard crashes I had.

But interestingly, much like the game’s writing, the combat is a bit of a slow-burn. Systems that feel just fine out of the gate get remarkably more compelling as you unlock a cornucopia of weapons and mods that can customize them – giving you dozens upon dozens of combat options. On top of that are a handful of gadgets that give you new skills, like a double jump, a mask that can reveal weak points or hidden secrets, and a shield to block damage. Each of these gadgets can be further enhanced with perks, too.

The Outer Worlds 2 has clearly been designed as a game that escalates the consequences of players’ choices exponentially the further they get into it. While the first Outer Worlds felt like it revealed its whole hand rather quickly, this sequel is one that continues to get more satisfying with every few hours, unlocking like a complex puzzle. And that’s especially true with its storytelling.

Corporate Skullduggery

More than anything, to me, the Outer Worlds feels like the best modernization of the classic computer role-playing game (CRPG) genre that we’ve seen to date. The Fallout games, including New Vegas, dug into this idea quite a bit, fusing systemic and emergent systems with more immediate first-person shooter-style gameplay. But The Outer Worlds 2 really doubles down on its systems and how those integrate into player choice and storytelling.

This first and foremost starts with character creation, and Outer Worlds 2’s astonishingly robust skill and perk system. At the start of the game, you can choose a background and put points into skills like Mechanics, Lockpicking, etc – on top of nearly 100 perks to choose from (with more unlocking depending on how you’ve allocated skill points). It’s a similar system to what was in the first Outer Worlds, but I cannot overstate how much more integral these skills and perks are to the entire experience – they’re woven into the very fabric of the experience.

Almost every quest and area can be tackled in a variety of different ways, depending on what your specializations are. For example, at one point, you need to get key data from a Protectorate settlement on the planet of Eden. If your speech is high enough, you might convince key people to defect to Auntie’s Choice, forcing the leader’s hand. Or you can storm an automech factory, blast away, and bring them the parts they need to fix their own mechs – retaining their place in the Protectorate. Even further, you can sneak into the settlement’s generator and sabotage it with a high Mechanics skill, dooming everyone who lives there to a future of never rebuilding.

You constantly have opportunities to dynamically solve situations or affect conversations in some truly dynamic ways. My personal favorite was when I invested in the “Luck” perk, which occasionally lets me solve stuff in ridiculously stupid ways. A computer with a password? My luck skill lets me mash the buttons and get it right. A complex mathematical equation that needs solving? My idiot main character can just guess it.

Mixed into this is an ingenious Flaws system, where the game will oftentimes prompt you with a “character flaw” based on your gameplay style that you can accept or deny. These can drastically alter the way you play, like the Consumerism flaw that lowers prices at vendors and gives you unique dialogue options, but also lowers how much you can sell things for.

Learning Your Factions

But the other side of the equation is the game’s factions, which play a vital role in nearly everything – from the quests you get, to how you navigate the main narrative, and even the items you equip. The three factions are diametrically opposed ideas on how to live and work, and they insidiously seep into every aspect of the game – and that’s entirely intentional.

The Protectorate is a Soviet-era-inspired regime that preaches absolute loyalty to the cause, but guarantees the state will provide anything and everything you could ever need. Auntie’s Choice is the result of a hostile merger between Auntie Cleo and Spacer’s Choice – a capitalist paradise that promises freedom for its subjects to have an upward trajectory and buy any product they can dream of. Then there’s The Order of the Ascendant, a spin-off faction that worships math as a god, eternally seeking to solve the Universal Equation and find the meaning of life.

Each of the game’s factions is a form of society taken to the absolute extreme, represented through both the writing and visual design of Arcadia. Obsidian makes each faction feel like a distinct entity, even designing entire radio stations for each one, with original songs, propaganda, and radio dramas. The Order has an entire song focused on the mathematical concept of the Fibonacci Sequence, and its importance.

At first, The Outer Worlds 2 doesn’t have as strong a narrative hook as the first game to start with, and the beginning narrative can feel a bit aimless. But the more you get to understand the factions and party members, the more the writing really starts to pop in some wildly fun ways.

That’s even more true when you consider the game’s companions – a cast even more memorable than the first game and some of Obsidian’s best-written characters to date. Due to the faction system, companions are more closely woven into the main narrative, and can even give you unique options in quests. One detail I particularly like is that you can sometimes just let your party member take the lead in a conversation if it’s something they’re really familiar with. Each one is written with rich history, giving a real impression of the life they’ve lived outside of your quest – from the dazzlingly brilliant elderly subterfuge expert of The Order, Marisol, to a Protectorate enforcer named Tristan, who’s struggling with the idea of justice and truth he was raised to believe.

As funny as these factions can be, there’s also real society, culture, and moral themes at the heart of each one – and this is where the game’s writing really shines. One quest had me tasked with ending a worker’s strike as I hoped to curry favor with the Auntie’s Choice faction. The hopeless executives that ran the factory were completely out of touch with, well, being human. When I mentioned the word ‘strike,’ they even remarked, “People are going to hit me?” On the flip side, the striking workers were happy if I could get them access to use the bathroom anytime, instead of relieving themselves in some of the containers for the very products they’re making (perhaps a nod to an actual headline about Amazon employees). The first Outer Worlds was definitely ridiculous, but this sequel is even more so – and I think leaning into the extremes of the idea makes the game’s commentary even more meaningful.

Beating the Odds

But this is also where I, personally, face a conundrum. The Outer Worlds 2 has a lot to say about oligarchy and rampant capitalism, and how that can even resemble authoritarianism at times — as evidenced by the conflict between Auntie’s Choice and the Protectorate. And while I’m genuinely glad Obsidian could tell that kind of story, it’s hard for me to square this with the state of Xbox and Microsoft as a company.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen Microsoft lay off thousands of employees as it invests in AI infrastructure. This is amidst calls for the company’s boycott by BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction), due to the role its cloud and AI services have played in enabling Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

It’s almost too on the nose that a game like The Outer Worlds 2 would be published by Xbox at this moment — a game that directly calls out the endless greed of corporations and capitalism. And I can’t help but think of the many employees at the heart of all this, and how this game even got made. There’s a superbly grim kind of irony in the messages of Outer Worlds – when you look at it alongside the closure of a handful of Xbox-owned studios.

I just genuinely don’t feel like you can talk about The Outer Worlds 2, in any way, without acknowledging these factors, as the game doesn’t exist in a vacuum. And simultaneously, I feel like I have to commend the team at Obsidian for being so unrelenting with its narrative and thematic vision in the face of that. It’s a game that builds on the legacy of Obsidian’s past titles, while meaningfully striking out in new directions.

You can see so many elements of Obsidian’s history richly woven into The Outer Worlds 2: the radio and dynamic factions of New Vegas, the complex systemic design of Pillars of Eternity, the depth of player expression from Alpha Protocol, and the snappy writing of the first Outer Worlds. All of these parts result in what might be the studio’s most definitive RPG to date, an encapsulation of what Obsidian does so well, despite an admittedly slow start and a handful of bugs.

The Outer Worlds 2 manages to feel both charmingly nostalgic and stunningly new all at once, and I genuinely wonder what the game’s legacy is going to look like, with how hard it is to untangle the game from this specific moment in time and where it was made. But more than anything, I sincerely hope that studios like Obsidian can continue to make games like this — and it’s difficult to say that I’m not confident they’ll be allowed to.

9/10

The Outer Worlds 2 launches on October 29 for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC. Premium Edition owners get Early Access on October 24. Inverse was provided an Xbox copy for this review.

INVERSE VIDEO GAME REVIEW ETHOS: Every Inverse video game review answers two questions: Is this game worth your time? Are you getting what you pay for? We have no tolerance for endless fetch quests, clunky mechanics, or bugs that dilute the experience. We care deeply about a game’s design, world-building, character arcs, and storytelling come together. Inverse will never punch down, but we aren’t afraid to punch up. We love magic and science-fiction in equal measure, and as much as we love experiencing rich stories and worlds through games, we won’t ignore the real-world context in which those games are made.