The Outer Worlds

The Outer Worlds is an action role-playing game developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Private Division. The game was released for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows in October 2019, with a Nintendo Switch version released in June 2020. The game received generally favorable reviews from critics.

Not to be confused with Outer Wilds, Inner Worlds Outer Worlds, or outer Solar System.

The Outer Worlds
Developer(s)Obsidian Entertainment
Publisher(s)Private Division
Director(s)
Producer(s)Eric DeMilt
Designer(s)Charles Staples
Programmer(s)Mark DeGeorge
Artist(s)Daniel Alpert
Writer(s)Leonard Boyarsky
Composer(s)Justin E. Bell
EngineUnreal Engine 4
Platform(s)
Release
  • Windows, PS4, Xbox One
  • October 25, 2019
  • Nintendo Switch
  • June 5, 2020
Genre(s)Action role-playing
Mode(s)Single-player

Gameplay
Pre-release gameplay screenshot of The Outer Worlds.

The Outer Worlds is an action role-playing video game featuring a first-person perspective. In the early stages of the game, the player can create their own character and unlock a ship, which acts as the game's central hub space. Though the player cannot control their ship directly, it serves as a fast travel point to access different areas in the game and acts as the player's persistent inventory space.[1] The player can encounter and recruit non-player characters as companions who have their own personal missions and stories. When accompanying the player, the companions act as an aid in combat. Each companion has its own individual skills and special attacks, and it can also develop its own skill specialization. When exploring, the player can bring up to two companions alongside them, while the rest stay on the ship. The player can make numerous dialogue decisions, which can influence the game's branching story. They can also respond to NPCs in various ways, such as acting heroically, maniacally, or moronically.[2]

During combat situations, the player can use various weapon types such as melee and firearms, which have three ammo types: light, heavy and energy. These weapons can be customized to add elemental damage.[3] The player can use stealth or social skills (persuasion, lying and intimidation) to avoid combat altogether. As the player progresses, they gain experience points, which the player and their companions can use to level up and unlock new skills. The player can develop their technical skills, which are further divided into three categories: Science, Medical, and Engineering. For instance, the player can use a shrink ray to shrink down an enemy. The player is able to invest points into these skills, which will unlock new perks that enhance combat efficiency. The player can also enter a "Tactical Time Dilation" state, which slows down time and reveals opponents' health statistics, which grants the player tactical advantages. As the player leads their companions, they improve their companions' combat strength and resilience.[2] The player can also gain a "flaw" that occurs when the player fails repeatedly in certain gameplay segments. Flaws impede the player in some way, but also give additional perks and advantages.[4]

Plot

Setting

The game is set in an alternate future that diverged in 1901, when U.S. President William McKinley is not assassinated by Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition. As a result, Theodore Roosevelt never succeeded him, and large business trusts were never broken up, leading to a hyper-corporate, class-centric society dominated by the power of megacorporations, which by the distant future have begun to colonize space and terraform alien planets, to varying results.[5] Earth residents are encouraged to undertake efforts to colonize these systems.

Among them is Halcyon, a six-planet star system. Traveling to Halcyon requires both the usage of advanced spacecraft with a specialist "skip-drive", and a 10-year cryosleep for the colonists. In 2285, two colony ships were dispatched to colonize Halcyon - the Hope and the Groundbreaker. While the Groundbreaker successfully arrived in Halcyon, colonizing the planets Terra 1 (later renamed Monarch) and Terra 2, the Hope and its cargo mysteriously disappeared in transit, slipping into myth among the citizens of Halcyon. The Groundbreaker is placed in a permanent orbit near Terra 2, with the original crew's descendants converting it from a colony ship into a small independent citadel.

Synopsis

In 2355, the Hope is discovered drifting on the outskirts of the Halcyon system by mad scientist Phineas Welles, who manages to safely revive one of the passengers (the "Stranger"). Welles informs the Stranger that the Halcyon colony has fallen on hard times due to the mass incompetence of the various mega-corporations (referred to collectively as "The Board") that govern every aspect of life in Halcyon. Due to the after-effects of prolonged cryosleep, the Stranger has substantially higher mental and physical abilities than the majority of ordinary Halcyon residents. Welles tasks the Stranger with securing the resources needed to revive the remaining Hope colonists, who Welles believes hold the key to Halcyon's salvation.

Welles jettisons the Stranger in an escape pod onto Terra 2, where a contact, smuggler Alex Hawthorne, is waiting. Unfortunately, the Stranger's pod lands on Hawthorne, killing him instantly. The Stranger commandeers Hawthorne's ship, the Unreliable, which is piloted by an artificial intelligence named ADA. In search of a power converter for the Unreliable, the Stranger ventures into the nearby frontier town of Edgewater, where the Board-supported cannery town is caught in a cold war with deserters led by Adelaide McDevitt. The Stranger is asked by town mayor Reed Tobson to divert power away from the McDevitt's village back to Edgewater, forcing the deserters to return to Edgewater. However, McDevitt instead suggests diverting power to her clan, shutting down the canneries and freeing the townsfolk from Board oppression.

The Stranger is joined on this mission by Edgewater's bashful town engineer Parvati Holcomb, and later offers her a place aboard the Unreliable. The Stranger is later also able to recruit further allies to their crew, including wisecracking mercenary Ellie Fenhill, ship's hand Felix Millstone, Edgewater vicar Maximillian DeSoto, alcoholic monster-hunter Nyoka, and a cleaning robot named SAM. As the story progresses, the Stranger learns that Welles is wanted by the Board for acts of alleged terrorism, and can decide whether to side themselves with Welles or the Board in their quest to save Halcyon.

After leaving Terra 2, the Stranger heads to Monarch, a colonised moon orbiting the gas giant Olympus, where an information broker holds the location of a batch of dimethyl sulfoxide, a chemical important to Welles' revival of the Hope's colonists. As landing on Monarch is prohibited since the Board disowned the colony there, the Stranger must first retrieve a passkey from aboard the Groundbreaker, which remains independent from the Board. With the passkey, the Stranger lands in the town of Stellar Bay to discover the colony divided into two violent factions - Monarch Stellar Industries (MSI), a corporate group led by Sanjar Nandi who face harsh opposition from the Board for their self-declared ownership of Monarch; and the Iconoclasts, idealistic revolutionaries led by Graham Bryant and Zora Blackwood. After retrieving the intel from the Broker, the Stranger witnesses a Board gunship crash nearby. Both the MSI and the Iconoclasts ask the Stranger to retrieve the gunship's weapons; the Stranger can choose to give the weapons to either side, or negotiate peace between the two factions.

With the Broker's intel, Welles directs the Stranger to Halcyon's wealthy capital Byzantium, where the Minister of Earth, Aloysius Clarke, has just signed on a shipment of dimethyl sulfoxide. Tracking down Clarke to his townhouse, the Stranger learns that Clarke has been placed under house arrest by Board Chairman Charles Rockwell, the true recipient of the chemicals. In Rockwell's private quarters, the Stranger discovers a video in which Rockwell announces the "Lifetime Employment Program"; the Board is conspiring to place the majority of the colonists in indefinite cryosleep, ostensibly in order to save humanity but in actuality to hoard the remaining food supplies for the wealthiest citizens. In order to store these frozen workers, the Hope colonists will be ejected into space, with the Hope turned into a vast cryogenic warehouse. The dimethyl sulfoxide is being used on human test subjects to attempt to recreate Welles' formula, in the hope that workers can be repeatedly pulled out of extended periods of suspended animation. The Stranger retrieves the chemicals, with or without killing the test subjects in the process.

Welles suggests using ADA and the Unreliable's power to "skip" the Hope into the inner Halcyon system, placing it in orbit near his laboratory above Terra 2 so that he can begin the revival process. Sophia Akande, the Adjutant for the Board, instead proposes that the Stranger skip the Hope to Tartarus, a planet home to the Board's infamous Labyrinth prison complex, so that the Board can apprehend Welles and begin killing the colonists. The Stranger infiltrates the Hope and learns of what occurred during the ill-fated voyage; the Hope's skip drive developed an unforeseen fault, extending the planned 10-year mission to 60 years. As food rations ran out, some of the crew turned to cannibalising the frozen colonists in order to survive, before staging a mutiny. The captain sealed the Hope's cryo-chambers and locked the ship on course for Halcyon, leaving everyone aboard to succumb to starvation. The Stranger also discovers that they were not the first colonist Welles attempted to reanimate; he actually tried at least twelve times prior with fatal results for the colonists involved.

Wiring ADA through to the Hope's control system, the Stranger skips the Hope either to Terra 2 or to Tartarus. Depending on where the Hope arrives in Halcyon, the ending diverges:

  • If the Stranger chooses to skip the Hope themselves rather than ask ADA to do it, and the game has been played with low-intelligence settings, the game ends here. The Hope will be launched straight into Halcyon's Sun, destroying the ship and killing everyone aboard.[6]
  • If the Hope was skipped to Terra 2, the Board will apprehend Welles at his base and take him to the Labyrinth on Tartarus. The Stranger and their crew land on Tartarus and fight their way through the prison, learning Welles is being held hostage by either Akande or Rockwell. The Stranger must reach Welles and negotiate with his captor, forcing them to release him either peacefully or by force.
  • If the Hope was skipped to Tartarus, an enraged Welles will travel to Tartarus himself and start a riot in the Labyrinth, taking Akande hostage in a bid to get to the Hope and her colonists. The Stranger and their crew land on Tartarus and fight their way through the prison. The Stranger must reach Welles and confront him, forcing him to release Akande either peacefully or by force.

Regardless of the outcome, the Stranger is informed that contact with Earth has been lost, and that a Board troopship en route to the home planet mysteriously disappeared in transit. The Stranger is offered leadership of the Halcyon colonies and allowed to shape humanity's future however they see fit. With Halcyon free of Earth's influence the colony is free to shape its own destiny, either under the Board's Life Employment Programme or under the freedom brought by the loss of the Board's influence. The Stranger and their crew go their separate ways as their individual fates are explained, and the story of the Unreliable slips into legend.

Development

The game is developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Take-Two Interactive's publishing label Private Division.[7] Though Obsidian was in progress to be acquired by Microsoft Studios at the time of the game's announcement, the project had been under development before that point, and Take-Two had secured the publishing rights prior to Microsoft's acquisition offer.[8]

Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, the creators of the Fallout series, served as the game's directors. The duo directors described the game as "the combination of [Boyarsky's] dark morbidity and Tim's silliness", and they hoped to seek a balance between silliness and drama when creating the game's tone and narrative.[3] Romantic options were initially considered, but the feature was eventually cut by the studio.[9] The game's writers include Boyarsky and Megan Starks.[10][11]

The game was in development since 2016, when Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart mentioned that a small number of people in the studio which included Cain and Boyarsky were working on "something completely new" in the Unreal Engine during an interview with Game Pressure.[12] Obsidian later revealed the game's development in 2017. In December 2017, Private Division announced the project as their first slate of published games.[13] It was announced at The Game Awards 2018 and was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on October 25, 2019.[14][15] In March 2019, it was announced that the game would release exclusively on the Epic Games Store and Microsoft Store, with its original Steam release being delayed until October 23, 2020.[16][17][18] Fan response to the announcement was negative.[19] A Nintendo Switch version was originally scheduled to be released on March 6, 2020, but was delayed to June 5 due to issues caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.[20]

The game's first piece of downloadable content, Peril on Gorgon, was released on September 9, 2020.[21][22]

Reception

The Outer Worlds received "generally favorable reviews" according to review aggregator Metacritic.[23][24][25] Writing for Game Informer, Joe Juba praised the game for its soundtrack and for assembling an "excellent cast of voice performers,"[30] while Daniel Bloodworth of Easy Allies found that the game was "incredibly well-written," but criticized the characters as appearing "rigid, lacking body language" during dialogue interactions.[28] The reception to The Outer Worlds' combat system was more mixed. Whereas the game drew acclaim from Josh Harmon of EGM for the depth of its melee combat mechanics,[29] Tom Senior, writing for PC Gamer, noted that "combat isn't challenging, and enemies fit into worn categories."[34]

The game sold more than 2.5 million copies, exceeding the publisher's expectations.[36][37] The game was nominated for a number of awards for its writing, voice acting and visual design – taking home five awards from the 2020 NAVGTR Awards,[38] and winning the Big Apple Award for Best Game of the Year at the 2020 New York Game Awards.[39]

Awards
YearAwardCategoryResultRef
2019 Game Critics Awards Best of Show Nominated [40]
Best Original Game Won
Best PC Game Nominated
Best Role-Playing Game Nominated
2019 Golden Joystick Awards Ultimate Game of the Year Nominated [41]
The Game Awards 2019 Game of the Year Nominated [42]
Best Narrative Nominated
Best Performance (Ashly Burch) Nominated
Best RPG Nominated
2020 23rd Annual D.I.C.E. Awards Outstanding Achievement in Story Nominated [43][44]
Role-Playing Game of the Year Won
20th Game Developers Choice Awards Best Narrative Nominated [45]
SXSW Gaming Awards Most Promising New Intellectual Property Won [46][47]
Excellence in Visual Achievement Nominated
16th British Academy Games Awards Narrative Nominated [48]
2020 Nebula Awards Game Writing Won [49]
GLAAD Media Awards Outstanding Video Game Won [50]

References
  1. Meija, Ozzie (December 7, 2018). "The Outer Worlds preview: Flaws in the system". Shacknews. Retrieved December 7, 2018.
  2. Tyrrel, Brandin (December 7, 2018). "The Outer Worlds Is Bringing Fun Back To Science Fiction". IGN. Retrieved December 7, 2018.
  3. Fenlon, Wes (December 7, 2018). "Obsidian's The Outer Worlds blends Firefly and Fallout into a bold, open-ended sci-fi RPG". PC Gamer. Retrieved December 7, 2018.
  4. Brown, Peter (December 7, 2018). "The Outer Worlds Looks A Lot Like Fallout, But That's Only Half The Story". GameSpot. Retrieved December 7, 2018.
  5. Watts, Steve (March 8, 2019). "Fallout: New Vegas Devs Share Lore Detail About The Outer Worlds". Gamespot. Retrieved August 3, 2019.
  6. Thielenhaus, Kevin (November 2, 2019). "The Outer Worlds: Get This Secret Ending If You're Really Dumb | 'Sunburn' Guide". Gameranx. Retrieved February 10, 2020.
  7. O'Connor, Alice (December 7, 2018). "Obsidian Entertainment announce The Outer Worlds". Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Retrieved December 7, 2018.
  8. Hall, Charlie (December 7, 2018). "The Outer Worlds isn't a Microsoft game, even though it's buying Obsidian". Polygon. Retrieved December 7, 2018.
  9. Hall, Charlie (December 7, 2018). "Three things we learned about Obsidian's new RPG, The Outer Worlds". Polygon. Retrieved December 7, 2018.
  10. Chris Ip (June 13, 2019). "Where 'The Outer Worlds' gets its sense of humor". Engadget. Retrieved June 17, 2019.
  11. Bryan Vitale (June 16, 2019). "The Outer Worlds at E3 2019: Interview with Game Director Leonard Boyarsky". RPG Site. Retrieved June 17, 2019.
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  50. Daw, Stephen (July 30, 2020). "Here Are All the Winners From the 2020 GLAAD Media Awards". Billboard. Retrieved August 5, 2020.
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