The Outer Worlds.

As I mentioned in the previous posting, my wife Karli purchased The Outer Worlds as one of my birthday gifts this year.  The download and installation process are complete - thank heaven we upgraded our internet access when we moved - and I've started in on the game.

Created by Obsidian Games and marketed by Epic Games, The Outer Worlds is a story-driven role playing game/first person shooter, although so far, it looks like more problems will be solved through negotiation than gunfire. (I admit to biasing my stats toward persuasion in the character setup.  This is not my first rodeo, and experience says that there's always someone with more firepower - not a bad thing if you can talk them out of using it.)

The game begins in an enjoyably tongue-in-cheek tone: after being rescued by rogue scientist Phineas Welles from an accidentally extended suspended animation on the Hope, an abandoned colony ship, you're deposited into a landing pod and dispatched to the surface of Terra 2 to meet with Captain Alex Hawthorne, a  smuggler who will help you to find the chemical resources required to rescue the other frozen colonists.  Hawthorne is a "dashing gunslinger, one of a kind ship, that sort of thing.  You'll like him, I'm sure," Welles announces confidently.

Which might well have been the case had the landing pod not crushed the good captain on impact, rather like Dorothy's initial meeting with the Wicked Witch of the East in The Wizard of Oz.  It seems that Hawthorne set up the homing beacon and waited beside it rather than moving to a safe distance from the landing site.  As Welles observes, "Shame about the whole 'squashing' thing, nasty way to go."

You then fight your way through some random marauders to Hawthorne's now captainless ship, the Unreliable, which immediately threatens to blow its airlocks and expose you to the fatal vacuum of space. Fortunately, ADA, the ship's AI, is bluffing with no cards - the ship is sitting on solid ground in a field full of rocks on the surface of a planet.

 
After establishing an understanding with ADA, you discover that she's stranded without a power converter for her engines. You leave the Unreliable in hopes of finding one, and members of the local constabulary direct you to Edgewater, the nearest population centre - such as it is.

Edgewater is a classic company town, where everything is part of the Spacer's Choice brand and the contracted workers don't even own their gravesites - they only rent them. The player is immediately thrust into a conflict between Reed Tobson, the town's bowler-hatted manager, and a group of workers who have broken away from the community under the leadership of Adelaide McDevitt.

The stakes are high: both sides have power converters that would restore the Unreliable to flight, but regardless of whether you support Tobson or the rebels, someone ends up starving in the dark.

This introductory plotline illustrates the manner in which the player's moral compass, rather than their quick draw, directs the flow of the game. Nothing is black and white, and both sides argue their case.

The initial portion of the game feels like a bit of a sandbox, in that it's clearly letting me get comfortable with the interface before sending me into the main storyline.  After all, I've got a spaceship - once I solve the question of Tobson versus Adelaide, the rest of the Halcyon System awaits! 

The look of the game is distinctive in terms of both the alien landscape and the vaguely 50’s pulp aesthetic of the ships, buildings and interiors, mixed with the early 20th century industrial feeling of Edgewater – factory town meets Astounding SF magazine cover, if you will.   

I’m enjoying The Outer Worlds so far, although it doesn’t break any new ground in terms of the action/adventure open-world model as established by games like the Fallout franchise: main quests, side quests, dialogue choices that dictate the direction of the story, picking up items for sale or use, buying better equipment, adding companions with different skills, gaining points to level up and improve attributes and abilities, and so on.

But those are just the standard tools from the gaming toolbox.  As with any good narrative, the game's real strength lies in the plot and the character interactions that move it forward, and so far I'm quite pleased with the manner in which The Outer Worlds is telling its tale. Given the number of games where you shoot first and ask questions later, it's a pleasant change to do things in the opposite order.

- Sid