The Outer Worlds

Developed by the Obsidian studio, responsible for the sequels of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Bioware) and Fallout 3 (Bethesda), The Outer Worlds merges these two unique universes and offers us a particularly successful game. I won't go so far as to say that this adventure taking place on the edge of space concentrates and transcends the qualities of these two licenses, but it is certainly a neat and inventive title, seeming to you both familiar. and original.

The Outer Worlds takes place in a vast land colony, where corporatism and dark humor reign. Wherever you look you will find a satirical slogan, an odd mascot, an employee considered (hilariously) to be throwaway, and heavy propaganda and oppressive policies helping to keep order there. As a big fan of Firefly, the late and short-lived space western series, I noticed its influences everywhere. Whether it's the “Firefly” ammo for the energy weapon or the naïve young engineer making up your crew who speaks exactly like Kaylee, the nods to the series are pretty obvious. It's also not very difficult to imagine Captain Malcolm Reynolds declaiming some of the more sarcastic lines of dialogue the game offers.

In a way, the fact that the plot doesn't put faces on the evil board running this isolated colony until the last third of this 30-hour campaign is a good thing (knowing that its members don't actually have anything really threatening). This lack of real purpose in The Outer Worlds might seem annoying, but it helps to overshadow your mission of helping a mad scientist bring your fellow cryogenized colonists out of hibernation, in favor of less Manichean local conflicts, where picking winners and losers is your job (sometimes by clearly naming the winners, or just shooting the losers). The first major quest also cultivates obvious similarities with activating / defusing Megaton's bomb in Fallout 3. But while I enjoyed learning more about the ideological differences between the different factions, this type of major surprise, relating to the progress of the quests, is shown to be much rarer here. But it works pretty well, considering The Outer Worlds takes on a smaller scale.

The format adopted by The Outer Worlds will sound familiar to anyone who has played a Fallout game before, as you almost always have different possibilities when it comes to combat, dialogue (with different skills allowing you to lie, persuade or intimidate your opponents) or undercover. If all of this leads to the same result when your skill level turns out to be high enough to activate the various dialogue choices (categorized as in Fallout: New Vegas), this approach allows you to tailor your speech based on the role you play. your character (rascal, diplomat or thug).

There is therefore a reputation system linked to factions, which allows you to know who you have helped or harmed, but the latter is quite anecdotal, given that the associated rewards come down to discounts of up to 25%. at the various merchants, whose services you will rarely request anyway. However, it is still pleasant that the consequence of this loss of reputation, occurring for example when you steal personal belongings from NPCs, turns out to be slightly more significant than a potentially fatal fight, or the fact of escaping from prison for the umpteenth. times with the certainty of resuming your progress where you left off.

Bugs are also surprisingly rare. Following the rushed development of Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian's productions gained a reputation for being bugged at launch, but if I am to believe my experience (on PC) with Outer Worlds, this game seems set to evolve. this perception. In more than thirty hours of play, I only came across a temporarily bugged side quest (characterized by the impossibility of interacting with the quest-giver NPC to validate it) once. Apart from this concern, the experience was very pleasant (although I do not guarantee such a result for you, since the bugs do not affect, by definition, all players in the same way) .

Likewise, The Outer Worlds' long quests, relating to your six companions, will feel familiar to anyone who has played a BioWare RPG before. While none of your crew actually stands out (knowing that I never unlocked the sixth and only noticed it when I was about to launch the final mission), all have personal stories. captivating and enjoying quality dubbing (including that moron Felix). Two companions accompany you at all times, and each pair has original lines of dialogue which help to give more depth to these characters.

All the concepts of The Outer Worlds, however, do not resemble a vulgar rehash of those of Bethesda and BioWare productions. Obsidian does indeed incorporate its own ideas into the equation, especially when it comes to its skill and benefit systems. The build of your character takes into account the stats of your various companions, and if you have chosen to focus your skills on weapons and dialogue, you can compensate for this by selecting Max to improve your hacking abilities, or Pavarti which will come to improve your engineering skills. An approach that makes sense, given that you are unable to directly control your companions.

In the vein of old-school RPGs, you also get a good level of control over your companions' gear and perks: their weapons, armor, and helmets need to be managed and changed along with yours. You can even change their behavior, and have them favor ranged or melee weapons, or behave more aggressively or defensively, without going into overly abstract considerations. Perhaps more importantly, each of them has a special combat skill, which can be activated at any time and takes the form of a cutscene whose triggering effectively interrupts the action so that you can admire the attack. . Providing particularly useful when you are overwhelmed, these offer you a significant respite during tense confrontations, since many of them, in addition to causing heavy damage, have a paralyzing effect and can save yourself the day when you are battling a massive enemy.

First-person combat definitely draws its inspiration from Fallout, but distances itself from it by adopting a more nervous pace and emphasizing the accuracy of your shots. If Fallout's SVAV takes care of targeting an enemy's weak spot for you, The Outer World's very limited ability to slow down rewards your skill. Aim for the head to blind your enemy, the legs to slow him down, tap his arms to reduce his attack capacity and aim at the heart of your target with a sniper rifle to finish him off. Once the hard mode was selected, this approach offering less robotic clashes than the SVAV allowed me to neutralize formidable enemies before they even had a chance to hit me.

Acting as a central hub, your spaceship lets you explore the handful of worlds and space stations open to you, and get to know your crew. If its function is very close to that of Normandy in Mass Effect, knowing that you also have the opportunity to chat with an insolent AI endowed with a female voice, the warm atmosphere reigning on board invariably recalls that of the Serenity of the series Firefly. Few activities await you there, but each time you return from a mission, you have the opportunity to watch your companions' escapades while you were busy doing good or bad.

The places your ship allows you to explore are varied - most of them are home to wild environments filled with alien beasts and marauders, but you are also taken to visit a dilapidated, citadel-like space station, as well as the 'a futuristic-inspired megalopolis. Switching between environments, jointly completing multiple quest chains, keeps things fresh, and the colorful visual style never turns out to be dull or monotonous.

With the explorable world of The Outer Worlds actually splitting up into several smaller maps, there is bound to be less to discover between the different quest markers than in a true open-world, but that doesn't mean you you will find yourself idle. In particular, you will have the opportunity to get your hands on a range of powerful and unique "scientific weapons", including a frankly cleavage reduction beam. Yes, we're having fun in The Outer Worlds.

The skill system also stands out by endowing traditionally non-combat skills, such as science, persuasion, and hacking, with impact during clashes, which can (passively) cause enemies to flee or hide. Consequently, favoring a build centered on skills not related to combat remains possible against wild beasts or marauders that cannot be "reasoned" in this way. However, it remains a pity that this is not represented in the game by scathing lines referring to the progenitors of your enemies. But your character being silent, it remains quite understandable.

By occasionally giving you the opportunity to opt for a weakness in exchange for a point that allows you to unlock a powerful bonus within your perk tree (such as the ability to carry more weight in your inventory or convert a health damage percentage) The flaw system is another very original aspect of The Outer Worlds. During my game a few made me significantly more vulnerable to certain types of attacks, but this rarely affected the way I fought, given that when charging I paid little attention to the fact. let enemies shoot me using plasma or corrosive weapons. The one that turned out to be the most impactful penalized me every time I took fall damage - I like when a game gets creative and influences the way I play without necessarily resorting to percentages. I haven't had the opportunity to explore all of these possibilities, but I'm glad they've been incorporated. This is not a major difference, but a part of appreciable randomness, making each game unique and reinforcing the replayability potential of the title.

For its part, the weapon loot and modification system allows you to spend your money to improve your favorite weapon (so that its level corresponds to your progress), and to change the type of damage caused in order to specialize accordingly. the types of enemies you face. If these possibilities turned out to be fewer than I hoped, they at least had the merit of giving me the impression that I would get my hands on something more powerful later. The loot is itself dispensed in a generous way, but the management of your inventory is not insurmountable, knowing that you always have the possibility of fragmenting the various items rather than throwing them.

THE REVIEW IN BRIEF

In the meantime, Bethesda presented its new Fallouts to the world, attempting a different path than its predecessors, a choice that however left a bitter to a part of the fans of the first hour, already disappointed by the more action footprint and the simplifications to the formula operated with Fallout 4 (and then even outraged by the failed multiplayer experiment of F allout 76) .

Many have started, first softly and then more and more noisily to invoke a "new New Vegas", perhaps the result of a new collaboration between Obsidian and Bethesda. It is in this context that The Outer Worlds fits , announced at the previous Game Awards and immediately presented as a spiritual heir to the cult already mentioned . "From the creators of Fallout and the developers of Fallout: New Vegas " reads the announcement trailer, difficult not to understand the message.

From the first moments the inspiration appears very clear, in big and small things: the first person perspective, the multiple choice dialogues, the "mute" protagonist (or better to say, not dubbed), the many skills among which to juggle , the presence of different factions and a reputation system that weighs all our actions allowing us to earn the sympathies (or to end up on the black lists) of the main forces in the field. And again: an open gameplay influenced by the choices made in the creation and development of our character, important decisions to be taken that influence the development of the events and, in order not to miss anything, also an optional "hardcore" mode, which adds elements survival such as the need to drink and eat.

At this point there is only one question: Is The Outer Worlds the worthy heir to New Vegas we have been waiting for? And the answer is, let's face it right away, a definite yes that leaves no room for doubt .

Welcome to Alcione

Now that we have got the more cumbersome question out of the way, let's take a closer look at each of the elements that characterize the formula of Obsidian's new work, starting from what distinguishes it from its main inspiration: the setting. In fact, we leave behind the post-apocalyptic western atmospheres of the Mojave desert to catapult us to the most remote corners of the galaxy , exploring the colony of Alcione, dominated by mega-corporations interested only in profit and who make war on hits of invasive advertising, and often even with much more questionable means.

With the partial exception of Knights of the Old Republic II (which however, like every Star Wars, mixes sci-fi and fantasy), it is the first real foray of American developers in science fiction, but to distinguish it from other space adventures is the thick tone light and that makes little trouble ironing on situations that normally would have little fun, and is undoubtedly one of the trademarks of the two creators, Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, who already in 1997 with Fallout had shown a certain predisposition for the black humor.

This time the duo of authors lashed out against the corporate world, painting a portrait with deliberately extreme and often grotesque features : we will therefore find companies that impose work shifts of even 20 consecutive hours, employees who dream of the promotion that will give them the right to a bathroom break, employees and workers who repeat company slogans as mantras and who are obliged by contract to buy only the products made by their company, and much more.

The tone chosen by the developers may certainly not appeal to everyone, however I found it well made and often quite funny. Furthermore, although the irony and the taste for the absurd find ample space in our adventures in the external worlds, there is no shortage of moments in which the authors stage more serious themes while tackling them with competence . In particular in some secondary missions, or by exploring around the game maps it is possible to reconstruct many life stories from the space frontier, often very interesting but reserved for those who are willing to leave the seed. Of course, if you are looking for a title with a markedly cynical, serious and in some ways realistic imprint like The Witcher III, probably The Outer Worlds is not for you, but on the other hand, just look at any trailer to immediately understand what is the tone of the game , and understand if it fits your ropes.

Worlds to explore, a fast spaceship and a faithful crew

The decision to move into space has also brought about another significant change compared to New Vegas : The Outer Worlds is not an open world, but it is divided into many different areas . The size of the levels can also vary a lot, in some cases you could spend several minutes to travel the map from one point to another, on other occasions the crossing is much shorter, however each level maintains a sandbox-like structure and is therefore it can be freely explored, even if there are loads (not really very short) in the transition from open spaces to inhabited centers or to large building complexes.

Speaking of space travel: obviously a ship cannot be missing, which acts as a real player base, in which to rest between one adventure and another. But a ship cannot be said to be complete without a crew, so we can recruit up to six companions ready to follow us in battle (only two at a time, however, the others will wait for us on board), all with a personal mission, a background to discover and numerous interaction with the player and with the NPCs scattered throughout the game world. They are not the most memorable ever created by the Californian studio, but they do their homework, some a little more than others.

If the setting is interesting and rather different from what is commonly seen in GgR - and in general in video games -, the narrative structure is instead a little less original but above all it is not the main strength of the production; this does not mean that it is badly made, mind you, indeed the numerous dialogues are often on good levels, even if they do not reach the heights of excellence of other works of the software house . However, The Outer Worlds focuses primarily on player freedom rather than building an exciting story full of twists. Exactly like New Vegas did, and before that they did Arcanum and Fallout , to quote again the illustrious curriculum of the authors.

Choices Matter!

For long stretches, therefore, the story remains in the background and proceeds at a slow pace, giving the player a goal but without harnessing him too much, leaving him free to experiment and choose whether to deepen this or that faction, whether to explore in this or that direction, whether to ignore momentarily the main plot to devote himself to secondary missions, but above all leaving him free to approach each situation in several different ways.

The approaches depend heavily on how you decide to develop your avatar. Starting from the character creation screen, where you can decide their gender, appearance, attributes and initial abilities, you can then at each level step choose which of these abilities to enhance and every two levels you will instead have an advantage, to be used to obtain very useful bonuses ranging from the possibility of carrying a greater load, higher quantities of health, temporary aiming bonuses that are activated after each kill and much more.

A classic and well-established system in which a particular and interesting idea, that of defects, fits: by walking around Alcione you will come across endless dangers of all kinds, some of which could indelibly traumatize you . By taking a certain amount of damage from robotic enemies, you could develop a phobia for robots, or become acophobic after some too ruinous fall, traits that, if you had to accept them, would lead to permanent malus to your character in some situations.

Wait, but why would a player choose to self-penalize? Well, because by accepting a defect you earn a point to spend on an advantage of your choice! I obviously chose a defect that proved to be more penalizing than initially expected (nothing tragic, however, is clear), but this is another matter ... in any case, it is up to you to assess whether the game is worth the candle.

Open gameplay full of possibilities

These aspects, but above all the choice of skills, play a key role in the gameplay of The Outer Worlds and in the possibilities available to us. Investing points on guns and rifles or on defense allows you to create a more leathery protagonist and increase your chances of survival in gunfights, but you can also focus on hacking, break-in, stealth or talking, all skills that will be useful to those who prefer a less direct and brutal approach.

The result is an open gameplay, which leaves the player plenty of room for maneuver and allows him to face and solve each mission in many different ways , sometimes with as many as four or five possible alternatives within the same quest. In addition, a great merit of The Outer Worlds lies in its non-linear structure, with entire sub-plots of which the existence is not even suspected, based on the choices made. For example, in my first game I arrived at a certain location following several passages in the main story and only after completing numerous intermediate missions, but reloading a game start save to experiment a little I discovered that it is possible to get there even in the early stages , provided you collaborate with another faction, in doing so I also discovered several completely new missions. In short, in terms of quest design and non-linearity the work done by Obsidian is really excellent .

The choices made in the development of the character are then doubly important because it will not be possible to create a hero capable of getting by in every situation. This means that, although it is certainly possible to create hybrids or diversify your talents without this being particularly penalizing, doing so could mean giving up specializing in some areas and perhaps closing some possibilities, reserved only for the most skilled burglars, hackers, speakers and so on. Those who prefer to make their way through bullets will have the opportunity to spend a lot of time with the combat system, which historically has never been Obsidian's greatest strength in the past, as anyone who has tried games like Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas will remember.

This time, however, the result is much better and at times even good: the weapons are quite varied and respond well to our commands , there are localized damage with the enemies that can be blinded, crippled or otherwise impaired by our shots and also the clashes they are further enhanced by the addition of the bullet time, which you can activate for a few seconds in order to dodge the enemy projectiles or to aim with greater precision. Of course, it's not Doom , but considering that The Outer Worlds is not a shooter as much as a RPG in which, moreover, it is possible to avoid almost all the fights, the result is appreciable, even if partially affected by a rather deficient AI, especially in the human opponents.

Not everything is perfect

However, there are some flaws: the faction system is a little less complex and successful than could be expected and inevitably suffers in comparison with that of New Vegas. If in fact the Mojave factions were all well interconnected and each gesture could have repercussions on the relations with the powers of the area, here the implementation is decidedly more superficial, many factions simply operate in their area of influence (usually a planet), beyond which their importance in events is drastically reduced. Moreover, it is all too easy to be able to maximize one's reputation with almost all the main sides without this compromising the relationship with the other factions.

Furthermore, as much as writing is, as already said, often on good levels, there is some occasional stumbling block but above all to be absent is the ability to give truly impactful moments or characters and dialogues capable of being indelibly printed in the memory of the player , in the past the main trademarks of Obsidian but for some years now the Californian studio no longer seems able to reach the heights of excellence to which it had accustomed us and which more recently we have instead found in the work of other developers such as CD Projekt Red.

All this matters up to a certain point, because as already mentioned The Outer Worlds is not by its nature a work that lives and dies from the strength of its narrative, in addition to the fact that the script still remains above average , so mention these aspects as flaws it is a bit exaggerated, however in the past the Californian team had accustomed us too well and the absence of writers such as Chris Avellone and George Ziets has not yet been fully metabolized.

It is good to also spend a few words on the technical system, another cracked tile of many past productions of Obsidian. My experience with The Outer Worlds has not been ruined by big problems, except when a companion has disappeared from the spaceship also causing the failure of his personal mission, but it was enough to reload to solve. Also, on a couple of occasions I happened to temporarily turn off game audio. Nothing too serious in any case, and a very full-bodied day one patch is already planned, which will hopefully put these last uncertainties in order.

As for the graphics, the glance is convincing, in particular as regards the landscapes, while the faces are not always of great quality (nor are their facial animations) and the same goes for textures, which up close appear rather grainy. This on a "standard" PS4, it is not excluded that the situation may improve on mid-gen consoles and on PC.

Having said that, there is also to consider that this is a project born under the aegis of Private Division, "indie" division of Take Two dedicated to financing interesting ideas but with relatively limited budgets, far from Rockstar's colossal standards, Activision, EA and Ubisoft. In short, although Obsidian has been acquired by Microsoft in the meantime, The Outer Worlds is a game that is a little halfway between the world of AA and triple A productions , so you can turn a blind eye to the technical sector not in the state art.

Beyond these small uncertainties, however, the new RPG of the creators of New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity certainly has charm to sell and much to offer to lovers of the genre, both to those a little more "casual" than to the most passionate ones. It would not be fair to say "welcome back, Obsidian" because in reality the Californian software house had never left, what can be said is that the expected return to the mainstream scene has not disappointed.

But what is The Outer Worlds all about? And is the role-playing game really an alternative for Fallout fans who were not happy with the last two parts of the Bethesda series? We answer these questions in the test.

Infinite space instead of post-apocalyptic wasteland

In The Outer Worlds, unlike in the Fallout series, we do not end up in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, but in the Halcyon system light-years away. Colonists and companies settled there decades ago in order to create a new living space and workplace for humanity.

The dream of the infinite freedom of space was stifled locally by greedy mega-corporations in gag contracts and slavery-like working conditions. And this is where we come in ... in the truest sense of the word.

As passengers on the lost colony ship Hope, we are awakened from our hibernation by Phineas Wells, who has “mad scientist” written on its forehead. With our help, Phineas (who, by the way, bears a striking resemblance to Rick Sanchez from Rick & Morty) wants to free the Halcyon system from the iron grip of the power-hungry board of directors.

A game for every style

How do we do that? As we please. The Outer Worlds lets us use a character editor , which we could just as easily find in a Fallout part, to create the character that matches our preferred approach. Of course, it's not a matter of gender, appearance or the length of your nose, but of our inner values and what we do with them.

Like Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian The Outer Worlds lets us play the way we want . At the start of the game, we define values such as strength, intelligence or charisma, which affect the entire course of the game. Obsidian now dispenses with a punitive karma system.

If we are bad for a good fellow citizen or good for a villain, we only have to live with our conscience - and possibly with what the various factions of the Halcyon system think of us.

Corporations War

The factions like Monarch Stellar Industries, Sublight Salvage & Shipping or Auntie Cleo all pursue their own selfish (and of course capitalist) interests, which we more or less pursue - depending on who we want to get along with.

If you proceed cleverly and don't kick in every door right away, you can play the corporations off against each other: For example, the vice-boss of the rather dubious company Sublight Salvage demands that we take out the boss of a sausage factory in order to take over. If the trigger finger itches, you can of course walk in and throw everything and everyone over the heap that isn't in the jar on three. Especially since the head butcher Clive is a real unsympathetic person who would deserve a rub.

However, this is by no means the most exciting solution to our problem. The shootings and fights are solid, but are no longer known as shooter fare. On the normal level of difficulty, it is seldom demanding, which can also be seen in the manageable variety of opponents . Obsidian's limited budget is noticeable at the latest when we target the same bandits, robots or monsters. The TZD - which speaks to the VATS mode from Fallout - is a nice but actually superfluous feature.

Another balance problem arises with the loot from The Outer Worlds, that there are still lots and lots of them. However, the booty rarely really needs us or makes us hot, instead we will soon be swimming in money - which we actually don't need. Weapons can be reinforced or modified in a targeted manner, but a new telescope or alternative type of ammunition only makes a manageable difference. Obsidian didn't do that well with Outer Worlds.

By the way, C & P-Boarstfabrik thinks that shooting in their own four walls is less cool and before we know it, our "acceptable" reputation wanes and all employees have "mixed feelings" towards us. This results in lower prices at dealers, less willingness to cooperate on the part of parliamentary group members and, in general, we are less forgiving. If we want to avoid that, we can just as easily crawl through a drainpipe or pretend to be employees with a camouflage module and employee ID, which means we don't drag our own name through the mud.

After sneaking in (whether through the sewer system or camouflaged) we can still shoot the boss of the C&P Boarstfabrik in the face or ram him in the back without attracting any attention . If we don't want to get our hands dirty at all (at least directly), we can poison the raw sausage raw material, the pimply cyst pigs and thus ruin the company. Or, in the interests of animal welfare, it would be better to screw up the balance sheets of the factory and thus put the tax office on the neck of the factory manager. Because as we all know, the tax office does not take prisoners.

Small & not so fine worlds

In The Outer Worlds, almost every main and side quest can be completed in comparably different ways. But often we just have to walk from A to B to C and back again - The Outer Worlds has no shortage of boring errand quests .

It is advisable to plan ahead a little, and if you pay close attention to when and where something is done most efficiently, you will save yourself from overstraining the fast travel function or using the same walking routes. The latter are not too extravagant - The Outer Worlds does not rely on a large open game world, but divides it into smaller, self-contained areas.

The asteroid Scylla, the earth-like planet Terra 2 or the hostile world Monarch are visually varied at first glance, but you quickly notice that the same plants and mushrooms grow there and the fauna is also very manageable. Furthermore, the gray, dreary space stations / ships relays GB-23, Groundbreaker and HFS-1084 are just as exciting as the names suggest.

Even Byzantium - the city of the "beautiful and rich" of Halcyon - looks neither rich nor beautiful because the streets are populated by only a few, interchangeable NPCs, all of whom are called "rich citizens" and whose greatest hobby is to get around in the area stand.

Of course, the Fallout games were never bursting with flourishing life (due to the post-apocalyptic setting alone), but compensated for this fact with enviromental storytelling that is second to none . In The Outer Worlds only a few locations tell a real story, instead we find a lot of the same loot or always the same robots, monsters or human opponents. The multiplicity of opponents in the role-playing game leaves a lot to be desired.

The funniest RPG in a long time

What definitely leaves nothing to be desired in The Outer Worlds are the characters, the dialogues and the humor of the game. The Outer Worlds is anything but a deadly serious RPG and turns the obsidian-typical humor to eleven: every little conversation with every NPC, no matter how unimportant, is peppered with jokes, innuendos or situation comedy.

It doesn't matter whether we fill up a security guard at the bar who becomes more talkative and honest about his employer with every drink we buy, or whether we earn the respect of a criminal organization when we slap people in the face instead of decent answers - The Outer Worlds has strained our laughing muscles almost continuously and without pity. The jokes are never too intrusive in the foreground, they are rather part of a natural and realistic-looking conversation and the few crooks can be counted on the hand.

Captain of his own crew

Hand in hand with this highlight from The Outer Worlds go the companions of the role play: We fork a total of six different crew members on our odyssey through the Halcyon system for the Unreliable, two of whom we can always take with us on field missions. At this point we appeal to every player: never forego using this opportunity!

Not only do mechanics Parvati or Vicar Max provide welcome support in fights. In addition, we benefit from the respective expertise of our allies on the way: with Parvati, for example, we have a technology expert and with surgeon Ellie a medical expert at our side, who has our own deficits balance in both areas.

For example, we can repair something or treat someone for whom we actually didn't have the necessary skills , which allows us to react more flexibly to unexpected situations regardless of our own playing style.

Skills such as dialogue, camouflage or ranged combat have a direct effect on the way we play: the higher or better the respective skill, the greater our chances of success. Specifically, this means that we can take or distribute more damage, for example, or manipulate our counterpart in a targeted manner with dialogue options such as convincing, lying and intimidating.

Advantages that we only get every second level up and that can best be compared with classic skills, however, have a terrifyingly little effect on the gaming experience. We can carry around a little more loot with us or reduce the cooldown times of the skills of our companions. Skills that drastically change the feel of the game are completely missing. The Fallout series is a lot more creative here, for example, when we were able to raise our character to be a cannibal or when we received devastating bonuses for sneak attacks.

Play with hearts

However, it is not only worth taking the companion on missions for practical reasons: Each of our crew members has a surprisingly deep personality and their own charm , which is particularly evident in conversations with NPCs. Some NPCs already know our companion from previous encounters, which sometimes leads to snappy verbal battles or hypothermic reunions. As a result, the dialogues are deepened by a third conversation partner, while we learn more about certain people, the universe of The Outer Worlds and especially our companions.

The Outer Worlds is a title that lacks budget or fine-tuning in some places, but compensates for these deficits with its unique humor, the fantastically written dialogues, its lovable characters and the in-depth role-playing elements. If you didn't warm up to Fallout 4 or Fallout 76, Obsidian Entertainment's newest role-playing game is the single-player alternative that should make fans of New Vegas especially happy.

The Outer Worlds is a game lost in time and space. It was created as a love letter to RPG fans who grew up on the top of the genre from two decades ago - but packed in a freshly fragrant envelope that is also intended to attract the attention of younger role-play enthusiasts. Success is half-baked. "Dinosaurs" can indeed admire the old school nature of the game and countless references to the Fallout series . The rest, unfortunately, are unlikely to be fooled by the seemingly modern shell and will quickly see through all its archaisms.

In fact, this project should have been 100% successful. After all, the Feargus Urquhart team came up with a similar premise as in their last games, with the Pillars of Eternity series at the forefront. It reached the roots of the RPG genre - in this case, the beginning of the Fallout series - and made an attempt to serve players once again a dish that the world had so tasted two decades earlier, at best by adding a little bit of an original vision to a proven recipe and using more modern kitchen equipment. The venture was led by the best people who could take the job - Timothy Cain and Leonard Boyarsky , without whom the Vault Boy would never have been born.

Obsidian only cut off the isometric projection (his recent experience has shown that the boom for games with such a perspective is ending) and shifted to a three-dimensional environment. Anyway, he has tried it before, his Fallout: New Vegas enjoys the esteem of fans of the RPG genre to this day, many even consider it to be the best installment of the series. So what could have gone wrong with The Outer Worlds ? Unfortunately, there are some such things.

Waiter! Borderlands is swimming in my Fallout!

You probably expect that my criticism of The Outer Worlds will mainly concern the archaic technological layer. Yes, I have a lot to say about it - but I'll start with the less obvious, but much more important aspect of the game. From the world presented in it.

Don't get me wrong - Obsidian has created a unique and interesting universe . The wild frontiers of outer space, perversely called Arcadia, is an interesting place to experience adventures. Especially that the creators let their imagination run wild and served a lot of crazy ideas, and the whole was lavishly watered with absurd humor.

Unfortunately, someone at the same time decided that in this frivolous world a completely serious story was to unfold, with moral dilemmas that must be taken seriously. You might say it sounds a bit like Fallout . Yes, this was undoubtedly the intention of the developers - only that they overboiled and brewed black tea, into which they poured twelve tablespoons of sugar, and finally added a cocktail of colorful vodkas . As a result, a mixture was created that causes cognitive dissonance with every second sip.

The world of Fallout has an unequivocally heavy, gloomy atmosphere, and blackhumorous interjections do not change it - indeed, they emphasize the harsh reality of the post-apocalyptic United States. The Outer Worlds storyline - the struggle to survive a colony that is threatened with starvation - has a similar tone. The problem is, the game is overloaded with jokes for such a serious story.

Humor just pours out of the screen. The power of the corporation is one big absurdity, we face ridiculous regulations or procedures at every step, and the colonists, almost every one of them, are inept bureaucrats and complete idiots who come to our character with their stupid problems. Do you want examples? Just take a look at the screenshots in this text. It's fun, yes - but it's impossible to take it all seriously. And Obsidian obviously wants his work to be taken seriously in the end, since this merry-go-round of laughter every now and then comes across completely ridiculous moral choices on issues such as sacrificing human life in the name of progress.

When playing The Outer Worlds , you can feel a bit as if you were reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , and every few or a dozen pages ended up in passages from Dune , the Foundation or even Solaris . Or - in the language of the players - as if you were playing Borderlands and had mods installed that mix the carefree, crazy reality of Pandora with the heavier threads from the Mass Effect series, and in a few places maybe also with nightmares straight from Dead Space . In a word - dissonance follows dissonance.

New Vegas encore

Finally, let's take a look at how The Outer Worlds is played in general. Here, the latest creation from Obsidian Entertainment is finally starting to show its claw. This is a purebred RPG with a gameplay model in which the effects of Fallout are much more visible than in the universe created for it. Complex, multi-sided character development, great freedom in playing the hero and open construction of tasks (often ingenious) and the entire plot - these are the pillars on which the game stands firmly, providing solid entertainment.

Let me start with the last of these aspects, because it is the element of The Outer Worlds that made the biggest impression on me (which does not mean that it was huge). The adventure begins when the player-created hero, a member of the several thousand crew members of the lost colony ship Hope, is awakened from hibernation by the "mad scientist" Phineas Welles. It paints an uninteresting picture of the situation for the protagonist - the Council, which is at the head of the corporation, leads Arcadia to the fall, turning a promising outpost of human civilization into a starving bureaucratic hell.

The only chance of salvation, says Welles, is to awaken the best minds of Hope and overthrow the Council with their help. At this point you might think that the framework of the story has been outlined and the good and bad roles have been distributed. But the game quickly gives the player a subversive thought: why not ally yourself with corporations and hand over an outlawed scientist into their hands? After all, the Council is probably also aware that the colony is not colorful, and has developed a plan to deal with the crisis. How about spitting on the whole thing and using all factions to just have a mouthful? Or to drown Arcadia in blood by killing anyone who comes across?

Although it is not a sandbox in the strict sense, The Outer Worlds has to some extent a sandbox - or rather non-linear - story structure. And although there are only two basic variants of endings (in addition, achieved in the course of a series of tasks that largely overlap), in the summary of the achievements of individual players, there may be significant discrepancies, depending on how to complete individual missions, treat specific characters or arrange relationships with different fractions. There is room for enthusiasts to exchange stories from the game.

Technically it is ... well, Obsidian

The backward technological layer also stings the eyes on other levels. Oh, for example, cities and buildings - in most cases, these are locations read separately , which cannot even boast of considerable size. The situation is particularly ghastly in cities, where empty spaces threaten and "life" is ineptly imitated by two or three-person clusters of motionless puppets (character animations are a separate, equally sad story). Even background sounds imitating the city buzz are missing. The already mentioned wild areas also look archaic - so modest that it is impossible to notice the open spaces in them, which they desperately try to be.

If the description of The Outer Worlds technological marvels was not amusing enough, you will undoubtedly be amused by the game optimization report. Sorry - "optimization". I was playing on a decent computer with a Core i5-4570 (3.2 GHz), 16 GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 1060 (6 GB) card, and at very high settings at 1080p, I didn't often enjoy the stable 60 frames per second . The smoothness of the animation went down to around 40 FPS at any occasion. As if that was not enough, even on the SSD drive I notoriously noted clipping related to data reading on the fly, and after loading a new large area, I usually experienced "twitching" for a few seconds, looking at the textures sharpening before my eyes. A real grotesque.

On the other hand - I haven't come across too many bugs in at least 30 hours of play. Of course, there was no shortage of worms (for example, limply fluttering bodies), but a really serious bug happened to me only once. At one point, the game spontaneously decided that one of my companions had died - several seconds after talking with him, while safely traveling on a spaceship. Of course, don't take this for granted - I might just be lucky. After all, we're talking about a game from Obsidian Entertainment.

Or maybe it all doesn't matter?

Someone will ask: if Fallout: New Vegas has been successful for all its technological imperfections, why shouldn't The Outer Worlds also succeed? There are two factors behind this. First of all, FNV made us turn a blind eye to technicalities, because it defended itself with interest in the plot. TOW doesn't have such a strong position here - and it's not just about that unfortunate bittersweet incoherent atmosphere of the universe.